How "smart data" helps English learners: with new methods of collecting and evaluating data, tracking student progress and finding effective instructional strategies is faster and easier.

Every school district is judged on its success according to today's standardized tests, in the midst of this, and despite statewide initiatives such as California's Proposition 227 for English immersion, disagreements continue regarding the best methods for teaching English learners. What teachers and administrators need is a way to work together to track the progress of each student and to adjust strategies accordingly.

Does the No Child Left Behind Act just add more complications to this equation? Each grade from 3 to 8 requires an annual assessment as part of Title 1 funding, and teachers are often unsure how they'll rate when that annual assessment comes around--especially in an English learner environment.

However, with new methods of collecting and evaluating data, several assessment measures can be managed. And what was once a very complicated scenario becomes a simplified one in which decisions are much easier to come by. A side benefit of working with this "smart data" is the opportunities that open up for involving parents.

English language learners

In the 2000-2001 school year, there were 1.5 million English language learners in California public schools. Seventy percent of-those students were in grades K-6. Nationwide, NCLB provided $665 million in 2004 to help ELL students acquire English language skills. This is a 49 percent increase over 2001, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education, $68 million of which is set aside to prepare teachers for teaching English learners.

The structured immersion approach, in addition to being the chosen method of California's Proposition 227, is being financed by the NCLB Act. Structured immersion means that instruction is in the language being learned (English, in our case), in a self-contained classroom. An alternative program would be bilingual education, in which the student is taught various subjects in the native language, with time set aside for learning English.

All schools must now have an evaluation plan for their English Language Development program. The evaluation plan must include:

* The progress of children in attaining English proficiency;

* Student attainment of the state's content and achievement standards; and

* Progress in meeting accountability requirements.

Tracking progress

With multiple teaching styles, what's the ideal way to track progress? It is impossible to raise the English proficiency of a student new to the country from beginning status to proficient within the one-year time frame set forth by NCLB and Proposition 227. Language acquisition research shows this effort takes five to seven years. But understanding progress by individual standards is the only way to prove or disprove the time frame's attainability for an individual school. Even within the immersion style of teaching, there are unique attributes of individual teachers. Fortunately, the tracking itself can improve the instruction path taken for each individual student.

Today at the Lennox School District in Los Angeles County, for example, a teacher doesn't need to wait for a report from the administrator to determine which 10 kids are academically at risk. It wasn't long ago that a teacher needed to go to the office and find the cumulative records, take out the paper copies of test data and locate the patterns by looking at various reports. Today, a teacher can look up this information on his or her students via the password-protected PowerSchool site. By removing that administrative lag time, teachers can take more immediate action where they see a need.

Now, comparisons of the student's year-to-year progress can be made quickly and efficiently, and a better picture emerges of what is working and what isn't for the student.

In a district of 97 percent Latino students, we at Lennox must pay special attention to our ability to ready students for life in an English-speaking world. Tracking of the California English Language Development Test is easy today, so our focus can remain on strategies for improvement.

The language proficiency data in PowerSchool, for example, when broken out by individual standards, helped us realize that many of our students stayed at the intermediate level of English language development for a long period of time. Students managed to move quickly through the first two levels, but their progress slowed dramatically through the middle stages.

In a district of 7,200 students, it may have been easy to miss the slow progress students make after reaching a certain plateau. Because we saw the data in a more comprehensible arrangement, we were able to institute an English Language Development profile or checklist of student progress to pay more attention to specific areas.

Once we determined the gap in our ELL population's progress, we did the following:

* Created a measurement checklist (ELD progress profile) to more closely monitor progress of our ELL students. This data is entered via PowerSchool each trimester, and we analyze it each term.

* Created an observational checklist to use while visiting classrooms to determine the essential characteristics of effective ELD instruction.

* Conducted monthly ELD trainings for teachers at minimum days (inservice days) during 2002.

* Reserved minimum days during the 2003 school year for a focus on additional training that fuses ELD and technology--specifically, the Internet. We will train all teachers on the vast resources available to address ELD standards with children.

* Adopted an ELD curriculum (textbooks) for all students.

* Placed all ELL students in classes based on their language proficiency levels to better tailor instruction.

* At the middle school level, we give placement tests at the end of the year that are graded via a Scantron. This data is imported into PowerSchool and used as an element in PowerScheduling.

* Implemented staff development for 2004 that focused on guided reading at the elementary school level to address a new district-wide elementary assessment called Development Reading Assessment. For this initiative, we use a consultant to work with the schools once a month.

Improving parental involvement

According to California law, parents must be presented with the option of signing a waiver that will, in effect, enroll their child in a bilingual program (rather than the English immersion program inherent to Proposition 227) if they so choose. Therefore, our school district mst work to evaluate three kinds of programs: the mainstream English program, the structured immersion program and the alternative program (taught in the native language).

According to new standards, parents of EL students participating in a language instruction program must be notified no later than 30 days after the beginning of the school year about their child's proficiency in English, planned methods of instruction, parental rights and more. We feel fortunate that these waivers and letters are managed by the student information system in an automated way that actually allows for more individualized attention to parents and students when needed.

Our school district also works to involve parents through:

* Literacy activities between parents and their children;

* Training for parents regarding ways to partner with the teacher to benefit the education of their children; and

* Parent literacy training.

Meeting the above recommendations is easier through our student information system because our ability to track individual student progress has been significantly improved. Parents are more frequently updated, so parent-teacher conferences become much more productive, focused on strategies for improvement rather than a rehashing of the filets.

At our middle and high schools, parents can actually be informed of their child's progress on a daily basis--regarding quizzes and tests, attendance and homework--through the PowerSchool interface, using any Web connection.

The improved understanding between teachers and parents fosters improvements in the programs designed to further encourage parental involvement and parental literacy. Our approach minimizes surprises to parents and helps us stay aligned not just with our state requirements, but with NCLB, which also mandates an increase in parental involvement.

With the nationwide emphasis on involving parents, we are more committed than ever to finding better ways to report to parents the meaning behind their children's test scores. For example, a Title III letter to the parents is generated once the data is entered into the system, sharing all the testing data for individual students.

We believe that with teachers, parents and administrators in more continuous contact with data--and with excellent computer systems for managing the data--the power for maximizing student achievement is, more appropriately, in everyone's hands.

Erika Benadom is the director of technology for the Lennox School District