English Learners Left Behind

Standardized Testing as Language Policy

Kate Menken

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781847699336
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

In the wake of recent federal legislation entitled No Child Left Behind, high-stakes standardized testing for accountability purposes is being emphasized in educational systems across the U.S. for all students – including English Language Learners (ELLs). Yet language proficiency mediates test performance, so ELLs typically receive scores far below those of other students. This book explores how tests have become de facto language policy in schools, shaping what is taught in school, how it is taught, and in what language(s) it is taught. In New York City, while most schools responded to testing by increasing the amount of English instruction offered to ELLs, a few schools have preserved native language instruction instead. Moreover, this research documents how tests are a defining force in the daily lives of ELLs and the educators who serve them.

Part 1

Language Policy Context

Chapter 1

Introduction

In a movement that has rapidly accelerated in recent years, testing has become a central part of education for all students in the United States – including English Language Learners (ELLs).¹ At the same time, more immigrants arrived in the United States in the past decade than ever before, such that there are now more than five million ELLs from all over the world attending public schools in the United States and speaking at least 460 different languages (Kindler, 2002), reflecting an increase of 84.4% in this student population over the past decade (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, 2004). When an immigrant who speaks a language other than English at home enters a school in the United States today, she or he not only enters a new country, language and culture, but also a testing culture in which an assortment of different tests are administered regularly to determine everything from that student’ placement into a program to help her or him learn English, to whether the student can advance to the next grade, and even to assess the performance of his or her school and state education system. It is therefore a pressing concern that language proficiency mediates performance on the standardized tests being used, which makes language a liability for ELLs when test results are the primary criteria for high-stakes decisions. Furthermore, testing has come to determine language policies in education in an implicit way, removed from explicit public debate.

In the United States, federal education policy (called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) was amended in 1994, mandating the creation and adoption of academic standards and corresponding assessment systems inclusive of ELL students. The recently reauthorized federal education policy, entitled No Child Left Behind, was passed into law by Congress in 2001 and places even greater emphasis on assessment for all students, requiring that ELLs make ‘adequate yearly progress’ towards meeting state standards and ‘demonstrated improvements in English proficiency’ (US Department of Education, 1994, 2001). According to the law, each state must show the federal government that students in their schools are achieving or progressing towards scores of ‘proficient’ on assessments; the law’ rationale is that such assessments will ensure there is accountability for the educational progress of all students. While each state is allowed to design their own assessment system, most states are relying on standardized tests to meet these federal mandates. Tests now carry higher stakes than ever before for individual students, as they are used in most states as the primary criteria for high school graduation, grade promotion, and placement into tracked programs (Blank et al., 1999; Heubert & Hauser, 1999).

Yet the standardized tests that most states currently employ were developed for the assessment of native English speakers – not for ELLs. In this way, these tests are first and foremost language proficiency exams, not necessarily measures of content knowledge (García & Menken, 2006; Menken, 2000). As a result, English language learners across the United States are performing poorly on the standardized tests being used in compliance with No Child Left Behind, and their scores are being used to make high-stakes decisions. According to national data, ELLs typically perform 20–40 percentage points below other students on statewide assessments (Abedi & Dietal, 2004; Center on Education Policy, 2005).

Research for this book was conducted in New York City, where students must pass a set of Regents exams in order to graduate from high school and to comply with state and federal regulations. In this multinational and multiethnic city, where approximately 40% of all school students come from homes where a language other than English is spoken and 14% are currently categorized English language learners (New York City Department of Education, 2006a, 2006b), ELLs in the past four years have performed an average of 47 percentage points below native English speakers on these high school exit exams. Like in other states requiring exams to attain a high school diploma, ELLs graduate from high school at rates far lower than other students. The unfortunate irony of current education reforms is that English language learners are disproportionately being ‘left behind’.

This book shares the human stories of how recent testing policy is affecting schools and the daily lives of teachers and students. I spent a year in ten high schools in New York City studying how the national emphasis on testing is lived in schools, offering one local example of this critical national and international issue. Because of the high-stakes consequences attached to standardized tests in combination with consistently lower test scores among ELLs, the tests greatly impact the instruction and educational experiences of ELLs. Specifically, tests shape what content is taught in school, how it is taught, by whom it is taught, and in what language(s) it is taught. In this way, tests have become de facto language policy in schools.

No Child Left Behind is in actuality a language policy, even though this is rarely discussed and nor is the law presented to the public as such. This book shows how language education policy in the United States is currently being negotiated, as the law is interpreted by people at every level of the educational system, from the federal government to classrooms, with teachers acting as the final arbiters of language policy implementation. Although research has until recently often overlooked local or bottom-up language policy implementation (Canagarajah, 2005), language policy is examined in this book from the top-down to the bottom-up, in both a practical and theoretical way. Tests are a defining force for ELLs and the educators who serve them, and analyzing this movement through the lens of language policy allows us to document the practical realities and yet also explore the wider sociopolitical implications.

Defining Language Policy

Before moving into this discussion, it is first necessary to establish a definition of language policy, and particularly language education policy, which will be used in this book. Language policy is concerned with such topics as which language(s) will be taught in school, how language education is implemented, as well as orientations towards language and language ideology (Cooper, 1989; Corson, 1999; Crawford, 2000; Fettes, 1997; Fishman, 1979, 1991; Hornberger, 1996, 2006b; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996; Ruiz, 1984). While there are many definitions within this emerging field and remaining ambiguities (Hornberger, 2006b), in this book I favor the broad definition offered by Spolsky (2004). For Spolsky (2004:9), language policy encompasses all of the ‘language practices, beliefs and management of a community or polity’. Language policies can be overt or covert, and include all of the decisions people make about language in society (Shohamy, 2006; Spolsky, 2004). While language policy research focuses primarily on the policies of official bodies, such as governments, this book will show how there can be policymakers at all different positions in society. The term language policy is therefore used on its own in this book, apart from language planning, because the language policies currently being created in US schools as a byproduct of testing policy occur in an ad hoc way, without careful language planning as traditionally depicted in the literature (Fettes, 1997; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). As such, it would be misleading to refer to language planning when discussing how standardized tests create current language policies in education.

Schools serve as a primary vehicle for language policy implementation. Acknowledging the importance of schooling in language policy, Cooper (1989) introduced the term ‘language acquisition planning’ into the literature. This is similar to what Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) term ‘language in education policy’ and Shohamy (2003, 2006) calls ‘language education policy’, and these terms are used interchangeably in this book. While some schools have contributed to language loss, others have contributed to language maintenance, revitalization and reversing language shift.² Examples of language loss include the imposition of English-only policies in Ireland (Wright, 1996), and English and Afrikaans in apartheid South Africa which led to the loss of minority languages (Alexander, 1999; Heugh, 1999). By contrast, examples of minority language maintenance and reversing language shift in schooling include recent efforts to revitalize Navajo in the United States (Cummins, 2000; McCarty, 2003), Quechua bilingual education in Peru (Hornberger, 1996), as well as Basque in Spain (Gardner, 2000).

Recent research has focused on ways that language policies create and/or perpetuate social inequities (Corson, 1999; Phillipson, 1992; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Tollefson, 1991). A great deal of scholarly attention is now being paid to ensuring that school language policies do not contribute to language loss or disparities because of language (Corson, 1999; Cummins, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Tollefson, 1991). Corson (1999) explains this movement in the following passage:

When school language policies are put into action, they are linked with power and with social justice in a range of ways. Whenever schools set out to plan their response to the language problems they face, matters of language variety, race, culture, and class always affect the planning process, and an effective language policy process will always look critically at the impact of these and other aspects of human diversity. (Corson, 1999: 6)

This book is located within recent language policy research that is concerned by issues of power, particularly within educational contexts, and seeks to ensure that language policies in education promote equity rather than inequity.

The body of research in language policy offers a helpful lens for analyzing the inclusion of ELLs in testing, because the preparation of students who are non-native speakers of English to take high-stakes standardized tests necessitates decisionmaking at the school and classroom levels with regard to language. Yet research in this area has far-reaching implications, in that language education policies paint in full relief the power dynamics within schools and the wider society which schools reflect, and help us to understand real national priorities. While debates over bilingual education wage on in the United States and elsewhere, decisions are being made in educational systems around the world about which languages will hold an official place in schools. However, these debates are not simply about language. Decisions about which languages to teach in school and how to teach them are deeply intertwined with the status of each language and its speakers within international and local sociolinguistic hierarchies. In actuality, these are conversations about how society chooses to treat diversity, culture, immigration and, mainly, the people who are the speakers of different languages.

Why is Testing a Language Policy Issue?

At present, there is no official language or language policy in the US, as clarified in the following:

Strictly speaking, the United States has never had a language policy, consciously planned and national in scope. It has had language policies– ad hoc responses to immediate needs or political pressures – often contradictory and inadequate to cope with changing times. Government cannot avoid language policymaking. Yet no federal agency is charged with coordinating decisions, resources, or research in this area. (Crawford, 2000)

The ad hoc creation of a wide array of language policies that Crawford describes has serious implications for language in education; standards and corresponding assessments for ELLs offer one example. In the absence of official language policy in the United States, unofficial or de facto policies carry great significance.

Recent education reforms in the United States have dramatically affected language education, and assessments are currently assuming the place of a language plan and policy. The following citation refers to the efforts of various professional associations to create standards that plan language acquisition, in the absence of national language policy in the United States:

As the development of language-in-education policy may seem very complex, it may be instructive to look at the recent development of ‘standards statements’ by professional associations in the United States. There, in the absence of a national policy on languages (or even clear guidelines), these elements of the education sector have taken policy development into their own hands … (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 140–141)

Standards were the precursor to the current focus on standardized tests, and this quotation accurately portrays this movement as language policy development. In fact, standards are now primarily symbolic in many places in the United States, hanging on classroom walls and occasionally referenced in lesson plans, when in actuality tests carry far greater weight in influencing curriculum and teaching because of the consequences attached to them.

The reality is that tests offer a highly potent and expedient method for changing school curricula and classroom practices, particularly when the stakes attached to them are high. The effects of tests on teaching and learning are called testing ‘washback’ in language education research (Cheng et al., 2004), and policymakers in countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, China and Israel turn to assessment as a vehicle for driving curricula and promoting their agendas (Baker, 1995; Hayes & Read, 2004; Qi, 2005; Shohamy, 2006). Yet when used as an instrument for change, tests are found making teaching and testing essentially synonymous (Menken, in press; Qi, 2005; Shohamy, 2001).

Testing has therefore emerged as a new development in language policy. Shohamy (2001) describes why testing is a language policy issue in the introduction to her book, The Power of Tests. As she writes:

In recent years I have been conducting research in the area of ...