Hispanic-White Reading Proficiency: California Has One Of Nation's Greatest Gaps
Sarah Garland
First Posted: 10/26/11 12:50 PM ET Updated: 12/26/11 05:12 AM ET
This article comes to us courtesy of The Hechinger Report. This is the second of a three-part series. Read the first piece, English-Learning Students Far Behind Under English-Only Methods, here.
SOLEDAD, Calif. -- On a cool winter morning Nicole Miller circulated through her fourth-grade classroom in this small town in the Salinas Valley, quizzing students on material they'd likely see on state tests in the spring.
"How do you know 'hit the lights' is an idiom?" she asked a student.
"'Hit the lights' is an idiom because if you hit the lights, they break,'" the student replied.
Miller smiled. "Good answer!" she said.
The majority of students in Miller's class began their schooling speaking no English, and idioms often are the last frontier for anyone learning a foreign language.
Many of these students have just mastered the ability to read. But because idioms are heavily represented on California's fourth-grade test, these 9-year-olds need to learn that "tickled pink" doesn't mean turning colors and that someone who is "all thumbs" is clumsy.
Helping students reach this more sophisticated understanding of English is a difficult but increasingly urgent task. A decade ago, only 10 percent of Soledad fourth-graders demonstrated proficiency on state reading tests. The vast majority of the students are low-income Hispanics, many of them English-language learners.
By 2010, the percentage had leapt to 43 percent. The district plastered a new slogan on bulletin boards across the district: "We're cooking!"
The improvement is impressive, but a large gap in proficiency still exists between Soledad's fourth-graders and the statewide average. Soledad lags behind the rest of the state by 20 percentage points. At the current rate, it will take Soledad's students at least another decade to catch up.
In many ways, Soledad's struggles mirror those of the state as a whole, which has one of the nation's biggest gaps in reading performance between Hispanics and whites.
By its own measure, the California Standards Test, the state has made some progress in closing that gap. In 2010, about half of Hispanic students were proficient on the fourth-grade English language arts test, up from just a quarter in 2003. The proficiency gap between Hispanics and whites shrank by 7 points.
California's performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, reveals a bleaker picture.
Only 12 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders in California were proficient in reading on that test in 2009, which places them behind every state in the nation except for Utah and Minnesota. On this test, the proficiency gap between Hispanic and white students actually grew slightly over the past decade.
These figures suggest that huge numbers of California's Hispanic students, the majority of whom are English-language learners, are missing a key benchmark that could affect the state's long-term future: the ability to read fluently by third grade.
Research has shown that students who miss this goal are at a much higher risk of dropping out of high school. That means California is on track to see millions of students drop out in the coming years.
The trend could spell economic disaster for a state that's already deep in financial crisis, at a time when California is about a million college graduates short of meeting workforce needs, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
"What we're doing in California is a travesty," said Patricia Gandara, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and an expert on the Latino achievement gap. "There has been very little done to improve the situation for these kids, and it's dire."
BUDGET CUTS HIT READING PROGRAMS
Many experts argue that the Golden State has taken the wrong approach to teaching English-language learners, who are largely Hispanic and make up a quarter of the state's 6.2 million students.
At the same time, California has a history of underfunding its schools compared with other states, experts say. Most recently, the fiscal crisis has hit schools and districts with large Hispanic populations particularly hard. Budget cuts are reducing programs intended to narrow the Hispanic reading gap, which hasn't gotten as much notice as it deserves, educators say.
"There's been so much attention to black-white gaps. We need more focus on what works for narrowing Hispanic-white gaps," said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist.
In the Soledad Unified School District, Superintendent Deneen Newman recognizes that the district is "not there yet," though officials are trying numerous innovations to make a difference.
"Our attitude is if we're not cutting it, we'll do whatever it takes," said Newman, a 23-year veteran of the public schools who started as an elementary school teacher in South Central Los Angeles. "The challenge is how quickly you can do it."
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