Brother Sticks Head in Language-Education Hornet's Nest

Last week I posted my brother Alan Gottlieb's TV news appearance, announcing the results of a major new study he'd helped commission of poor and Hispanic kids' performance in different Denver Public Schools settings.  One thing the study revealed was that kids in majority-Hispanic schools, where they're federally mandated to receive instruction in Spanish and transition gradually to English, didn't learn English as well as kids in economically integrated schools where they had to learn in English from day one.  There are a number of reasons why that might be so -- as Ally was careful to state -- but one possibility is that teaching immigrant kids in their own language retards their English-learning -- as Ally dared to mention.

Now Ally's in the soup.  The researchers are mad at him, the right is gloating and the left is steaming.   From the e-newsletter (subscription free) sent out by his online magazine, HeadFirst, and edublog Schools for Tomorrow (I can't find this content online yet, so I'm posting it here):

Last week, HeadFirst Colorado released a long-awaited study on the effects of socio-economic school integration on Denver Public Schools. As a former newspaper journalist, I knew the study was newsworthy and would garner some coverage. The amount of coverage and its intensity, however, caught me a bit off guard.

Most media accounts were fair and responsible. Unfortunately, the top-notch researchers who conducted the study, people for whom I have the utmost respect, felt I played fast and loose with their findings.  In their view, I treated their research irresponsibly, and drew conclusions not supported by the study. You can read their detailed objections in the article below.

To put it mildly, I feel a bit conflicted. On the one hand, I’ll freely acknowledge that the article I wrote for Headfirst contained a finding that I came up with on my own, and that was not included in their research study. This finding centered on the fact (which, by the way, no one disputes), that the high-poverty schools where, according to the study, students learning English perform badly, are, for the most part, schools that operate under the court-ordered DPS English Language Acquisition (ELA) program.

What that means is that Spanish-speaking children in those schools are taught in their native language and gradually moved, over the course of three years, into English. The lower-poverty schools where students learning English perform better are not, for the most part, under the ELA program. There, students learn in English from day one.

I went to great lengths to explain, in writing and in interviews, that this finding does not mean that Spanish-speaking students should be immersed in English from their first day of school. It makes no judgment one way or another on the merits of bilingual education.

What the finding does suggest, however, is that something about Denver’s ELA program is not working for large numbers of children. There are, as I wrote last week, many possible explanations for this. Spanish-language instruction is one possible explanation. So is teacher quality, teacher qualifications (DPS has eternally struggled to find enough qualified bilingual teachers), and the breadth and depth of the ELA curriculum. The finding merits further study.

So here’s where my conflicted feeling comes in. On the one hand, I feel badly that I angered the researchers, whose work is beyond reproach, and whose study, even without my added detonator of a finding, is provocative and fascinating. On the other hand, as a journalist and a public education advocate, it would have been irresponsible of me not to point out the possible connection between low performance and the ELA program.

In hindsight, I should have made it clear that the portion of my article that dealt with the ELA program was based on my own investigation, rather than the research study. I’m sorry I didn’t do that.

But I also have to admit to a certain frustration with the academic researchers’ insistence on keeping their study hermetically sealed. Is there really anything so wrong about taking the findings of a methodologically complex and sophisticated study and extrapolating to confront a relevant, real-world situation?

Make no mistake: I loathe politically-motivated and biased research. There seems to be a suggestion in the researchers’ reaction that I somehow stepped over that line. If that’s how they feel, I take umbrage.  True, commentators and talk-show hosts on the right have taken what I wrote about the study and leapt to some predictable, unsupported and tired conclusions about English immersion. That was bound to happen.

On the other side of the coin, bilingual education advocates on the left have, in some instances, stopped just short of accusing me of being Tom Tancredo’s blood-brother. (As a side note, when I worked at The Piton Foundation (1997-2007), I was a leading advocate for dual-immersion programs, in which English- and Spanish-speaking students become fluently bilingual by the end of fifth grade. I either funded or helped launch such programs at two DPS schools.)

The fact that ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum will twist almost anything to serve their ends should not prevent researchers, journalists and other interested parties from tackling these contentious issues head-on.

--Alan Gottlieb

And the researchers' objection:

Headfirst article took liberties with our study

By Pam Buckley
The Piton Foundation

This past week, my colleagues from CU-Boulder and I received numerous emails and phone calls from peers and strangers expressing their interest in the study on economic integration conducted in collaboration with Denver Public Schools. This article serves to clarify our research.

We did not set out to evaluate the district’s ELA programs. We controlled for ELL students because this is an important sub-population given the district’s federal court order to track the academic progress of this growing number of students. Conjectures made by Alan about ELA program quality and instruction based on our study, however, are highly premature and would require a completely different statistical model than the one we used.

To explore instructional program effects would include reviewing areas such as, but not limited to, understanding the different ELA program models deployed throughout the district, understanding the language background (e.g. such as the degree of native language fluency) of students designated as ELA, reviewing qualifications of teachers to teach in ELA programs, and understanding whether adequate resources are being allocated by the district to support the needs of ELA students in schools that have a large contingent of ELLs in the population.

Making a public statement that the lower achievement of ELLs in high poverty schools is largely attributed to language instruction based on our exploratory study (which was restricted to reviewing performance of students as a function of school poverty) is highly misleading to the general public.

The research did raise interesting questions around implementation of the district’s ELA program, and I do believe our findings merit further study.

Wheee!  Al, you having fun yet?

(Those of you who enjoy fighting over education, I strongly suggest you read this magazine and blog -- subtitled "Education on the Edge," they showcase a wide spectrum of often contentious and contending opinions.)

Comments

[Internet Ronin]

Excellent explanation by Alan. Too bad most talking about this will never get around to reading it. Sounds to me like Buckley & Co. do not really deny Alan's conclusion, just that it is "premature" and that their study "raised interesting questions." I'm cynical enough to believe that, were their study no longer hermetically sealed, Alan's conclusions would seem all the more appropriate, but campus politics will prevent that.

[Pastor_Jeff]

Yes, Alan's conclusions and caveats seem reasonable. And of course people on both ends will read the study how they want.

The really interesting thing is the ivory-tower approach of the researchers who don't want anyone to draw real-world conclusions from their research. I do know something about statistical research. I also know a little about researchers: they put enough caveats on the study to keep you from drawing reasonable conclusions in hopes that you'll fund a further study (or two).

I had a former colleague who often warned about the fallacy of perfect knowledge. You can get a pretty good answer pretty easily. The temptation is to keep doing more research to get better answers. How much time and money will that information cost, and will it really help you make a better decision that the imperfect data you have now? It's a good reminder for all sorts of decision-making -- business, purchase decisions, even relationships. You can drive yourself crazy always looking for that elusive piece of data which will answer all your questions. Trouble is, it doesn't exist.

This study surely suggests more research is needed. But then again, researchers always think that :)

[amba]

A friend of mine is starting a foundation so that his family's painstakingly amassed wealth will have a chance to do some good in the world. He has worked with academics, hoping that the economic theory called "the new institutional economics" could help to define fruitful vs. futile places to place your philanthropic bets so that people wouldn't pour time and money into sinkholes of corruption, with everything they gave ending up in e.g. a Mugabe's Swiss bank account.

It turned out the academics always said, We're not ready, we don't understand enough yet. My friend feels much more compatible with engineers, who operate in just the opposite way: they can't wait till they know everything (which is never) to do something practical, and they believe action is the best way to learn. They proceed on imperfect knowledge and a lot of intuition, a feel for things. And they often know what will work without fully knowing why.

[Ally]

Yeah, I am having fun. I live for this sh**. I long ago decided that if I'm not stirring the pot, I'm not doing anything. That's why I had to leave the worlds of mainstream journalism and foundations. I'm feeling liberated -- until, that is, I can't find anyone to fund my work...

[Dan]

I strongly oppose bi-lingual education. My reasons are based on evidence that is anecdotal but the conclusion that I draw from this evidence seems irrefutable: that the best way for children to learn English is total immersion, without using their native language as a life rope.

My father went to kindergarten not knowing a single word of English. He became a successful surgeon. He considers English his mother language.

My children went to pre-school with a child who, at the beginning of the year, knew not a single word of English. By the end of the year the kid's English was normal. You couldn't distinguish the way he spoke from the way American kids his age speak.

Thus, from what I have seen, a child learns a foreign language within a year when immersed in it. At the entry level -- i.e., pre-school or kindergarten -- there's not a lot to fall behind to and continuing to teach them in their native language can serve only to retard the process of learning English. It is insane to be teaching these young children in their native languages.

In California they abolished bi-lingual education some years ago. I know first hand that Spanish-speaking Hispanic kids who have started school since bi-lingual education was eliminated all speak English normally. Are they behind relative where they would be if they had received bi-lingual education? I am convinced that the opposite is true.

[Lisa]

No disrespect, but "possible connection between low performance and the ELA program" is simply not quite sufficient for publication. There is an equally, if not more, possible connection between performance and family income, parents' educational level, social background, quality of after-school child care, etc. Most probably, all of these factor come into play, and singling out one of them does more harm than good to the quality of the debate on bilingual education.