JCPS seeks waiver on immigrant students' tests

Forget verb conjugations and figures of speech: Some students show up to their first day at Bowen Elementary not knowing how to use indoor plumbing, much less a single word of English, according to Principal Stephen Tyra.

That means there's a lot of ground to cover to get students ready to pass the state's standardized tests. But that's exactly what the state demands.

Recognizing the challenges faced by Tyra's school and others with high numbers of students who are English-language learners, Jefferson County Public Schools is asking the state to remove some of those students' test scores from the schools' overall scores.

Instead, it's requested a waiver from the Kentucky Department of Education to have the accountability results of students with limited English proficiency be attributed only to the district.

"There's this accountability regulation that hangs like a scythe over everybody's head," said Bob Rodosky, chief of data management for Jefferson County Public Schools. "We can say the assessments are only one thing, but it's in the back of everybody's mind. People get judged on their scores, whether we like to admit it or not."

District officials say getting the waiver will help students by allowing schools to focus more on what the children need.

"By taking the accountability away from the school for all those academic subjects, you've freed the school to do what's in the best interest of the child," said David Jones Jr., chairman of the Jefferson County Board of Education, which voted to approve the waiver in February.

Jones said the scores still go to the district, and the district can look at how English-language learners are being educated as a whole.

Currently, English-language learners are granted one year of English instruction in Kentucky before their scores start counting toward schools' and districts' accountability scores.

In other words, a second-grader who arrives in Louisville in March from a refugee camp in Uganda — with only a limited grasp of English — is expected by the following May to take the state's KPREP tests with the rest of his third-grade class, and that score counts the same.

The waiver would affect students who score below a 4.0 on an exam to determine English language proficiency. Research shows that students who score a 4.0 or higher on the test, dubbed the ACCESS test, are around the level of academic language proficiency, JCPS officials said.

The Kentucky Board of Education is expected to consider the JCPS waiver at its June meeting.

Tyra noted that studies show that it can take five to 10 years of English instruction for an immigrant student to reach the level of a native English speaker, depending on a number of factors, including how much schooling was received in a student's native language.

"These kids pull the (school's) score down through no fault of their own," Tyra said, noting that as much as he hates it, "I have a test score hanging over my head each year."

Iroquois High Principal Chris Perkins faces similar challenges. At his school, he said, some students show up to their first day at Iroquois High having never before attended a formal school, much less knowing any English.

Nearly 25 percent of Iroquois' students are English-language learners.

"Many are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder," he said. "Many are wearing shoes for the first time, are in a building with A/C for the first time. Their needs go much further than learning what they need on a state accountability test."

Perkins and Tyra said JCPS' waiver request is actually different from what principals originally wanted.

They said they wanted to give their English learners more than one year of instruction before having to take the test for accountability purposes.

"Until students can score a 4 or higher (on the ACCESS test), they shouldn't be held accountable for taking an English reading test," said Perkins, whose school launched the International Academy, a program for new English speakers.

Perkins said the current waiver, if passed, would almost certainly help Iroquois High's accountability score but what "ultimately, what would be in the best interest is to be able to delay the assessments of those students."

The federal government has said that all students should be counted the same way, and the requirement to test English-language learners after one year is part of many states' No Child Left Behind waivers.

But while some education experts have said including all students is good in theory, having students who barely read and write in English take the complicated test is impractical.

Florida recently won a months-long fight with the U.S. Department of Education to give English-language learners two years before their test scores count toward a school's and district's accountability scores. Colorado is also proposing in its NCLB waiver renewal request to include English learner proficiency scores after two years of instruction.

All this wrangling over the testing and scores of English-language learners underscores the larger concern about how to properly help this rapidly growing population. English learners are one of the fastest-growing populations not only in JCPS but at districts nationwide.

Efforts to aid this group can be daunting; many of the English-language learners at JCPS speak a language that no teacher or staff member in the school knows. And JCPS has said it is struggling to keep up with hiring English as a Second Language teachers as demand grows.

And the move to implement Common Core, which puts emphasis on having students explain their reasoning in even math class, means these students may need more support than ever.

Seeing the needs of this growing population, the Obama administration's 2016 budget proposes raising the amount of money for grants to help states and school districts with providing instruction to English-language learners.

At Iroquois High, Vicky Cummings, a resource teacher who works with its new International Academy, said a lot of people questioned why the school would want to bring in students just learning English.

"A lot of people asked why, because of our scores," she said. The waiver discussion at times "makes us feel we're just talking about the scores of the school, but that's not it at all," saying that everyone in her school is focused on helping students.

Reporter Allison Ross can be reached at (502) 582-4241. Follow her on Twitter at @allisonSross.