Every year, Georgia’s high-stakes Criterion-Referenced Competency Test delivers sobering news about students who struggle with math and reading, but one group has been producing encouraging results: immigrants and others who don’t speak much English.
The CRCT is being phased out and was administered one last time this spring. The last batch of school-level scores are expected in coming days, and officials are looking for continued improvement by students with limited English proficiency.
The growth by that group has been impressive, observers say. When the test was administered in 2005, for instance, 55 percent of eighth-graders with an English deficiency failed the reading portion of the CRCT and 58 percent failed math. A passing score in both is required for automatic promotion to high school. By 2013, the group’s reading failure rate had tumbled to 13 percent in reading and 28 percent in math.
CRCT PERFORMANCE CHARTS: LEP STUDENTS
» STATEWIDE: 3rd Grade | 5th Grade | 8th Grade
The pass rate for these students grew much faster than for students overall in Georgia. There is still a big performance gap, especially in social studies and science, which more than half of all limited-English-proficiency eighth-graders failed last year. But the numbers show the gap is narrowing, and it’s a lot smaller for younger students. Third-grade limited-English students passed the reading portion of the exams at about the same rate as the general population in 2013.
Dana Rickman, an education policy expert, said the improving performance of English learners is especially good news for Georgia because that group is growing as immigrants pour into the state. The policy and research director with the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education saw gains so big she called them “just crazy.”
School officials say they worked hard to make these gains, training teachers, hiring interpreters and coaching students and their parents.
About a fifth of the 106,000 students in the Cobb County School District are native Spanish speakers. Many also speak English, but the district still serves about 10,000 students who do not.
Greg Ewing, a Cobb administrator, ran the district’s English-as-a-second-language program for a dozen years, and said Cobb has been gearing up to meet the growing immigrant population.
“We knew 10 years ago that changes were on the horizon,” he said. The district won a federal grant to work with Kennesaw State University on teacher training. The 100 teachers who went through the KSU program about a decade ago learned that students often grasp street English quickly but lag with the more abstract language needed to comprehend math and other academic subjects. They learned how to help students cope.
The district took the training program in-house, and brought more teachers through it. At this point, Ewing said, about 1,200 of the roughly 6,500 teachers have graduated from it. “Our plan is to keep training,” he said.
One key aspect of a successful English learner program, Cobb discovered, was bringing parents into the fold. That’s something DeKalb has been doing, too.
Clarkston, in the middle of DeKalb County, is an international refugee relocation center. About a fifth of the district’s 100,000 students speak English as a second language. In any given year, more than 140 languages will be spoken in school hallways. DeKalb students with limited English proficiency lagged their peers in other metro Atlanta districts on last year’s tests, with half of those in eighth grade failing math compared with 18 percent in Gwinnett and 23 percent in Cobb.
DeKalb is recovering from budget cuts a few years ago that slashed interpreters. The district now has 15 of them, and they work with students — and parents. The district reaches parents by offering classes in English, computer literacy and child care. Engaged parents mean better-performing students, said Sandra Nunez, director of the district’s International Student Center.
“That’s one thing that is really influencing the results we are seeing,” she said.
Parents who can’t speak English can get help at three outreach centers. Oswaldo Diaz, who moved from Mexico 15 years ago, has two sons in DeKalb schools and a daughter who will attend kindergarten this fall. He said the books and other information he’s been given by outreach staff have taught him how to help his children with their studies and have also helped him communicate with his boss at an auto body shop.
“They have always been helpful,” he said through an interpreter.
In Gwinnett County, about 11 percent of the district’s roughly 160,000 students are in the English-as-a-second-language program, said Elizabeth Webb, the district’s ELL Programs director. Roughly 1,100 teachers, just over 10 percent, are certified to teach English to non-native speakers.
Whenever possible, new international students are placed with teachers who have the special language training. Teachers enlist students who speak the same language to help newcomers learn the ropes and adjust.
The CRCT will be phased out in the upcoming school year, but Webb said the pressure to serve English learners will continue, and even increase. The state will roll out a successor exam called “Georgia Milestones” that Webb said will force teachers to develop their students’ critical thinking.
“That’s going to be really different for us,” she said. “It’s going to be a great, new challenge.”
MORE CRCT PERFORMANCE CHARTS
» STATEWIDE: 3rd Grade | 5th Grade | 8th Grade| 8th Grade Math
DISTRICT-BY-DISTRICT
» 3rd GRADE: APS | Clayton | Cobb | DeKalb | Fulton | Gwinnett
» 5th GRADE: APS | Clayton | Cobb | DeKalb | Fulton | Gwinnett
» 8th GRADE: APS | Clayton | Cobb | DeKalb | Fulton | Gwinnett
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