... Office of Civil Rights Condemns CUSD

Well, the achievement test scores for the past year are now available on the Web. Parents in the area are busily discussing what they mean. At a party recently, the father of some children who attend district schools was mentioning that he knew that the reason the scores at Hatch are dreadful is because of the high percentage of Spanish-speaking students there. But then, he added, those scores are a true indication of the quality of the school. Why? Because the students who don't speak English well are included in many of the classes his children take. The lack of education of those students drags down the level of the classes his own children take.

Last year, when Susan Foley began working with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to investigate the Reward Assemblies at Cunha, which do, the OCR found, exclude proportionally more Hispanic students than non-Hispanic, the OCR mentioned that another investigation into treatment of non-English speaking students was on-going. The OCR's decision in regards to Foley's complaint was widely reported in local media. However, no mention was ever made of this other OCR investigation.

Through the Freedom on Information Act, we learned that the OCR found the following problems at Cabrillo Unified schools:

• The Cunha site data indicates that 60 percent of all ELL (English Language Learner) students are failing in their core content classes.
  
  
• The Cunha site data indicate that there was a lack of daily ELD instruction English proficiency levels. The spring 1999-Language Census indicated 114 ELL students at Half Moon Bay were not enrolled in an ELD class. In other words, the district did not provide English language instruction appropriate to the students' level of English proficiency.
  
  
• The Cunha site assessment data for the majority of the ELL students was out of date and/or incomplete. In other words, Cunha doesn't assess most of the English-learning students to determine what level of support they need.
  
  
• ELL students at Half Moon Bay High school have not been properly or completely assessed with respect to their English language proficiency. In other words, the High School doesn't assess any of the English-learning students to determine what level of support they need.
  
  
• At the Cunha site, OCR noted that 68 out of 166 ELL students were in special education placements, approximately 40.9 percent of the total ELL population. At Half Moon Bay, the numbers of ELL students designated as needing special education services was approximately 19 percent (30 of 157). According to the OCR, "such numbers infer that ELL student may be over represented in the District's special education programs."
  In other words, the District has been double-dipping on its ELL students, identifying them as both learning disabled (when they probably are NOT) as well as English-Language Learners. They got double the funding on these kids, but did not provide appropriate services to them, either as learning-disabled students or as English-language learners.
  
  
• Cunha placement data indicated that 166 ELL students were placed in one of five programs (newcomer, sheltered, mainstream dual immersion or special education) based on out of date and/or incomplete English proficiency scores.
  
  
• At the Half Moon Bay site the scheduling of classes did not provide many ELL students access to graduation requirements because there were few properly credentialed instructors available to provide language support or assistance.
  
  
• The data revealed that many ELL student are placed into classrooms with teachers that are misassigned because they do not possess the appropriate credentials to instruct ELL students.
  
  
• Both Cunha and Half Moon Bay sites had no evaluative component to determine the effectiveness of their ELL program. The only available indicator of program effectiveness was a review of ELL student grades. OCR notes that additional measures of ELL student achievement and progress are necessary to insure that the District is meeting its dual federal responsibility to teach English and provide meaningful access to the core.

For more information, see The CUSD's Voluntary Resolution Plan, from which these and other facts concerning the education of non-native English learners in our district were extracted.