Academic achievement is strongly associated with English language proficiency, yet students who are still developing English skills need to engage in rigorous curriculum long before they are proficient in academic English. As English language learners (ELLs) move into middle and high school and toward graduation, it is crucial that they experience a balance between challenge and support in all their classes.
Each state has its own requirements for students to be reclassified from ELL status, but all states require evidence of proficiency in the academic language needed for school success. Research has shown that it is bad policy to reclassify ELLs as proficient too soon or too late because the students are either pushed into sink-or-swim immersion in mainstream classes or they remain too long in the harbor of sheltered instruction and language support (Hill, Betts, Chavez, Zau, and Bachofer, 2014). It is important to acknowledge that many intersecting factors can result in low academic performance for these students, and asking difficult questions and listening to the voices of students, families, and teachers can lead to finding the best trajectory for ELLs toward graduation and postsecondary studies (Jimènez-Castellanos and García, 2017).
Are Required ESL Classes the Problem?
Being classified as ELL means participating in a school language program, including English as a second language (ESL) classes that focus on developing students' language proficiency, often within the context of simplified language arts content. However, when students are underchallenged and even segregated within the school day from the rigorous curriculum needed to get into college, they miss out on core content.
In a recent study of 14 successful college or college-bound students whose families had come to the United States from Mexico, 11 of these young people spoke of the tension between staying in ESL classes with easier content and supportive teachers and needing to move to more academically challenging classes (Hire, 2015). Some of them had decided to refuse ESL support and insisted on taking more demanding classes. Several of the students expressed frustration with the poor attitudes of other ELLs toward learning and the lack of academic rigor in ESL programs, and they recommended that teachers should have higher expectations of their students.
One student believed that her time in the ESL program during middle school had kept her isolated from her peers. She recognized that her ESL teachers were caring and nurturing and played an important role when she was a newcomer but felt that her involvement in ESL came at a high academic cost. "I was taken out of history and science classes, so I didn't really learn [this content] until I was in eighth grade, and it was hard because I didn't know what the Constitution or the Amendments were and I felt stupid." In light of such findings, educators may need to consider whether ESL classes, which are required for ELLs, are limiting some students' engagement in rigorous curriculum and impede their progress toward meeting college requirements.
What Needs to Change?
Academic isolation and a lack of rigor in a language program often indicate ESL teachers are isolated from core curriculum teams and opportunities to share leadership across the school. Separating ESL teachers who have specialized knowledge about language development from academic planning and school improvement is a tremendous loss for a school community (Daniels, 2015). This isolation leads to ESL classes that offer more support than academic challenge, and content classes that offer challenge without needed support for language development directly linked to academic learning goals.
Ensuring that ELLs and their success are a central part of school vision and policy requires a shared approach to instruction, school leadership, and community building. Listening to the voices of students—and to the voices of their parents—can help school leadership teams understand problems from new perspectives and develop solutions that are community property. Solutions that may emerge from these collaborative conversations include engaging families in learning about college requirements, developing mentor programs, following lines of inquiry generated from data analysis, and opening enriched curriculum to ELLs.
Table 1: Questions to Consider
Increasing Rigor in Secondary Language Programs-table
Shared Leadership | "1. How will you discover what ELLs and their families say about the challenge and support students are experiencing in all their classes? 2. How are ESL teachers and language specialists participating in school leadership teams?" |
|---|---|
| Rigor and Support | "1. What does a day of learning look like/sound like/feel like for individual ELLs? (ELL shadowing) 2. In what ways have content and classroom teachers taken responsibility for language development that is directly linked to lesson goals? 3. How do you examine longitudinal patterns of achievement and language development for ELLs? What are the implications of these for graduation?" |
Support and rigor must be a shared responsibility for all educators and the students they serve. Students' concerns and experiences must be noticed and valued. Parents' voices and presence need to be part of evaluating how well a school challenges and supports ELLs across the curriculum (Mancilla, 2016). To share specialized knowledge in a strategic way, ESL teachers should serve as trusted leaders within their school communities. As a result of this unified approach to school improvement, ELLs will able to engage and succeed in rigorous curriculum within a supportive learning community. Shared leadership leads to a balance between rigor and support for ELLs.