Full Report - Center for Collaborative Education

Language Learners (OELL) has attempted to identify
the sources of the problems of assessment and
placement as well as those related to the disparities
in academic outcomes found between ELL students
and their English proficient counterparts (OELL,
2009). The changes undertaken by the district
prior to the intervention of the U.S. Departments of
Justice and of Education are, in fact, documented
in the settlement agreement. They include: (1)
the re-assessment in SY2009 and SY2010 of over
7000 students who had been previously misassessed
or not assessed at all; (2) notification of
principals about the changes in staffing required
to comply with the needs of ELLs beginning in the
fall of 2010; (3) plans by each of the 135 schools
detailing how the needs of ELLs would be met; (4)
the provision of compensatory services in the form
of summer classes in Summer 2010 for students
who had not received services; (5) notification of
parents of new and reassessed LEP students about
the language status of their child, the programs
and services available to them, and the availability
of compensatory services; and (6) the development
of new High Intensity Literacy Training for students
with interrupted formal education (HILT-SIFE) and
SEI Multilingual and Language Specific programs.
In addition the district committed $10 million to improve
services to ELLs in SY2010 and SY2011 (U.S.
Department of Justice, 2010, pp. 7-8). By October
2010, the Boston School Committee named a Task
Force on English Learners with the charge to “improve
the academic achievement of students whose
first language is not English.” 4
Identifying Success in Schools and Programs
for English Language Learners in Boston Public
Schools, of which this report is one part, is a project
commissioned by the Boston Public Schools as
part of this process of change set in motion by the
intervention of the state and the federal governments
on behalf of Boston’s English language learners.
The project is being conducted at the request
of the Office for English Language Learners and is a
collaboration among this Office, the Mauricio Gastón
Institute for Latino Community Development
and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts
Boston, and the Center for Collaborative Education
in Boston.
The research aspect of this project entails two parts.
The first, contained in this report, is a quantitative
analysis of enrollment and educational outcomes
for Boston’s ELLs in SY2009 (with selected analyses
of trends between SY2006 and SY2009). This
analysis supports aspects of the required monitoring
of English language learner programs and provides
the district with the 2009 baseline that will support
its ongoing assessment of programmatic strengths
and weaknesses as it undertakes the brisk process
of improvement in the programs offered to English
language learners. The project also entails a close,
qualitative examination of the practices at four BPS
schools which are “beating the odds” in educating
ELLs. Detailed case studies of the four schools were
conducted: two of the schools performed substantially
above the level that would be predicted by
their demographic characteristics alone and two
showed recent, steady improvement in outcomes
controlling for any changes in student demographics.
These case studies appear in a companion
report entitled Learning from Consistently High
Performing and Improving Schools for English
Language Learners in Boston Public Schools.
This report begins with an explanation of the approach
taken to conduct the quantitative analysis,
followed by its findings regarding the enrollment
and demographics of students in different types of
programs and schools of different characteristics.
This is followed by a discussion of the educational
outcomes of LEP students that considers their demographic
characteristics, the characteristics of the
schools in which they are enrolled, and the types of
programs in which they participate.
Improving Educational Outcomes of English Language Learners in Schools and Programs in Boston Public Schools 3