The No Child Left Behind law allows states to test students in their native languages.
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Posted on 03/02/2004 7:52:26 AM PST by Puppage
HARTFORD — Nazanin Hibodi is from Iran, has attended school in Germany, and has only been living in the United States for two years.
But not long after she arrived at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, she was forced to take a high-stakes exam, the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, in a language she could barely understand. She was allowed to use a dictionary, but it took too long on a time-limited test.
"It’s really hard for students who are coming to another country not knowing any English," said the teenager. "If I were in my country and I would take the CAPT, of course I would pass it."
Hibodi was among several New Haven students who testified before the legislature’s education committee Monday in favor of a bill that would require the state to offer standardized tests like the CAPT and Connecticut Mastery Test in languages other than English. The tests are used to determine which schools are labeled "in need of improvement" under the federal law.
The No Child Left Behind law allows states to test students in their native languages. But Connecticut offers its tests only in English, unlike states such as Texas, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. New Jersey, for example, translates its high school proficiency test into 10 languages, including Vietnamese and Arabic.
State Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg said Monday she is open to exploring the idea of alternate tests, especially in subjects like math or science where a student’s grasp of the English language isn’t being measured.
But she worries about the cost and legal questions in a state where more than 140 different languages are spoken in the public schools.
Sternberg estimated it would cost about $9.8 million per grade to covert the state exams into the most commonly spoken language, Spanish. The tests are now given in grades four, six, eight and 10 but eventually will be expanded to grades three, five and seven.
Even if the state chose to offer the test in the five languages most frequently spoken in state schools — Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Chinese and Croatian — she questioned if students of other native tongues could have grounds for legal challenges.
"If in fact we have all these language groups, where do you stop?" Sternberg asked.
Sternberg explained that creating an alternative test is not simply a matter of translating English words into Spanish. She said pilot test would have to be created and the content must be the same as the English version. Another option the state is exploring is using a national standardized test created specifically for students learning English, Sternberg said.
Superintendents in districts like New Haven, with large immigrant and refugee populations, have long complained that the federal No Child Left Behind Law unfairly penalizes them because it counts the test scores of children who are just learning to speak English. New Haven has 2,000 students who are considered English Language Learners, who speak 49 different languages.
Recent test data provided by the school system show 66 percent of New Haven’s bilingual eighth-graders scored below basic on the mastery test in math, compared to 26 percent of their English-speaking peers. On the reading test, 79 percent of eighth-grade bilingual students scored below basic, compared to 37 percent of eighth-graders overall.
Israel Chacaltana, a fourth-grader at New Haven’s Truman School, told lawmakers in his native Spanish that he was a very good student in Peru, but he struggled with the Connecticut Mastery Test and he started to think he was nobody.
"Try as they may, these students are not able to demonstrate on this test the full range of their academic knowledge," said Marlene de Naclerio, who runs New Haven’s bilingual education program. "Why subject our students to practices that can only harm their self-esteem and their love of learning?"
Hey, you're free to go back to your country til your heart is content. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, SPEAK ENGLISH[American].
The tests are used to determine which schools are labeled "in need of improvement" under the federal law.
Uhmm... sweetheart, maybe if you can't speak English well enough to pass this test, you ARE in need of improvement.
Owl_Eagle
" WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
DIVERSITY IS STRENGTH"
Hibodi was among several New Haven students who testified before the legislature’s education committee Monday in favor of a bill that would require the state to offer standardized tests like the CAPT and Connecticut Mastery Test in languages other than English. The tests are used to determine which schools are labeled "in need of improvement" under the federal law.
Give me a fricken break.....YOU are getting an education on the backs of AMERICAN taxpayers....who have been paying for those schools LONG before you came here, in fact THEY BUILT those schools.....we cannot be a nation of 50 languages......SPEAK ENGLISH ONLY!!! OR.....go to IRAN and MAKE THEM give you the TEST!
The No Child Left Behind law allows states to test students in their native languages.
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Obh, obh, mo chreach 'sa thainig!
Yeah, but if my kid moved to your country and couldn't pass the tests there because he didn't know Farsi, what would happen to him?
This test obviously doesn't measure this child's intellectual capacity. But what to do?
First, the test scores of any child who has not had (I'm pulling a number out of my ass here, YMMV) 2 years to learn English should not count against the school where he was tested. It's not their fault the kid just moved into the U.S. and hasn't learned English yet.
Now, what to do with the child? Any child who does not know how to speak English should get intensive instruction in English! In order to keep their math, science, etc. instruction moving forward, I would favor one year's eligibility for being instructed partially in their native language, but there would be a limited number of those, maybe 5. People moving to the U.S. with kids should understand that this is going to be an issue and make plans accordingly; if not before the fact, then afterwards. After all, back in their home country, how many kids from foreign countries were being instructed in their native languages there?
And I would authorize the translation of an American History text, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights into as many languages as possible. Of course, I'd also authorize air dropping them into Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Egypt, various -stans, and any other tolitarian country in the world you can name. Along with radio receivers and DVD players. These regimes seem to fuel their fires by passing around video tapes of various exhortations to mayhem, perhaps we could make DVD's of our own exhortations and start passing them around. Radio transmissions can be jammed, after all. But DVD's are cheap to make, less fragile than tapes, and smaller.
And, you know, it has been that way here for, what, 250 years! LEARN THE &*&^%%^& LANGUAGE!!
Uh, let's see, because everywhere they go in America, there will be the written English language?!
This is one of my great pet peeves. If you're living in America, SPEAK ENGLISH! I hate going someplace and hearing people speak other languages. I'm not racist, but please, English is the national language. Have enough respect to at leat attempt to speak it.
What I REALLY hate is when the teen hispanic population around here (Texas) goes someplace like a store and speaks Spanish to beat the bush. If you're an exchange student, or someone from overseas on business, then hey, I don't have a problem with you hanging around and speaking your own language. There's a need for that when you're visting from another country. But to live here, and even be born here, and not speak English is insulting.
You'd like to think so, but everytime they tried to make it so, the bill was defeated. So, there IS no national language in America, because to do so would be (gulp) racist. Isn't that great?</sarcasm
Yeah it slipped under my radar, too. I bitch about this issue quite frequently. Testing in a student's native language isn't even the worst part of this program. Parents all over the country are concerned with the workload being dumped on their elementary school aged children. Teachers are being held to a cookie cutter standard, and if the kids don't perform to some arbitrary standard, there are sanctions such as a school district being taken over by the state. Imo, the Federal government has no business interfering in state matters, period. If you thought public schools were bad before, look out. My 9 year old is so frustrated and upset that getting her out the door in the morning is miserable. She's in 4th grade and instead of book reports, she's doing MLA style essays. She hasn't mastered multiplication and division, but she's getting geometry, fractions, and algebra homework. They don't stick to one subject. One week it's this, next week it's that.
Yes I would love to homeschool her, but I don't know if she would be a good candidate.
I was an exchange student to a Spanish speaking country. I knew absolutely NO Spanish. It took me 3 months to finally understand everything that was said to me. Within 5 months I could converse well. By the end of my year I was asked if I was from the north part of the country because I still had a little accent.
I took tests in Spanish. My grades were abysmal at first and improved as I learned. OH, and we exchange students spoke Spanish after we got there, not English.
If you want to become a part of the culture, you will adopt the language. If you want to remain separated, you won't.
Of course. Someone will sue if even one student exist that speaks some obscure language.
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