The Department of Justice (DOJ) reached a settlement with the California Department of Education (CDE) and the state Board of Education regarding California’s failure to provide proper instructional language services to English learner (EL) students.
In May 2015, the DOJ found that California did not adequately monitor its public schools’ provision of language instruction to EL students under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act (EEOA), which requires state and local education agencies to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers among students, according to a press release from the DOJ.
When the DOJ made its findings, California public schools had released reports showing that since the 2007-2008 school year, more than 20,000 EL students hadn’t received the instructional language services required by the EEOA.
In Santa Barbara County, EL students make up 35 percent of the public school student population, according to 2015 data from the CDE. Of the county’s EL students, 62.7 percent are long-term English learners (LTEL), meaning they have been enrolled in California schools for at least six years but have not made adequate progress in learning English and are struggling academically.
California Together, a coalition of education advocacy and civil rights groups, claimed in a recent news release that LTEL students’ “life chances are compromised by a schooling system that isn’t responding to their needs.”
“The real goal for California’s schools and districts should be to guarantee that no English learner becomes a long-term English learner,” California Together President Xilonin Cruz Gonzalez said in the release. “Each school and district should commit to assessing their current EL programs and investing in what we know works.”
The DOJ’s Sept. 9 settlement should help accomplish this. Under the two-year agreement, the CDE and Board of Education are required to make the following adjustments:
• Respond in a timely and effective manner to credible evidence that schools are failing to serve EL students, including notification of violations and provision of a protocol by which the schools must document evidence that they are resolving the violations.
• When selecting schools for monitoring reviews, consider reports of unserved EL students and include charter schools in the selection process for such reviews each year.
• Improve the CDE’s online monitoring tool and require that schools failing to meet specific requirements receive onsite monitoring, unless they can provide evidence that the noncompliance has been resolved.
• Develop and implement policies and training on the CDE’s monitoring, review, and correction action processes for schools with EL service violations.
This article appears in Sep 15-22, 2016.