It’s no secret that Texas is a state in the midst of a substantial demographic shift. The number of English language learning (ELL) students in Texas schools continues to increase, and as much is presenting a challenge to Texas educators.
A recent story from KVUE highlights the challenges facing our education system:
Meanwhile, the percentage of what educators call English language learners – the most expensive children to teach – has grown from 13 percent in 2001 to 16.2 percent in 2012, numbering about 838,000 kids, according to the Texas Education Agency.
Nearly a million Texas students face the challenge of mastering a new language. In the midst of acknowledging the difficulty in educating these students, the story includes this as well:
Every educator knows that a child’s performance in school has more to do with what happens in their home than with their teachers. A child who doesn’t speak English at home or whose parents are not educated will not do as well on tests.
This is very true; a child’s home environment has more bearing on their classroom performance than anything other factor. That said, the corollary being drawn here is that students are having a difficult time mastering the language, at least partially, because they’re not learning it in an immersive environment. What if our schools could create such an environment?
With our ELL population growing steadily, Texas public schools need more flexibility when it comes to how they educate those students. Unfortunately, bilingual education, which does not immerse students in an English speaking environment, remains the virtually mandatory method for educating our ELL students. It’s time we give Texas schools the option of using sheltered English immersion as a primary means of educating those same students.
Texas is one of the last states to mandate bilingual education, and is certainly the largest. Other states with large ELL populations, including California and Arizona, have moved toward a more flexible, immersion based model, with encouraging results. For its part, Texas is going to keep growing, and its ELL student population is extremely likely to grow right along with it. This is a problem of socioeconomics (many of the state’s ELL students are also among its poorest), and one without an easy fix. But a rigid system, one that provides bilingual education as the only means of educating ELL students, will not meet the needs of all those learners. School districts need more tools, such as sheltered English immersion, at their disposal to address this growing segment of the student population.
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