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Although battles rage about the technical adequacy and implications of the research on language acquisition and primary language maintenance, practitioners find that their classroom experience with LEP students of any kind in the sites visited for this study prompts them to reach out to students in their own languages. Many teachers are fluently bilingual in Spanish and English, and others are learning to communicate in Navajo, Khmer, Hmong, Chinese, Russian, and other languages to meet their students at least halfway, even where the diversity of the minority language populations makes real bilingual instruction untenable. However, except for newcomers, most LEP students are immersed in English programs by the end of third grade. Relatively few teachers and administrators seem aware of the evidence that, without ongoing school support for bilingual communication skills, most students will soon lose their primary language proficiency, and their literacy skills in any language may stall at the early elementary level. Few seem to understand that language minority families usually provide better communication modeling in the primary language than in English; hence, some educators interviewed for this study encourage such families to use English at home, whether or not their use of English is skillful. Ironically, as they reach high school, students, if fully educated, may be required or at least urged to learn a non-English language--and by then so completely have they lost their primary language that they must begin all over again.
Many project developers and participants experience the benefits of bilingualism, but even they are not immune to the pressure to promote English proficiency as quickly as possible at almost any cost. Because the social and economic benefits of bilingualism may not be evident until adulthood, the goal of maintaining students' proficiency in primary languages--both as a necessary foundation for second-language acquisition and as a valuable educational end in itself--is sometimes overshadowed by the goal of developing proficiency in English. This may be a case of more haste leading to less progress--the pressure to make immediate gains in English proficiency may slow overall language development and academic achievement.
In this study, two schools with similar proportions of low-income and language-minority students in adjacent neighborhoods illustrate this dilemma. In one school, most LEP students speak Spanish, and their academic progress is supported by bilingual instruction in the early grades. Furthermore, their bilingual teachers provide role models and in other ways reduce the discontinuity students might sense between school and home life. In school, neither their language nor their immigrant status is treated as problematic; the students are comfortable and amenable to learning. However, this school is often troubled by fights in the lunchroom and on the playground between Hispanic students and other students; these students have not developed any grounds for friendship because they meet only in these relatively unsupervised public spaces. Outside school, violent clashes between ethnic gangs are reaching crisis proportions, and school does not seem to offer opportunities for children to learn alternatives to isolation and hostility. In the interest of preserving the integrity of language and cultural resources, the school's bilingual program produces ethnic isolation.
In the second school, although the population of Spanish-speaking students might support at least one strand of bilingual classes, major proportions of other LEP students complicate the language learning picture. This faculty chose an ESL approach and deliberately made all homerooms heterogeneous with respect to primary language and other factors. They schedule primary language literacy classes after school, and fluent native speakers teach an hour every day. During the school day, students sometimes work in heterogeneous language groups and other times in same-language groups. At this school few racial or ethnic tensions are evident. However, the relative absence of high-status representatives of minority cultures (for example, teachers) and the marginalized position of primary language and cultural studies may communicate a different message about what it means to be an "American" than the one school leaders intend to convey. In the interest of promoting integration and appreciation of diversity, the school may be contributing to erosion of cultural and linguistic integrity.
Deep convictions and extensive knowledge do not provide easy solutions to complex problems, only hard choices with different costs and benefits. Schools struggle with the challenge of finding the right balance between the social and academic goals that are part of their mission. Their strategy for offering hospitable and familiar environments for individual language minority groups might contradict their strategy for teaching students from different groups how to live together, yet research and experience indicate that individual ease and collective harmony are both essential. Project leaders at many sites are experimenting with different approaches in attempts to develop programs that are right for each setting.
In contrast, one project specially requested nominations for and chose a participant group consisting equally of well-regarded candidates and of those who needed to improve. This project adapted a process that was already well researched, enriched it with additions that accommodated the particular demands of the new application, and banked on the proven power of the intervention to bring both high-risk and high-probability candidates to the desired levels of competence. This project yielded a high rate of success. Given the variability of competence in the existing instructional workforce and the potential applicant pool, this approach also has value.
The final stage of any pre-employment training program must ensure that candidates achieve high entry-level standards. If program funding is on a short cycle and program length is relatively limited, selecting only the best-prepared candidates guarantees that a program will produce capable graduates and earn an impressive rating with funders and employers. Few could be more convincing in their arguments for establishing high professional standards for teachers of LEP students than those whose daily experience reminds them of the job's challenges. Given a short opportunity to train, project staff choose only those who can finish successfully--and these students are often already so well supported and educated that their chances of earning degrees and certification are high even without project support. However, project personnel are also in daily contact with people whose character and ability recommend them for teaching, but whose present achievement is not adequate for them to succeed in appropriately rigorous teacher education programs. Many interviewed for this study expressed regret that the structure of funding discouraged long-term or variable-length programs for these prospective candidates. Such programs would permit teacher educators to apply their expertise to stimulating the academic progress of students more in need of help and less likely to reach the pool of qualified candidates without it. The downside of "creaming" is the same in this employment preparation program as in others--it produces high retention and placement rates but has marginal impact on improving the quality and size of the general applicant pool.
Other projects focus broadly, aiming to harness several bureaucracies to their task. These projects often show insight about the implications of research, and the scale of their efforts reflects understanding of the size of the task. They attempt to reach thousands of teachers or to weave together coherent programs that span from middle school through college graduation. Legal mandates often do promote extensive activity around the right dimensions of practice, and comprehensive programs hold the promise of reaching the right people. However, it was difficult to determine whether the broadly conceived and implemented programs that we visited had much effect at the classroom level. Indeed, observations, conversations with teachers, and evidence collected in other studies (Fleischman & Hopstock, in press) suggest that effects are minimal in many classrooms. Resources are simply spread too thin to support the organizational activities that undergird real change. Without such activities to support effective implementation, projects are seldom successful in changing student achievement.
Unfortunately, in the interest of preserving the appearance of collegiality, one group or the other sometimes gives up ground it should defend. Practitioners may accept an idea that they know is unworkable because they think project developers must know better; project developers may accept mistaken interpretations of plans because they think it is the democratic thing to do. Neither consensus nor majority rule provides a wholly reliable model of decisionmaking in such collaborations; creation of new models may be one of the most important parts of the shared construction of knowledge in any project.
For example, family interviews are part of several projects' efforts to help teachers learn more about the values, customs, and other cultural dimensions of their students' lives and to establish stronger, more supportive bonds among teachers and parents. The goal of learning more about students' actual lives--not just a new set of stereotypes--implies making authentic personal contact and using certain interview strategies that create an agreeable and well-defined, but novel, social ground for the contact. To use a written survey ignores the possibility that parents may not be able to read it--in English or any other language. What's more, even literate adults often view surveys as a type of test, with right and wrong answers. In this context, a survey is not an effective way to gather information about culture. Even a face-to-face encounter must be carefully constructed. To depend on forms of social discourse appropriate for a casual meeting may lead to embarrassment on both sides because the information sought may seem to be too personal for such discourse. Instead, after asking parents if they wish to serve as cultural experts, teachers must schedule an appointment to hold the conversation, frame their explanations with language making their purpose clear, ask questions eliciting the right kind of information, and record the information clearly and completely. For instance, if one wants to know what economically useful talents and skills family members have, one must ask a question that does not point only to formal employment. Even parents who are currently employed in unskilled occupations or altogether unemployed may have a vast repertoire of abilities developed in other times and places. Furthermore, as every ethnographer knows, a good set of interview notes preserves to a reasonable degree an accurate record of what was shared and provides the basis for later reflection. A good interview process, which might take several meetings, establishes a bond between teachers and parents that generates good outcomes for them and the students. A survey takes less time, but it does not establish personal bonds or go very far in breaking down stereotypes.
One project experimented with having researchers conduct interviews with parents identified by teachers and report the results. The project team--teachers and researchers--discovered that, although the information gathered might be more technically adequate, the value of the process was diminished. The most powerful combination of data collection and community-building occurred when parents shared their insights with teachers, not with researchers.
In projects that rely on interviews, teachers immediately feel the extraordinary time demanded to conduct good interviews, even while they also immediately see how much the process contributes to their ability to reach their students. Their concern with limiting the task to manageable dimensions so they can fit it into their full schedules often drives them to take shortcuts that render the encounter meaningless. Project developers know that a hasty meeting shaped by a highly structured questionnaire cannot generate the information or the relationship that will enrich the context of teaching and parenting. Negotiations between project developers and practitioners must result in a task that has manageable dimensions as well as features that promote a meaningful encounter between parents and teachers. Finding the right compromise--one that accommodates agreed-upon priorities--requires debates that muster the most compelling evidence about each position. Backpedaling to avoid controversy among program collaborators can easily erode program quality.
This tension between what researchers or other educators who are not classroom teachers know must be done and what practitioners are able to squeeze into a day affects most projects. Even in good projects, the temptation to take shortcuts to resolve the tension can cause slippage in implementation, which in turn significantly restricts possible improvements in outcomes for students. If projects are to be fruitful, then unproductive compromises must be resisted. How to resist them and how to settle on more productive alternatives are matters of continuing struggle.
The several dimensions of teacher preparation and continuing education often involve distinct service providers whose work is difficult to coordinate. In some cases, projects have not even attempted to wrestle unwieldy bureaucracies into coherent postures, but have instead relied on individual managers to make the necessary adjustments, occasionally with more attention to the spirit than to the letter of the relevant policies and regulations. For example, in urban areas where negotiated agreements guide decisionmaking about school assignment and reductions in force, some projects have benefitted from informal waivers of protocol. Persuaded that the general trend is in the right direction, the principal parties tacitly agree not to raise a fuss about temporary irregularities. This leaves them vulnerable to complaints about failure to follow the rules, but developing tighter couplings--institutionalizing arrangements--poses a new set of challenges.
A few university-based project leaders have earned tenure and promotion to associate and full professor; others in tenure-track positions aspire to tenure and promotion but are skeptical about their prospects because time-consuming project work may leave little opportunity to write for refereed journals. Application of scholarly knowledge or project direction still ranks below publication, even in institutions whose mission is teacher education. Their fears are justified by the long-standing "temporary instructor" status of qualified colleagues who have chosen to devote themselves to developing and running bilingual teacher education projects and been rejected for tenure. Some projects lean on the willingness of competent PhDs to work on one-year contracts in key roles. In the districts, some teachers and principals who were central to the success of continuing education projects were transferred to other schools or assignments not involved in the project.
Those working in poorly funded districts often face the temptation to use their new teaching credentials in nearby suburbs paying thousands of dollars more each year. For example, bilingual teachers in the Edgewood Independent School District of San Antonio can earn an annual specialty-certificate bonus $500 to $2,500 more if they transfer to the adjacent San Antonio or Northside districts. Participants in the Los Angeles project are recruited in their schoolyards by energetic personnel officers from nearby districts offering higher pay and better working conditions. In cities like Los Angeles and San Antonio, grim school funding realities wreak havoc with staffing arrangements from month to month. A principal in Edgewood commented in the spring that it was not clear whether any of her outstanding programs--developed collaboratively with the university--would be in place in the fall, after the next move in the ever-shifting Texas school finance case. A top performer in the university's post-masters leadership program, she could earn $10,000 more a year working in a school across the street, in the San Antonio district. Funding equity issues have a critical impact on programs for LEP students and their teachers, among others.
In too many places, bilingual or ESL training programs appear to have prospered in part because qualified essential staff have sacrificed career advancement, job security, or financial advantage to keep them going. Although LEP students have always accounted for a significant part of public school enrollments and their numbers are now growing more rapidly, programs serving them are often funded on soft money for short periods. The need for expertise in teaching LEP students is permanent, but financial support is temporary and programs are seldom institutionalized. Such working conditions discourage career commitment.
Inviting family members to professional gatherings and social events has also proven to be a useful recruiting strategy. Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and offspring have occasionally been so impressed with the value of the project to the individual and the community that they enroll in it themselves. In some cases, a cultural value that might have formerly been an obstacle to participation was transformed into an asset. For example, some hypothesized that in Hispanic communities, la familia--the close-knit extended family--might discourage young women from leaving a traditional homemaking role to go to college and then to work. Instead, in many cases the families have put their resources at the service of their women, providing childcare, helping with housework, and accepting regrets for family celebrations deferred on account of the demands of school assignments. La familia directed considerable resources toward a new form of nurturing.
On the other hand, projects primarily using ESL strategies to serve thinly scattered or very diverse language minority populations--particularly those that also suffer economic disadvantage--are especially vulnerable to corruption of their mission. It takes time and resources for teachers to acquire knowledge of new cultures, a repertoire of culturally sensitive and unambiguous teaching strategies, and materials that reflect diversity. Most teachers' energy is taken up by the familiar demands of the majority of students and families and the conventional routines and strategies that serve well in the mainstream. Few resources are available for investment in learning new approaches.
Consider, for example, the plight of teachers in California and Arizona: New state reform mandates have reshaped the regular curriculum, requiring coverage of new content and new approaches to instruction. Thus, a native English-speaking teacher may have already had to learn new content and methods, as well as adjust the way lessons are framed, to accommodate the different language and cultural resources of LEP students from one language minority group who have arrived during the past few years, perhaps from Mexico. But this year's immigrants may include Vietnamese and Russians--whose resources are quite different. Learning about them--their gifts, their needs--in order to include them actively makes another demand on scarce time. Establishing authentic contact with families may be difficult. In a bilingual setting, many cues remind teachers and students of the bonds created by their shared language. In a multilingual setting where the language of instruction is English, communication problems abound, making intimacy harder to establish and the temptation to stereotype and generalize psychologically compelling.
Parent education classes based on mainstream beliefs about the "proper" ways to raise children socially and support their academic success may contradict alternative minority cultural perspectives that are quite useful in their own fashion. In addition, some teachers and parents interviewed in this study found offensive the practice of schools offering advice to parents, under the apparent assumption that only a single model of childrearing is acceptable. Within the fabric of a particular culture, commonplace recommendations about shared parent-child activities or strategies for behavior management may not make sense. The forms of skilled and loving caretaking that are responsive to developmental needs and opportunities vary across cultures and contexts. Classes that advise adoption of practices well adapted to mainstream culture may not take into account important dimensions of an individual family's life. The classes themselves may set up unequal power relations between parents and teachers, rather than collaborations that build on the resources of families and schools.
Professional development projects aiming to cultivate both skill and insight among teachers and prospective teachers confront not only the challenges posed by competing goals, quality control, and institutionalization, but also the broad range of effects that projects exert on the communities they serve. The experiences of project personnel, their students, and their communities, coupled with the findings of research, suggest that policies set at local, state, and federal levels can and do have impacts on student success. The implications for policy are discussed in the final chapter.
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[Chapter 5 Policy Implications]