The State of America's Children in regards to English Language Learners and high stakes testing.

1. Rosa D. Noles
ED 502

2. “The Un-Education
of
English Language Learners”

3. Due to the importance being placed on high stakes
testing, English Language Learner (ELL) students are
not receiving the high quality instruction needed to gain
a full understanding of the language or the time
required to be successful in communicating in their
everyday lives.

4.  Baseline scores for high stakes tests are normed on a very
different sample population than the population that is
being tested in rural and inner-city schools.
 Funds for schools deemed “low performing” or “exhibiting
inadequate progress” are cut, where a lack of funds is
already part of the problem for schools in low
socioeconomic regions.
 Teachers who often times cannot communicate with ELL
students in their classes are expected to break those
barriers and ready these students to perform at the same
level as students who have spoken English since birth.

5.  English Language Learners (ELL) are expected to meet the
same standards as native English speaking students.
 ELL students struggle to comprehend questions and
passages due to time constraints placed on them during
high stakes testing. They are often unfamiliar with the
terminology used and require extended time.
 With ELL students being ill-prepared, the tests are more of
a measure of language proficiency than a true method of
demonstrating content mastery.

6.  Their home lives and experiences vary greatly from those
students that they are being measured against.
 Students from low socioeconomic neighborhoods come to
school facing problems such as hunger, jailed parents,
gunfire, single-parent homes, etc., then we as educators
expect them to be ready to achieve the next morning.
 Parent(s) are working to provide food, clothing, and
shelter, and simply cannot afford the luxury of books at
home and museum visits that come so easily to others.

7.  English Language Learners (ELL) from rural and
inner-city schools are affected by poverty in addition
to the language barriers they face (Wright, 2002).
 Changing names does not create a culturally sound
question or passage (Wright, 2002).
 A test’s dependability is in question if the student is
not adept in English. If a student is not proficient, it
would be more feasible to test for content mastery in
their native language (Coltrane, 2015).

8.  Test items may allude to ideas or experiences that ELL
students have no understanding of due to their
socioeconomic status (Coltrane, 2015).
 Even if parents have the time available to help their
children, they are unable due to the absence of English
understanding or deficiency of education themselves
(Wright, 2002).
 Working parents are not capable of taking students on field
trips or to the library to build the foundation that many
students already possess when they come to school
(Wright, 2002).

9. Instead of just preparing students for a test, we as educators must
prepare them to be college and career ready using proven strategic
teaching strategies. Otherwise, we producing artificial results by
teaching to the test. In order to truly measure academic growth, we
must test students in the language they are most comfortable with
or provide accommodations to equal the playing field. To
determine language proficiency, we can administer a language or
reading test. In my classes, I have tried to always make sure my
tests measure the skill I am seeking to assess. I have made such
accommodations as extended time, testing in a smaller setting, and
allowing oral testing. I am willing to do all I can to help ensure all
students can be successful in my classroom. Teaching in a county
where we have a growing Hispanic population, we strive to help our
students become fluent at an early age so this barrier does not
hinder academic growth in higher grades.

10.  Coltrane, B. (2015). English Language Learners and
High-Stakes Tests: An Overview of the Issues. ERIC
Digest. Retrieved June 13, 2015, from
http://www.ericdigests.org/2003-4/high-stakes.html
 Wright, W. E. (2002, June 5). The effects of high stakes
testing in an inner-city elementary school: The
curriculum, the teachers, and the English language
learners. Current Issues in Education [On-line], 5(5).
Available: http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume5/number5/