Levers for Improving Access to Core Content for Multilingual Students
Presenters: Ilana Umansky, Karen Thompson, and Katherine Bromley
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the third session of our Where the Evidence Leads webinar series, where we’ll be presenting preliminary findings from IES-Funded English learner research studies. This series is brought to you by the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education For Secondary English Learners. Today’s topic, Levers for Improving Access to Core Content for Multilingual Students. We’ll be sharing findings from the Center’s course taking study. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m Associate Director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd, I’ll be your host. Presenting today is Karen Thompson, Co-Investigator at the Center and Associate Professor in the College of Education at Oregon State University.
We also have Ilana Umansky who’s a Co-investigator as well at the Center and Associate Professor of Education at the University of Oregon. Kate Bromley will be moderating the session. She’s a Data Manager at the Center and Research Associate at the University of Oregon. Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. WestEd is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that aims to improve the lives of children and adults at all ages of learning and development. We do this by addressing challenges in education and human development, reducing opportunity gaps, and helping build communities where all can thrive. Now I’d like to pass the mic to Kate Bromley. She’ll be introducing the session today and moderating our time for Q and A. Kate, take it away.
Katherine Bromley:
Hi everybody, I’m Katherine Bromley from the University of Oregon, and I’m so pleased to introduce today’s session. So the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners is funded by a grant from IES, Institute of Education Sciences, which is the nation’s leading source for rigorous, independent education research, evaluation, and statistics. And our center works to bridge research and practice bidirectionally and to identify the biggest barriers and opportunities in America to English learner success in order to significantly advance the capacity of educators, policy makers, and researchers to serve students who are classified as English learners. So today’s webinar, which is the third in a series of bi-monthly webinars the Center will host this year, is titled “Where the Evidence Leads.”
Today researchers are going to share findings about core course access for secondary students classified as English learners in two states, including what malleable levers may increase access to core courses for EL classified students. So I’m so pleased to introduce my wonderful colleagues, Dr. Ilana Umansky from the University of Oregon, and Dr. Karen Thompson from Oregon State University. So Ilana, take it away.
Ilana Umansky:
Thank you Kate. Thanks everybody for being here. I hope you can see the screen okay here. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. I’m gonna present the first part of today, and then I’ll pass it over to Karen. But to briefly review, our goals for today are to really dive into EL classified students’ access to core content. And in doing so, we’re gonna introduce the concept of exclusionary tracking. We’re gonna look to understand the prevalence of EL-classified students exclusionary tracking in high school. We’ll examine factors that are associated with students inclusion or exclusion in course work. And then we’re gonna spend some time really learning about levers that can alleviate exclusion that exists. I wanna first, before we dive into the content, alert you to the fact that we have five open access briefs, and I believe one of my colleagues will be putting links to them in the chat.
The first, which is just launching today, is our brief on English learners access to content, and then the latter four listed here, each one is about a different lever that can alleviate exclusion or barriers to access to content, and Karen will be talking about several of these. So to start with a bit of background, the Supreme Court case from 1974 Lau v Nichols really set the groundwork for the rights of multilingual students in K-12 schools in the United States. And Lau v Nichols established two core rights of students and responsibilities of schools. The right to English language development instruction, so instruction towards developing English, and the right to equitable and meaningful access to grade level content.
We’re gonna be focused on this second right of students to really try to figure out how well is this second right being carried out today. So one important way to think about English learner classified students’ access to content is through the lens of tracking. And we’re all used to the sort of traditional notion of tracking in schools, which here we’re calling leveled tracking. And examples of this are, are you in an honors biology class or are you in some sort of remedial science lab class? So classes can be leveled, but EL classified students also experience two other forms of tracking that are somewhat unique to them. The second we call parallel tracking, and that’s when EL classified students are in parallel classes where the idea is the content would be the same as in another class, but somehow pedagogically different.
So the two core examples of this are sheltered classes and then also bilingual classes. So here are two examples of those. We’re however today gonna be focused on what we call exclusionary tracking. And exclusionary tracking occurs when students classified as English learners are less likely to be enrolled in a content area class than other groups of students. And the two primary comparison groups would be students who are never classified in school as English learners and then students who were formerly classified in school as English learners but have been reclassified. So examples here would be a student who is not in any English Language Arts class in a given year or not in a social studies class in a given year. And that’s really what we were looking at in this study.
We draw on data from two states, Oregon and Michigan. These are states that are somewhat different from each other. The population of K-12 students in Michigan is far larger than it is in Oregon. However, the proportion of the K-12 population that is English learner classified is smaller in Michigan than it is in Oregon. Another important difference is in the EL population itself. The EL population in Oregon is more homogenous, is diverse, absolutely, but is more homogenous than in Michigan. So in Oregon, the vast majority of English learner classified students are Spanish speaking and also eligible for free or reduced price lunch, whereas that’s not the case in Michigan. About over a quarter of students of EL classified students in the years that we examined are Arabic speaking, and a much smaller proportion are eligible for free or reduced price lunch.
A couple of really important limitations to note about this is that data are not from the most recent years, and so patterns really may have changed. This is especially the case in Michigan where our data are 10 years old or nearly 10 years old. Also, the relationships that I’m gonna talk about at the end of the presentation are correlational, they’re not causal relationships. And I’ll underscore that again. So let’s dive into the results. First, I just wanna orient you to this figure, which we’re gonna stay on for a bit. This figure shows content area classes along the X-axis and then the proportion of students enrolled in that content area on the Y-axis. The blue bars represent current English learner students, the yellow bars represent former English learner students, and the green bars represent never English learner students, or students we might call English only students.
The first thing I just wanna show you is that in both states across almost all content areas, we see evidence of exclusionary tracking. And we see that by looking and seeing that the blue bars in general are lower than the green bars. This isn’t true in, you know, in every single area, but it’s true in most. The first finding that I wanna draw your attention to is that the gaps that we see are largest in both states in English Language Arts. In English Language Arts, we see a 10 percentage point gap between current English learners and never English learners, and a five percentage point gap between current English, in Oregon, and a five percentage point gap in Michigan. So we see this lower enrollment in English Language Arts among current ELs.
I also just wanna draw your attention here to the about 15 to 17% of English learner students in both states are not in any English Language Arts class. And this is particularly important because unlike some other subject areas where you only need three classes to graduate or something like that, in English Language Arts in the time period examined both states required students to have four years of English Language Arts in high school in order to graduate. So these gaps we see in English Language Arts are particularly concerning. Next I wanna show you the All Core. So All Core means that a student is in math, science, English language arts, and social studies. And here too, we see large gaps in between English learners and their former and never English learner peers.
You can see that the gaps are larger in Oregon than in Michigan, so I wanna just draw your attention to a couple things about this first. The main thing I wanna draw your attention to is that while exclusionary tracking the gaps are larger in Oregon, this is largely driven by the fact that former and never English learners have higher enrollment rates in Oregon than they do in Michigan. So when we look particularly at ELA, which you can see here, and math, which you can see here, English learners actually have the same enrollment rates, it’s just the difference between them and their former and never English learner peers.
And then the last thing I just wanna draw your attention to, we’ve done these analyses by grade as well, but these actually just show averages across ninth through 12th grade. But across grades we see an interesting pattern where in Oregon former English learners, so the yellow bars, tend to have higher enrollment rates than never English learners. So reclassified students are more likely to be enrolled in subject area classes than never English learners. Whereas the opposite is true in Michigan, where the yellow bars tend to be a little bit below the green bars, so that’s just an interesting difference across the states. The second main thing that we looked at was what factors relate to exclusionary tracking for EL classified students.
We were particularly interested in organizational factors. Organizational factors are those factors that schools and districts can work with, can maneuver. And we were also interested in sort of structural factors as well as demographic factors. And this slide just summarizes our findings. We found that there’s more exclusion amongst Latino students compared to students of other racial and ethnic groups, among low English proficiency students, those in beginning levels of ELP, amongst students in special education as well, you know, dually identified students, and newcomer students, so students recently arrived from other countries. Those students all experience more exclusion from classes.
We found mixed results, mixed relationship by grade and district, and we saw less exclusion over time in both states, so we saw progress in terms of enrollment in both states. And we also in Oregon were able to look at the association of exclusion with bilingual education. We found that students in bilingual education were less likely to experience exclusionary tracking. So this just shows some of those results. In Oregon, these are predicted probabilities of enrollment. And the blue bar is all English learner students. And then the yellow bars show by ELP level. The green bars show by special education status, and the blue bars, the light blue bars show by newcomer status.
And you can see that these three factors, organizational factors, because schools structure services by ELP, by special education, and by newcomer status, so these three organizational factors were very important in terms of predicting access to core content. So in conclusion, during the years examined, EL classified students experienced exclusionary tracking in both states. Gaps were greatest in English language arts, which was a big concern for us for graduation. There were some meaningful differences in patterns by states suggesting that there is an important role of the state in ensuring access. And specialized services and programs like ELD services, special education, newcomer identification, and bilingual education may shape course access, perhaps oftentimes in unintended ways.
And I wanna just close by saying that in both Oregon and Michigan, there are many, in recent years, policy and practice initiatives to increase EL classified students’ access to core content, as I’m sure there are in the schools, districts, and states where many of you are working. There are efforts to build teacher capacity to effectively educate multilingual students. There are co-teaching models in place and other ways of integrating ELD into core content classes to reduce crowd out. There’s growing access to bilingual and dual language programs. And there’s also shifts in reclassification policies to honor students’ proficiency in their languages and content knowledge. So that sort of begins to hint at some of the levers that schools can use to increase course access. And Karen, as I said, is gonna be talking a lot more about that.
But before we go on to that, we wanted to pause and have you share in the chat based on your experience, to what extent do EL classified students have equitable and meaningful access to grade level content? And if you are in a school, district, or state, it would be great for you to answer for your own work locale, what successes do you see and what challenges remain. And also if you have questions, feel free to share them. I’ll probably particularly answer any sort of tech sort of, you know, specific questions about understanding and more sort of conceptual questions we may share, we may save for the end. Okay, thanks, and please do put your reflection answer in the chat and we’ll talk about it for a little bit, and Kate will moderate that.
Katherine Bromley:
Yeah, and Ilana, we just had a great question from Heidi when she asked if course access improving over time meant across grades or across actual years.
Ilana Umansky:
Oh yeah. Thank you Heidi. That’s a really important distinction. It actually improved across years. So we saw that in 2013 there was more exclusion happening than in 2018. So this showed progress over time. The prompt was, you know, to what extent do you see EL classified students in your setting having access to core content, and what have been the successes and what are the ongoing challenges? Would love to hear your reflections on that. I see Carissa’s comment here that core content area enrollment in their setting appears equitable, but access to CTE appears inequitable for EL classified students. So that’s very interesting.
One of the things that we encourage based on these results is that if you are in a school, if you’re in a school setting, it’s actually probably not that difficult to try to look to see are EL classified students in all core content areas. And you know, if you’re, especially if you’re in a low incidence school, you could just print up the schedules. If you’re in a higher incidence area, maybe you can, you know, look to see what percent of ELs are in ELA, what percent of EL classified students are in math.
Katherine Bromley:
And Tricia just had a great question too about whether our analysis compared rigor in courses.
Ilana Umansky:
This is a great question. No, it did not, so it’s of course so important to keep in mind that simply being enrolled in a class is not enough, that EL classified students need to be in, they need to be in classes as sort of as a baseline minimum, but then they need to have teachers who know how to work effectively with them, and who are giving them access to equitable content in ways that they can access. So no, using the data that we have, we are unable to look at that. But other members of our Center, of the R&D Center are working much more with curriculum and rigor of curriculum. So I’m thinking here of our studies, where we call them studies three and four on English language arts instruction and math instruction for secondary EL classified students.
Katherine Bromley:
And there’s also a question about whether most of the Spanish speaking students in Oregon are immigrants or migrant students.
Ilana Umansky:
No, so like the EL population nationally, most EL classified students in Oregon are born in the US.
Katherine Bromley:
And Justine had a, I think a really timely reflection for some of the work that we’ve been looking at more recently about EL classified students having more limited access to AP and IB classes.
Ilana Umansky:
Right, so that’s getting to that level tracking that we talked about at the beginning, that EL classified students also experience level tracking. So, and that’s similar to the comment about CTE, right? So it’s important to understand and document whether students are in core content area classes, but then also understand yeah, the rigor of the, of what that instruction looks like, but also the level of instruction, the level of the class, because we want students to be equal, have equal access to gifted and talented identification, to AP classes, to honors classes, et cetera. I see Rachel’s comment, maybe this is what you’re referring to, our students are required to take core content classes like everyone else.
I think what’s interesting here is that is really true basically across the board, you know, EL classified students should be in the same classes. And that’s why it can be somewhat surprising to see that 15% of EL classified students are not in English Language Arts in any given year of high school. So I think sometimes this is flying under the radar in part just because it hasn’t been looked at very closely yet.
Katherine Bromley:
Yeah, and then there’ve been multiple comments about students having access to core content, but potentially not enough training for teachers who are providing sheltered instruction or who are in co-teaching models. And then I thought Deborah also had a great comment too about they have a school within a school model at their high school, but there’s an issue with some Els being routed to all EL classes without differentiation based on individual needs.
Ilana Umansky:
Mmm hmm. Right, and by all EL classes that probably means like all sheltered classes. I’m guessing that might be what that means, so that speaks to that parallel tracking. And parallel tracking I think is a really important area for greater understanding because it’s quite possible that in many settings parallel, you know, being in a parallel class is perfectly fine because the access to content is enriched, and the rigor of the curriculum is the same or higher. And then there’s probably other settings where that may not be the case, where a sheltered class may have less access to content, so it’s one of the more complicated forms of tracking. Certainly there’s a lot of evidence about bilingual classes, that students in bilingual programs and bilingual classes typically are getting a great education and doing just as well as their students, as their peers in non bilingual classes in the same content areas.
There’s great research about that. I saw this, Georgia wrote, “We struggle to get incoming newcomer high schoolers with the needed credits to graduate without sacrificing ELD classes.” So Georgia, one of the briefs that we have is about extra instructional time because there is a real challenge, especially for newcomers who are coming in at later grades. How do we fulfill our right, I mean our obligation to provide that student with sufficient support in the English language while also getting them the credits that they need to graduate. And that’s a real challenge. And certainly we see school systems responding in diverse ways.
One is allowing students to stay extra years in school, and another is providing extra instructional time within the school year, so longer school days, summer school programs, online credit recovery programs, credit for classes taken in the home country or preceding country. Thank you Erica for putting that link in the chat.
Katherine Bromley:
I was just gonna point out that Brianna added a comment about how is this data reflected in graduation rates? Like how does course access impact graduation rates?
Ilana Umansky:
Yes, great question. We are starting to look at that. That is definitely one of the research questions that’s a part of our proposed research. And so we will be looking at questions like, when you are not enrolled in an English language arts class, how does that impact your likelihood of graduation? So it’s a critical question, but one that we can’t quite answer yet.
Katherine Bromley:
Did you see the most recent comment from Khalil?
Ilana Umansky:
Khalil, “How can we enhance the training of content area teachers to move more quickly toward making every class an English language development class?” Yeah, so this is speaking to two of the briefs that we’ve published. One is on teacher preparation and how when teachers have endorsements or specializations or credentials to work specifically with English learner classified students, we see greater enrollment in core content area classes, and similarly, integrated ELD. When you integrate ELD into a core content area class, you really open up room in the schedule to ensure that students have fuller access to content.
So both integrated ELD and teacher specialization are positively associated with EL classified students’ access to core content, and so this is an area that both Michigan and Oregon are pushing by investing in teacher preparation programs. There’s a lot, I know here in Oregon we’ve got a, you know, a bunch of them, and we are seeing the proportion of content area teachers with endorsements increasing, but it’s still relatively low. So it’s still an area for a lot of growth.
Katherine Bromley:
And I missed one question a little ways back from Michael about how many ESL teachers in Oregon also speak Spanish, which I know we’ve just started to look at that a little bit.
Ilana Umansky:
Yeah, Kate, do you remember?
Katherine Bromley:
That’s a great question. I do not. I saw Manuel was on the webinar. Not sure if he could answer.
Ilana Umansky:
Manuel, if you’re on, put it in the chat.
Karen Thompson:
I have a slide about that in the next section, so it’s perfect.
Ilana Umansky:
Oh, great.
Katherine Bromley:
Perfect.
Karen Thompson:
…some limitations.
Katherine Bromley:
Perfect timing.
Ilana Umansky:
Great. Okay. So with that, thank you so much for these wonderful reflections. I’m gonna spend some time after the webinar and read through them really carefully, and we’ll pass it over to Karen.
Karen Thompson:
Hi everyone, it’s great to be with you. Today I am going to be talking about levers that can expand course access potentially. And you know, as you’ve heard, we’re, in our portion of the R&D Center work, focused on understanding course taking patterns, and as Ilana shared, understanding the lay of the land of who has access to what, but then also really importantly looking at what levers may expand access to content courses. So we’ve already been talking about some of these. I’m gonna give you a little more detail about some of the levers we’ve looked at so far. So prior to the beginning of our center, we hypothesized that a set of different levers might be related to expanded course access, and we conducted a scan of the research, which is also available on the R&D Center website, work other had people had done looking at levers.
I’m gonna talk about three levers today. The first one, which we’ve just been discussing a little bit, specialized teacher preparation for working with multilingual students, bilingual program participation, and school counselor availability. So for each of those I’ll describe why that lever might be related to course access, and then show you a little bit about how we see it operating in Oregon. And for this portion, I’m only using data from Oregon. We hope to look at how levers are working in the other state partners who are part of our R&D Center, but we’re focusing on Oregon data here.
Other levers that we are looking at, you’ve heard us mention some of these already, but that we won’t be talking about today in these slides, are more instructional time, integrated English language development, waiving English learner services, a lever that’s in the control of families of multilingual students, and then peer composition of courses. So to start off, specialized teacher preparation. This is near and dear to my heart because another hat I wear is as a teacher educator, I help run our ESL endorsement and dual language programs at Oregon State University. So we work hard on expanding the number of teachers with this specialized preparation.
And we might think that could enhance core content because maybe counselors, when they’re making placement decisions will think, “Oh, I know this social studies teacher has this preparation and is going to be able to make this content accessible to this newcomer student, so I can feel confident enrolling them in this class.” Or a student might say, “I want to be in this class. I know this teacher has this preparation. I know they speak Spanish. I feel comfortable being in their class, I’m gonna forecast for that class.” The number of teachers in Oregon, the proportion of teachers in Oregon who have specialized preparation for working with multilingual students has been increasing, but it’s still relatively low overall. So in Oregon, teachers can earn an ESOL endorsement, which is pretty intensive.
At my university it represents 18 quarter term credits. So it’s six courses. They can also have a bilingual specialization, which just means they’ve passed a language proficiency test, or they can have a dual language specialization, which means they passed a language proficiency test and also have completed coursework specifically about pedagogy for dual language settings. And we see that the percentage of teachers with an ESL endorsement has increased from about 11% in 2014 to 17% in 2021. But still that’s less than one in five teachers who have that endorsement. And then the percentage of teachers with a bilingual or dual language specialization is only around two and 1% respectively. However, that does not reflect the full percentage of teachers who speak another language.
Actually in another project with the Oregon Department of Education, we’re working to improve the data the state has about teachers who are bilingual because there actually is incomplete data about that. So we don’t, bilingual or dual language specialization aren’t required for teaching in dual language programs in Oregon, and so that’s part of the reason why this percentage is quite low. And then when we look at who disaggregate, who has this preparation by grade span, we see it’s much more common at the elementary level. So about 22% of elementary teachers have an ESOL endorsement compared to 13% of middle school teachers, and 9% of high school teachers. So in the high school grades we’re looking at, it’s less than one in 10 teachers who have this specialized preparation.
Then furthermore, when we look by subject area, we see that it’s English language arts teachers who are most likely to have this specialized preparation, and math and science teachers are the least likely to have it. I saw in the chat people mentioning that math teachers may not have sufficient preparation in their core licensure courses to really think about how to make math learning accessible to multilingual students. And we see that, yeah, there are very few teachers who have had that specialized preparation in the STEM subjects. And when we look at, this is now switching to, what is the relationship between this lever and core content course access. We see that this lever does seem associated with greater access to core content.
So just to orient you to this graph a little bit. These blue bars are for students who did not have a prior year teacher with specialized preparation for working with multilingual learners. Whereas the orangy bars are students who did have a teacher with this specialized preparation in the prior year. And we see across all content areas and across middle and high school that students who had a teacher the prior year with the specialized preparation were more likely to be in a core content course the following year, so it might be that they learned more the prior year because their teacher was able to make the content accessible to them and they were prepared for the core content the next year. That could be one reason why the lever is operating in this way.
So next, moving to our second lever, bilingual program participation. Why might that be related to core content access? We know from prior research that students in bilingual programs have higher academic achievement in the long run than students in English only settings. So if you’re learning more content because it was made accessible to you in a bilingual program, then perhaps you’re more prepared for core content courses later on. I’ll talk a little bit first about how bilingual programs operate in Oregon. The most prevalent by far are dual language programs. There are still some transitional bilingual programs. And as, on the national level, they’re much more common at the elementary grades than in secondary.
Nearly a quarter of, or in some cases over a quarter of EL classified students in Oregon in 2018-19 were in bilingual programs. At the secondary level, it’s much lower, but there are still students in bilingual programs in the higher grades. And more than we actually see because there’re so few secondary bilingual programs, we’re looking back at, did students ever participate in a bilingual program? And we find that more than one fourth of secondary EL classified students in the years of data we’re analyzing had participated in a bilingual program at some point in their schooling. And we know, again, from the prior research that the benefits of bilingual programs are greater when students are in those programs for a substantial number of years.
And we see that among students who had been in bilingual programs, over half had participated for four years or more. So there’s some substantial exposure to bilingual programs among that EL classified students we’re looking at. So again, shifting to how does this lever work in relationship to access to core content? We see that once again, it does operate in a positive direction. So there’s students who had participated in a bilingual program were more likely to be enrolled in core content courses. So just again, to orient you to the graph, the blueish bars here are students who had participated in bilingual programs. The orangy bars are students who had never participated in bilingual programs.
And we see across every subject area in both middle and high school students who had participated in bilingual program in prior years were more likely to be in core content courses. So for our final leveler, we are looking at counselor availability. This is a relatively new area of research for me. There’s very limited research about the role of school counselors for EL classified students, but it’s something we think there needs to be more attention to because we know they play a really important role in the course placement process. And we can think about why they might be associate, why counselor availability might be associated with core content access. If your counselor knows you and you are able to have more interaction with them, they may be able to make more informed course placement decisions and make sure you’re in core content courses.
So in Oregon, Oregon does require that all schools and districts have a comprehensive school counseling program, but school counselors are not, schools are not actually required to have licensed school counselors on staff. A dean of students or an assistant principal can oversee the comprehensive school counseling program. And that’s partly because there’s a shortage of school counselors nationally and in Oregon. So Oregon student to school counselor ratio has dropped in recent years. It’s now at around 371 to one, which is above the recommended level of 250 to one. But even 250 to one is a lot of students for just one person to advise.
And we see that Oregon actually has a substantial number of schools without counselors, so therefore, when we were trying to understand the role of counselor availability, we couldn’t just use a student to counselor ratio because we couldn’t calculate a student to counselor ratio for schools with no counselors. So we created this different measure where we were looking at counselor FTE per 100 students. And there’s more about that in our brief. We see when we just look at who’s in a school with or without a counselor, we see this seeming paradox where many schools that secondary EL classified students attend don’t have counselors, but most secondary EL classified students are in schools with counselors.
And that’s because schools without counselors tend to be small, in rural areas. They’re not the schools that most students attend. So middle and high school EL students in conventional, middle and high schools only about 5% are in schools without counselors. The students in schools without counselors are more likely to be in other school configurations. Again, they’re in more smaller settings. They might be in K-8 or K-12 contexts. And once again, we see that our lever is operating in the hypothesized direction. So secondary EL classified students in schools with any counselor, FTE, are more likely to be enrolled in core content courses. So the blue bars are students in schools with counselors. The orange-ish bars are students in schools without counselors.
And we see students in schools with counselors are more likely to be enrolled in, EL classified students in those schools are more likely to be enrolled in English language arts and in math, and that’s regardless of whether they’re in a middle school, a high school, or another school configuration. So to wrap up, we see, just zooming out that levers that are under the control of schools, districts, and states are associated with greater access to core content for EL classified students. It’s not easy to change counselor availability. It’s not easy to change specialized teacher preparation, or bilingual program participation on a large scale. But we know that states and districts and schools are investing in these things, and our findings suggests that those investments have the potential to expand core content for EL classified students.
And as I mentioned, we’re exploring additional levers too. So stay tuned for more. We really appreciate the Michigan Department of Education, the Oregon Department of Education, and IES for enabling this work to happen. And we want to open the floor for questions.
Katherine Bromley: I’m gonna loop back to a question that came in right as we were switching speakers. So David asked this question and then Rachel upvoted it as well. What does the research say about the use of teacher aids as making a difference with differentiation?
Karen Thompson: That’s a great question and something we have not looked at.
So thinking back to my time as a bilingual teacher and to my work supervising pre-service teachers and in-service teachers getting their ESL endorsement or dual language specialization, you know, we see, as I imagine you do too, huge variation in the amount of time that teachers have with paraeducators or classified staff in their rooms. And also real differences in the preparation that teachers have for understanding what roles they might play. I know many districts have been investing in grow-your-own programs to enable paraeducators to become bilingual teachers because there are many bilingual paraeducators who are playing really important roles in students’ lives every day.
We don’t have any research that answers that question yet, but Ilana, do you wanna chime in with anything else there?
Ilana Umansky:
No, I was just thinking about Mike’s question about arts integration, and you may have other things to say about that, Karen, but one thing it just made me reflect on is just electives in general. We haven’t looked at arts integration specifically, but that is an area where we saw different patterns in the two states. In Oregon, we saw evidence of exclusion from electives. We don’t count ELD as an elective, we count ELD as its own category. So we see evidence of lower enrollment in electives in Oregon amongst EL classified students. And we saw the opposite in Michigan where EL classified students are overrepresented in electives compared to their former and never EL peers. So it’s interesting and an area to try to unpack farther.
Katherine Bromley:
Yeah, I see one question that is really easy to answer, so I’ll answer that one about whether this research is a sample of Oregon districts or all districts, it’s all districts. Yeah, so we are very thankful to the Oregon Department of Education and Michigan Department of Education for providing us with access to complete statewide student level longitudinal data. So we have data for every district in the states.
Katherine Bromley:
And there’s a couple questions about newcomer EL students. Alexandria just posted one in the chat, and there’s also one from the Q and A. So like what are some suggestions for helping newcomer students who might be at a very low level for English language proficiency, but need to access core content. And then Sue-Ann also had a question about how can we support state education agencies and local education agencies to provide newcomers programming, especially at a high school level.
Ilana Umansky:
I can, want me to start, Karen, and then you add? I mean, one obvious thing that we should mention that hasn’t come up yet today is Oregon has a really exciting new law called Access to Linguistic Inclusion. And this new law, one of the critical things it does is it shifts the requirement that I mentioned before of four years of English language arts, now, since 2021, it’s four years of language arts. And so what this means is when a newcomer arrives from another country and they have language arts coursework on their transcript from their home country or the country they’re coming from, those courses actually can count towards graduation. So those kinds of things of awarding credit where credit has been earned is one really important step in trying to get newcomers through graduation requirements. Karen, do you wanna add anything?
Karen Thompson:
Yeah, I would just add that for students with limited or interrupted formal education in particular, you know, I completely agree that it is a really complex challenge to think about how to make high school level content accessible and meaningful. And I think that states and districts are doing lots of interesting things. One potential strategy that I’ve heard about is potentially considering weighted funding or other additional funding for districts with particularly large or growing populations of students with limited or interrupted formal education, because it simply may take more resources, more personnel, more time, more for curriculum development.
So just recognizing the diversity within the multilingual learner population and the diversity of resources that might be needed. And also thinking creatively about partnerships in all sorts of ways, I know CTE came up before thinking about what are bilingual CTE course offerings that might be possible. It’s definitely a challenge that I know is on the minds of lots of people, including here in Oregon.
Katherine Bromley:
There’s also a similar question about which content areas’ co-taught courses might be the most effective for. So how can you maximize language learning, in which core content areas?
Karen Thompson:
Yeah, so I’ll just mention a couple things. My colleague, Amanda Kibler, from Oregon State University, who’s here, I think today, she and I have been co-leading a group of district administrators in Oregon who have been implementing integrated ELD. In some cases for many years, in some cases they’re new to it. And we have a brand new guide about implementing integrated ELD that is about to be released. And we’re having a webinar that the R&D Center is hosting in September, I believe it’s September 25th, where you’ll be able to hear from district administrators who have explored this question firsthand. And I think just trying to think back on their experiences and their words of wisdom.
I think one, rather than any particular subject being inherently better or worse to integrate into, I think they’ve found it to be really important to begin with teachers, content area teachers and English language development teachers who were excited about trying this, that going where the energy is and piloting and trying things out, and getting some positive momentum and lessons learned is more important than any kind of structural factor about one content area over the other.
Katherine Bromley:
And there’s two really good questions too about preparing school personnel. So one is about how can we support teachers who are currently in their roles while also preparing new educators and teacher prep. Are there plans for for providing professional development to those currently in roles? And then the second question that I thought was great too is about EL, like bilingually certified counselors serving Els, and if there’s any success with course access, if that’s the case?
Karen Thompson:
We’ve seen both states and districts play really important roles in enabling current licensed teachers to get specialized preparation for working with multilingual learners. So states have invested ESSER funds in, ESSER III funds in that, or other funds prior to ESSER III existing. And districts have also used their own funding, different funding streams based on the state to actually pay the tuition for teachers to get ESL endorsements or dual language specialization. So that’s one really concrete way that districts can invest in making, or states can invest in making this specialized preparation accessible to teachers. For bilingual counselors, I would say, yeah, I think that’s a really important area to think about. And we are trying to collaborate more at OSU with our school counseling program to make sure that the preparation that all counselors get includes more information about multilingual students. But the more we can have bilingual counselors, the better.
Ilana Umansky:
Yeah, I would just add to that, that, you know, these efforts to diversify the teaching population are so critical, and we need to move beyond also just teachers and include administrators and counselors and specialists because having people in school who are multilingual themselves, who have gone through similar experiences as their EL classified students, we just know from a lot of research, from our experiences on the ground that this is really beneficial for multilingual students.
Karen Thompson:
I’m gonna say one more thing, and then we can turn it back to Danny to wrap up, but just I should have mentioned that the Center also has co-teaching and collaboration research that includes work on integrated ELD that Dr. Amanda Kibler and Dr. Martha Palacios are leading. And so the Center website is a great resource to read about their findings that include a variety of in-depth investigations, both from a national survey and then case studies at particular districts, so there are lots of resources from the other resources too from the Center related to those who are thinking about integrated ELD or co-teaching and collaboration to learn from their work as well. Thank you everyone, I think we’ll pass it to Danny to wrap up.
Danny Torres:
Yes, thank you very much. Thank you Kate, Karen, and Ilana for a great session. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. And for those of you interested in learning more about the Center at WestEd, visit the Center website at elrdcenter.wested.org. And remember, a recording of this webinar will be available publicly in about a couple weeks, so look out for my email with a link. I’ll send some more information about future webinars and other events there too. And feel free to reach out via email if you have any questions about the Center and the study. And you can also sign up for our email service just by going to ELD, I’m sorry, elrdcenter.wested.org/contact. And you can sign up for our email list there. Once again, thank you all very, very much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your day and, and be well.