Bilingual education in Evanston schools — which survived budget cuts this year — will face scrutiny again.
The programs used at Evanston/Skokie School District 65 will be evaluated at tonight’s school board meeting and could possibly be changing course. The evaluation is part of the district’s ongoing program to reach Spanish-speaking students at elementary and middle schools.
“For the past year, the Bilingual Education Committee has been looking at the best way we should be approaching bilingual education,” said Betsy Sagan, a school board member.
The committee will present its report on the two programs currently provided by the district. The board requested the report when considering budget cuts.
The $76.1 million budget was passed in September. Although it is expensive to have two programs, the board did not want to cut the programs prematurely, said Mary Erickson, school board vice president.
The traditional program, Transitional Bilingual Education, pulls Spanish-speaking children from classrooms and focuses on teaching them English.
The newer program, Two-Way Immersion, has been in place for three years and takes the opposite approach. It creates a mixed classroom of 12 Spanish-speaking students and 12 English-speaking students. The teachers of these classes speak Spanish for most of the day, and the goal is to teach students both English and Spanish.
Erickson said it seems, from the results, the traditional approach is not working. She said the immersion program has “a lot of promise,” but it is expensive and some Spanish-speaking parents do not want their children placed in the program.
But Erickson said tonight the board primarily will discuss the “philosophical aspects” of the committee’s findings and defer decisions on the programs until January, she said.
The school board also will consider the performance of its reading programs after receiving reports from two studies it commissioned.
“I think this is really critical information the board is receiving about the district’s reading programs,” said Greg Klaiber, a school board member. “Whether or not we’re going to allocate funds for these programs depends on whether they’re effective or not.”
The reports came from separate research by Prof. Fred Hess, the director of Northwestern’s Center for Urban School Policy, and Prof. Patricia Edwards from Michigan State University.
Hess and Edwards approached the issue differently, Erickson said.
Erickson said Hess’ research was more school-oriented than program-oriented and focused more on statistical data than Edwards’ research, which utilized a lot of anecdotal observation for her report.
Erickson said the board’s goal for evaluating the program reports is to piece the information together and find the “common threads.”
Both Erickson and Klaiber said they were interested by Hess’ finding that in certain schools and with certain teachers, students — even ones from low-income families — were succeeding and doing better than the national average.
“We need to see what’s working at these schools and replicate it at other schools,” Klaiber said.
He also said the programs’ futures partly depends on discussion with the school administration.
“The question is, where do we go from here?” Klaiber said. “Do we make changes? Do we continue these programs or not? That’s what the superintendent has to bring to the table.”
