Analysis: Arizona Is the Worst State in the Nation in Serving Students Still Learning English

Amaya Garica wrote for The 74 Million about Arizona and its lack of support for English Language Learners:

Remember that kid who always got in trouble at school? The one who never listened to the teacher and struggled to follow the rules? Well, when it comes to English language learners — students who come from households where English is not the primary language spoken — Arizona has reliably been America’s chief troublemaker. (Some quick backstory here, here and here). Just how bad have things gotten? The federal government has started taking action against the state. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division (DOJ) reached a settlement with the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) to begin properly identifying and exiting students from special English learner services.

The settlement is just the latest development in a story that dates back to (at least) 2010. That year, OCR and DOJ began an investigation into a complaint against ADE alleging that, starting in the 2006 school year, “thousands of ELL students are being reclassified as ‘proficient’ in English when test results indicate that they are not in fact proficient in English.” Specifically, the complaint stated that these errors were due to: 1) the state’s reliance on the Stanford English Language Proficiency (SELP) test and, later,  the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment (AZELLA) test as the only criteria used to reclassify ELL students; and 2) faulty scoring procedures that resulted in students being identified as proficient even when they weren’t.

The OCR and DOJ’s investigation found the allegations to be true. They worked with an expert psychometrician to examine data of tens of thousands of students and found that “the AZELLA fails to identify all ELL students, prematurely exits ELL students, and is not a valid measure of English language proficiency and readiness to exit the ELL program.” As a result, ADE was cited for being out of compliance with Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin) and the Equal Education Opportunities Act of 1974 (which guarantees ELL student’s rights to language services to help ensure their equal participation in educational programs).

***