Education experts grapple with narrowing English learner achievement gap in California
Lawmakers and academics met Monday at Cal State Long Beach to discuss helping English-learnerstudents in the state get a high school diploma and go on to college.
The Assembly Education Committee convened in the CSULB Student Union to learn more about roughly 1.4 million English learners who make up 22 percent of all enrolled students.
“Our schools serve nearly one in three English learners in the country,” said Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, who chairs the committee. “That’s one in three across our nation (attending) our public schools. What we do here matters, not just to the success of California’s public schools, but for our nation as a whole.”
About 43 percent of all enrolled students come from homes in which a language other than English is spoken. That’s roughly 2.6 million, according to Patricia Gandara, research professor and co-director ofThe Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
“We really do not want to leave those students behind,” Gandara said.
More than 83 percent of English learners speak Spanish, Gandara said. The number of English learners peaked in 2003-04 at about 1.6 million, then fell to fewer than 1.35 million in 2013 but is on the upswing again, according to figures provided to the committee on Monday.
In 2014-15, about 180,000 or 35.2 percent of the state’s English learners were in kindergarten, with the smallest amount found in 12th grade, at fewer than 60,000 or about 11.3 percent. That reflects the demands of school becoming more stringent as students advance, Gandara said.
In statewide test scores tied to Common Core, 27 percent of English learners in third grade were proficient in language arts, compared to 38 percent of all third-grade students in 2015. Just 8 percent of English learners were proficient in 11th grade, compared to 44 percent of their peers.
Twenty-two percent of English learners in third grade were proficient in math, compared to 40 percent Education experts grapple with narrowing English learner achievement gap in California: