Dual language immersion students at Vista Del Valle Academy in San Fernando.

With California’s voters passing Proposition 58 this week, millions of students will now have increased access to bilingual education. That’s especially good news for LA Unified, where the district’s English language learners significantly trailed their peers at other large districts in the state on the most recent standardized tests.

While LA Unified had plans to expand bilingual education with or without Prop. 58, the process will now be streamlined, as schools will be free to offer recommendations to parents on bilingual education, and parents won’t be required to sign a waiver form.

LA Unified leaders proudly announced the district’s improved overall performance on the state’s standardized tests at an August press conference, as its students made jumps in both English language arts and math. Superintendent Michelle King pointed out that the increases “represent some of the highest gains that were achieved among urban districts in California.”

But one statistic that was not mentioned, and certainly not cheered, was the performance of the district’s English language learners (ELLs) in comparison to other urban districts.

While the district, the state and many subgroups saw growth on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) tests — also known as the Smarter Balanced tests — growth for ELLs at LA Unified was close to stagnant, and among the 10 largest districts in the state, they were tied for last on both the math and English language arts (ELA) tests.

“At the end of the day, let’s face it, we are not happy with the performance of English learners and we definitely need to do better,” said Hilda Maldonado, director of LA Unified’s Multilingual and Multicultural Division.

• Read more: Dual language immersion programs will grow at LAUSD with or without Prop. 58

Three percent of LA Unified’s ELL students scored proficient, meeting or exceeding the standard on the ELA test, and 6 percent were proficient in math, numbers that reflect only a single percentage point improvement in the math score over last year. Statewide, 13 percent of English learners were proficient on the ELA test and 12 percent were proficient on the math test. San Diego’s ELLs scored a 25 percent proficiency rate on the ELA test, which was first among the 10 largest districts, and a 23 percent proficiency rate on the math test, which was second. San Francisco had 20 percent of its ELLs score proficient in English, which was second highest, and 27 percent score proficient in math, which was the highest.

As the largest district in the state, with over 557,000 students — not counting those enrolled in independent charters — LA Unified also has the highest number of English learners, at over 141,000, or roughly 25 percent of the student body. LA Unified dwarfs all other districts, as San Diego, the second-largest district, has roughly 130,000 students, with 19 percent of them ELLs. San Francisco, with roughly 55,000 students, has 30 percent ELLs.

“It is definitely fair to compare us to other school districts … but we are three, four times larger than everybody else, so for us to impact a whole system takes a lot more than everybody else,” Maldonado said.

When asked to explain why San Francisco’s ELLs perform so well, Christina Wong, special assistant to the superintendent at San Francisco Unified, said the district has a long-term investment in English learner programs and bilingual that is typically far ahead of other districts because of a lawsuit from the 1970s. In the Lau v. Nichols case, the California Supreme Court ruled San Francisco Unified was depriving English learners of their civil rights by providing an inadequate education. As a result of the ruling, San Francisco has been invested in developing programs for English learners for decades.

“We have the Lau vs. Nichols consent decree from the 1970s, and since then San Francisco must ensure their English learners have access to the core curriculum,” Wong said. “And so basically the district needed to find ways to support English learners and make sure they had access, and so one way was to develop and grow bilingual programs so that students would have access to the core content.”

The use of bilingual and dual language programs was found in a 2014 Stanford study to be more effective long-term for English learners. “The results show that while students in English immersion programs perform better in the short term, over the long term students in classrooms taught in two languages not only catch up to their English immersion counterparts, they eventually surpass them both academically and linguistically,” the study said.

San Francisco, as a result of its long-term focus on English learners, has far more dual language and bilingual programs than LA Unified, which may account for its high achievement. Roughly 30 percent of San Francisco’s ELLs are enrolled in bilingual or dual language  programs, compared to LA Unified, which has under 2 percent of ELLs enrolled.

“I think it’s just part of (San Francisco’s) history to serve their language populations than compared to the way they have been for LAUSD,” Maldonado said.

In San Diego, the reasons for success were not as easy to pinpoint as San Francisco’s. San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten, who is in her fourth year running the district, summed it up as simple hard work and focus.

“We don’t believe in silver bullets and we don’t believe in quick fixes. We don’t believe children are test scores. We believe that when you meet children where they are, you recognize their strengths and abilities, you see language as a strength and asset, and you give them support in the classroom instead of pullout programs,” Marten said.

Of San Diego’s English learners, roughly 11 percent are enrolled in dual language or bilingual programs. Marten said one key change the district has made over the last few years is getting each teacher specific training on teaching English learners.

“We have a vision that every teacher needs to be an English learner expert. So we have English learner support teachers, and our model was for the expert to help each and every teacher at each school become an expert in the classroom,” Marten said.

Some critics have pointed to LA Unified’s ELL problems as one of budgetary focus. Earlier this year, the district lost its appeal to the California Department of Education on how it spends hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds that are supposed to be directed to its neediest students, including English learners. According to the state, LA Unified’s use of $450 million over the last two fiscal years on special education does not qualify it as also having been spent on three needy subgroups — foster youth, English learners and low-income students — despite the district insisting that it did.

State law requires extra money be targeted to these groups and also provides extra state money for them, and the ruling essentially found that the district was using creative accounting and short-changing them to help balance the books.

The district has also been the target of a lawsuit that was filed last year over how it was spending the disputed funds, and a 2015 study by UC Berkeley and Communities for Los Angeles Student Success (CLASS) coalition also found that the bulk of the district’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) dollars “has seeped into the district’s base budget with … little apparent regard to the students who generate the new dollars.”

LA Unified had no immediate comment on the state’s ruling, but in response to the lawsuit in 2015, the district issued a statement: “We believe that this group has misinterpreted the LCFF.  The Legislature clearly granted school districts — which serve  predominantly low-income students, foster youth and English language learners – the highest degree of flexibility in determining student program needs.”

LA Unified has also had problems with the federal government in regard to English learners. In 2011, the district settled a complaint by the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which found that the district had failed to provide adequate services to English learners. As part of the settlement, the LA Unified school board passed a new English Learner Master Plan aimed at improving services for ELLs.

At a September committee meeting, several board members expressed dismay over the test scores, including the performance of English learners. Board member George McKenna, summing up his colleagues’ sentiments, said, “I’m as frustrated as I can possibly be. The data is miserable.”

LA Unified has shown it is investing in dual language programs and there are also signs it is making improvements to how it teaches English learners. In May, the district announced that its long-term English learner population — students who require six or more years of special English instruction — has been reduced by 6.4 percent since 2013. The district also added 12 new dual language or bilingual programs this year.

Kelly Gonez

By Kelly Gonez

When you are a teacher with a student who is engaging and clearly capable of big things, it breaks your heart to see an obvious barrier to success.

One of my students, I’ll call him Julian, faced this kind of challenge. He was the kind of student who makes you really appreciate being a teacher. Yet, in every class, Julian struggled. Not because of his intelligence or work ethic, but because all classes were conducted entirely in English and he was still learning the language.

Julian isn’t alone. Every day, more than 165,000 students in Los Angeles face these same barriers. A quarter of our students are learning English as a second language, and they face a long path to fluency. Yet even as we have expanded public school choices for students to include career academies and all-girls schools, we are still faced with significant barriers to prevent us from teaching English language learners in a bilingual environment.

Proposition 58 is a chance for voters to open our schools up to the option of bilingual education, which has clearly demonstrated that it is extraordinarily helpful for students who are learning English and native English speakers alike.

California is known for its vibrant diversity, accepting people of all cultures and ethnicities. Yet in 1998, our state voted to bar bilingual education, despite scant evidence to support the idea that forcing students into English-only programs will help them gain language proficiency. As of the 2015-2016 school year, just 11 percent of Los Angeles students learning English showed enough progress to be reclassified as proficient.

And beyond academics, the pressure to learn every subject in English can easily turn school from a place of learning and growth to a place of stress and anxiety. Instead of helping students overcome this challenge, Proposition 227 has stunted opportunity.

Proposition 58 seeks to overturn this flaw in the system and build upon the natural assets of English language learners – their home language and culture – as the foundation for their education, rather than treating it as a deficit.

That’s why I am supporting Proposition 58, and encouraging Los Angeles to open up new opportunities for our English language learners and for native English speakers, as research has shown that dual-language education supports both groups of students. Voting yes on Proposition 58 is just the first step to take down language barriers that hold students back, but it is an important step.

Bilingualism and biliteracy are assets, and it is time our education system recognized this. Vote yes on Proposition 58 and open doors for every child, no matter their home language.

Kelly Gonez is an LAUSD middle school science teacher and candidate for LAUSD Board District 6. 

Californians know this better than anyone else. By the time the rest of the country is discovering a new cuisine, restaurants in California have already gotten bored and fused it with a few others. Want to know what Welsh-Ethiopian seaweed injera tacos taste like? Los Angeles probably has (at least) a couple of food trucks working on it.

But look, food is just a placeholder for a deeper cultural dynamic: Diversity is cool. It’s not a coincidence that the U.S.’s most vibrant places are effervescent, freewheeling, multicultural hubs. California is cool for the same reason that it’s delicious: It’s always found ways to attract, celebrate, and integrate the broadest possible array of people. In other words, the state is interesting — a self-contained civilization in its own right — because it embraces the myriad cultures attracted to its dynamism.

Multilingualism is the bedrock of this positive cultural feedback loop. What would San Francisco’s Chinatown be without Chinese — a theme park masquerading as a neighborhood? And that brings us back to the election and November 8, when California voters will weigh in on Proposition 58. If the measure passes, it would allow the state’s K–12 schools to significantly expand their bilingual education programs.

(The 74: California Voters to Decide Future of Bilingual Education for Country’s Largest ELL Population)

Nothing sets California apart from the rest of the country — and from most of the world — like its multilingualism. The state already has more young, emerging bilingual students than any other — around 1 million more than Texas, for instance. The bilingual education programs that Proposition 58 would enable could help the state build on these considerable linguistic and cultural advantages. A politically diverse range of states is certainly trying to catch up: Texas’s bilingual education program is the largest in the nation, and New York, Utah, North Carolina and Delaware have state initiatives to expand these programs to more students.

In the near term, bilingual education helps kids of all backgrounds in a host of ways. The balance of the data suggests that these programs are actually the most effective way to help English-language learners reach English proficiency. And all students in these programs develop a more sophisticated understanding of language in general by simultaneously learningEnglish and the program’s partner language.

In addition, the best of these programs enroll classes that mix native speakers of English with native speakers of the program’s partner language. That way, students develop their language skills through class instruction and interactions with their diverse peers. These programs build linguistic and cultural bridges between communities and prepare students to participate in an exciting, multicultural society like California’s.

There are lots of good long-term reasons to make bilingualism a priority for California students. It’s in keeping with the state’s (and, to a lesser extent, the country’s) history of celebrating diversity and integrating immigrants into society. It’s also in our economic interest, given new Americans’ remarkable entrepreneurialism and the value of a multilingual workforce in the global marketplace. Finally, there are useful cognitive advantages to acquiring a second language: Bilingualism strengthens our brains.

(Williams: Linguistic Politics, and What’s at Stake in November with California’s ‘Multilingual Education Act’)

But while those are all real benefits of diversity and good reasons to support bilingual education, they’re also abstract. They’re not part of the cluttered muddle of concerns that make up our hourly or daily lives. Do Americans want more prosperity and innovation in their country’s future — and longer attention spans for their potentially bilingual young children? Yes and yes.

But on any given Tuesday, most of us are more concerned with the actual work of living. Many of us are feeding, shepherding, chauffeuring and entertaining our kids. We’re trying to come up with ways to expand our kids’ abilities and horizons so that they’re set up to succeed at school and in their lives. That’s why, given the option, most of us — I hope — would rather live and parent in multilingual, multicultural communities. When it comes to parenting — shoot, when it comes to living — interesting beats boring.

Or, to bring the whole discussion back to dinner: Cheeseburgers taste great. So do empanadas, sushi, pho, poké, borscht and fajitas. Given the option, most of us would rather live in communities where we could choose from as many of these as possible.

Similarly, English is great! Students need strong English skills to participate in American society. Other languages are great too! Strong speaking and reading skills in an additional language, whether Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hmong or some other, help students to contribute fully to the wonderfully diverse communities around them. They’re multilingual, multicultural feasts full of interesting choices and opportunities.

But those cool communities don’t usually spark forth on their own. States need to cook them up by attracting new, interesting people and celebrating their newly arriving cultural contributions. By giving more schools the choice to build bilingual education programs, Proposition 58 would make California tastier, cooler and — yes — more economically dynamic than it already is.

The views expressed here are Conor Williams’s alone.

Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. He has two young children and an extremely patient wife.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

Proposition 58 certainly isn’t the highest-profile among the 17 ballot questions facing California voters this fall — those would probably be the proposals to repeal the death penalty or legalize marijuana.

It isn’t even the newsiest among the education propositions. That’s probably Prop. 55, which would extend a special tax on individual incomes over $250,000, most of it going to the state’s K-12 schools.

Yet the ballot question could have a huge impact on the state’s more than 1.5 million English-language learners at a time when immigration and the country’s relationship with Mexico have become hot-button topics. The outcome of the potentially pivotal vote is far from clear, despite very lopsided advocate support for the referendum.

(The 74’s Conor Williams: Linguistic Politics, and What’s at Stake in November With California’s ‘Multilingual Education Act’)

The question facing California voters is whether to overturn a 1998 referendum, Prop. 227, that limited how schools could teach English-language learners. English-language learners were to be placed in classes taught only in English, as opposed to bilingual classes. Parents of both native English speakers and English-language learners can petition for bilingual education for their children where it’s available, but only under limited circumstances.

Advocates say changing the law would return local control to districts and schools, let children learn English the way that best meets their needs, and open new opportunities for native English speakers to learn a second language.

Since the original proposition passed, there has been a chill put on the virtue of becoming bilingual, said Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, president of Californians Together, a coalition of 25 parent, professional and civil rights groups focused on English-language learners.

About 30 percent of English-language learners were taught in bilingual settings before the 1998 change, a number that has dropped to about 4 percent, she said.

“It’s been 18 years since Proposition 227 passed. We know a lot more about educating students to become bilingual and biliterate, and we think it’s time that the barriers that proposition created be modified so all students, in all districts” have access to multilingual programs, Spiegel-Coleman said.

Proponents for overturning the old rules span the ideological spectrum.

Teachers unions, civil rights groups, the state PTA, the California Chamber of Commerce and the state Democratic Party are all backing the measure. Even groups often not involved in education issues, like the Sierra Club of California and California Professional Firefighters, support the initiative. As of early October, more than $1 million had been raised to push Prop. 58, half a million dollars of that from the California Teachers Association, with the rest primarily from other unions and the state school administrators association.

The opposition, meanwhile, is limited largely to the state Republican and Libertarian parties and Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley software developer who bankrolled the original 1998 initiative. They haven’t spent any money, according to state campaign finance records.

Unz, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1994, launched an admittedly long-shot bid this spring to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer in order to bring attention to the issue.

A series of articles in the Los Angeles Times about “immigrant Latino parents” who started a public protest against an elementary school that refused to teach children English inspired Unz to push for Prop. 227 nearly 20 years ago, he said.

“The problem was that hundreds of thousands of immigrant children in California were not being taught English when they went to school,” he said.

The change to focus on English-only instruction “worked out perfectly well,” he said – children are learning English and test scores are up.

A 2006 study by the American Institutes for Research on behalf of the state education department found a slight decrease in the performance gap between English-language learners and native speakers. But the gap in test scores remained “virtually constant” across grades and subjects, and, the researchers noted, the Prop. 227 reforms were implemented at the same time as several others, including a reduction in class sizes.

“Across all analyses, little to no evidence of differences in [English-language learner] performance by model of instruction was found,” they wrote.

Unz blames the push to overturn Prop. 227 on a “small group of very zealous advocates of bilingual education” who “hoodwinked” politicians. Because California has term limits for its state lawmakers, the legislators who passed the 2014 bill pushing Prop. 58 to the ballot weren’t in office when the state considered the issue in 1998, he said.

“This whole vote, I think, is much more sort of a matter of symbolism, and a matter of basically ignorance, since the whole issue’s been totally forgotten, than anything that will have a major practical impact on California education,” he said.

He predicted that if schools change to emphasize bilingual education, parents will protest and districts will have to revert to the current system, with its emphasis on English instruction.

“I am very skeptical there will be any major changes in educational policy in the state, regardless of how the vote goes in November,” he said.

A big change in L.A.

One of the districts where a change could have the largest impact is the Los Angeles Unified School District.

About 27 percent of the 558,000 students in K-12 district schools at any given point are classified as English-language learners. An additional 25 to 27 percent were formerly English-language learners, so more than half of the district’s students either currently are, or at one point were, classified as ELLs, said Hilda Maldonado, executive director of multilingual and multicultural education.

The district provides a range of options for ELLs, from the required English-language immersion classes that educate about 85 percent of them to a variety of bilingual offerings.

All students, regardless of which program they attend, are required to prove their English literacy skills — at grade level — within five years of beginning the program, Maldonado said. The district five years ago entered into an agreement with the federal Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to improve outcomes for English-language learners who weren’t meeting that benchmark.

“We have found that it potentially is taking these kids a lot longer to learn English in these all-English programs, and we’ve had to put in place additional services, additional courses, so we can catch them up” and comply with the agreement with the federal government, Maldonado said.

Maldonado is already looking to see how the district could expand bilingual education if Prop. 58 passes, starting by trying to recruit bilingual certified teachers. She’s working with the district’s HR department to take stock of existing teachers and implement incentives for bilingual para-educators to get fully certified. The district will also look for existing teachers who speak a second language but are credentialed in another subject to also get the bilingual certification.

(The 74: Desperate for Bilingual Teachers? New Paper Says You Should Start With Your Classroom Aides)

Offering more bilingual education will help teachers understand why English-language learners aren’t grasping content, whether it’s trouble understanding English or the underlying subject matter.

“Maybe they can take algebra in Spanish and pass it, because algebra is algebra,” she added.

Maldonado is herself an English-language learner, having come to the U.S. at age 11.

“I think the world is so much smaller now than it used to be. Being bilingual or multilingual really just puts us into the current 21st century in a way that values everyone rather than divides them,” she said.

Result unclear

The result of the vote will likely depend heavily on how informed voters are about what the proposition would do – primarily, that it would overturn Prop. 227.

A poll conducted in September found high support for Prop. 58, with 69 percent of those surveyed backing the measure, but only as long as they were presented with the official ballot language. (A separate poll in April found the exact same result, 69 percent, with similar ballot language.)

The change comes, though, when respondents are informed that Prop. 58 would repeal the part of Prop. 227 that requires classes to be taught almost exclusively in English. When given that information, 51 percent of respondents opposed Prop. 58. Republicans, independents and white respondents were particularly likely to change their minds when presented with that additional information.

Unz thinks that given the official ballot language — which doesn’t mention overturning part of Prop. 227 — and the deluge of other races and ballot questions vying for voters’ attention, many Californians will vote in favor of Prop. 58 by mistake.

“The impression I have is, very few Californians even know there are two people running for the U.S. Senate right now,” Unz said of the race between Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats. “If that’s gotten no attention, then one of 17 initiatives isn’t really getting any attention either.”

Proponents, too, face the same problem of overwhelmed voters.

Spiegel-Coleman said advocates will work through the scores of groups that have endorsed the initiative, as well as an increasing number of endorsements from major newspapers across the state, to raise awareness. They’ll also probably run some ads on radio, she said.

“The issue is really letting people know that it exists and see their way down the ballot and vote yes on it,” she said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

Mural handcrafted by Broadway Elementary students

The LA Unified school district plans to expand its dual language immersion program next fall, adding Spanish language programs to three elementary schools in the district.

According to LAUSD officials, that brings the total number of dual language programs offered by the district to 57, including 43 in Spanish, 10 in Korean, and four in Mandarin.

Hilda Maldonado, the director of the multi-lingual department at LAUSD told LA School Report that the new programs are a result of the schools’ and communities desire for students with different backgrounds to study and gain fluency in both English and Spanish.

“The schools solicit to begin a program,” Maldonado said. “All we do is guide them and provide professional guidance building so they can be successful.”

The three new programs have been approved at Madison, Nightingale and Hooper elementary schools.

Dual language immersion programs are still few and far between in California but are growing in popularity; according to the California Department of Education there were 313 programs in California in 2011, mostly in Spanish. They offer a curriculum in two languages to the general student population –  not just to English language learners, but to English-only students as well.

That has allowed dual immersion to side-step the controversy surrounding bilingual education, an approach embraced by California in the 1990’s, which separated students with limited English from the main student population so they could be taught math, science and social studies in their ‘home’ language. By 1998, bilingual education was being blamed for an achievement gap in the immigrant population and was banned by Proposition 227. As a result, English language learners are required to receive academic instruction in English and then ‘reclassified’ as quickly as possible to join the rest of the student population.

Since the shut-down of bilingual education, dual immersion programs have emerged on a limited basis, only if parents help get a waiver from Prop 227.

Maldonado says in order for the programs to be sustainable, the school, community and parents must work together. There must be an implementation plan in place and certain guidelines must be met such as 50 percent of students in the class must be English speakers while the other 50 must be Spanish speakers.

She also says that the school must be prepared with available teachers, preferably ones who are already on site, who are willing to teach the program.

But while finding Spanish and English speaking teachers is usually not an issue, it does become problematic for other dual immersion programs such as Mandarin.

Even though the district works with Human Resources to recruit dual speaking teachers, a qualified teacher who speaks both languages, “certainly is difficult to find and there is a challenge,” she said. “But we are persistent in our approach.”

Despite the challenges, the Mandarin dual immersion program has seen great results.

For example, City Terrace Elementary, a school located in a low-income neighborhood in East Los Angeles, began offering a Mandarin dual immersion program in 2007 and has seen 90 percent of students scoring advanced or proficient in math and English arts on their statewide tests.

City Terrace’s Principal Elaine Fujiu credits these high scores to the Mandarin dual immersion program and she’s not alone in her belief that becoming proficient in two languages can improves academic success.

The success of dual immersion programs has brought the idea of bilingual education back in the spotlight. State Senator Ricardo Lara of Bell Gardens says that students who are bilingual are better prepared to compete in a global economy.

Lara plans to bring the issue to the voters in November 2016 with a ballot initiative to repeal Proposition 227.

TV ads for Prop. 38 start airing SF Chronicle: The 30-second spot hits on the themes that proponents have pushed so far and includes a barely subtle jab at Brown’s measure.

Seeking Allies, Teachers’ Unions Court G.O.P., Too NYT: While donations to Democrats still far outweigh contributions to Republicans, the proportion of union money going to Republican candidates this year, just over 8 percent, has doubled since the last election cycle, according to the National Institute on Money In State Politics.

Finding Classroom Success In Bilingual Mix Of Spanish, English Hechinger Report: In 2011, while 56 percent of elementary-age students in California were proficient or above on state tests for English language arts, two thirds of Ernest R. Geddes Elementary School in Baldwin Park, Calif students were [proficient].

Reform by the ounce, unfunded pension debt by the pound Ed Source: The pension reforms passed in June, paring back the benefits for new teachers and administrators, will knock off $189 million per year from the additional payments taxpayers must make to keep the California State Teachers’ Retirement System solvent over the next 30 years. That’s the good news.

Millikan students volunteer, raise money for cancer care Daily News: Students hope to raise $2,000 over the next month to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

La Puente High Horrors: Soccer Players Claim to Have Been Hazed, Sodomized With Poles LA Weekly: Superintendent Barbara Nakaoka announced this morning that four students, one 18 and the rest minors, have been arrested in connection to the case. In addition, one male teacher/coach has reportedly been placed on administrative leave.

LAUSD Special Education Failings Still Flying Under The Radar Neon Tommy (blog): The district recently failed for an eighth straight year to meet special education delivery targets for disabled students.