Promise or Peril? NCLB and the Education of ELL Students

Abstract

This report describes the implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in school districts and schools with large enrollments of English language learners (ELLs) and immigrant students. The study, part of a series on the education of young immigrant students, documents how this landmark legislation in education policy played out in three high-ELL districts and six schools and traces the law’s effect on the education of ELL students attending these schools. The research, which takes a case study approach, addresses the following questions: 1) How has NCLB been implemented in high-ELL schools? 2) What has been the effect of NCLB on the improvement of high-ELL schools? and 3) What has been the effect of NCLB on ELL students in high-ELL schools? The findings reveal that, while implementation of NCLB in high-LEP schools has resulted in some problems for ELL students’ education, the net effect of the law has been positive because it has increased attention paid to ELL students; increased the alignment of curriculum, instruction, professional development, and testing; and raised the bar for ELL student achievement.

Introduction

Since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in January of 2002, there have been attempts to document how the requirements of this legislation have affected policies and practices in schools and school districts. There has, however, been little attention paid thus far to the way that NCLB has affected educational practices for limited English proficient students (LEPs) or English language learners (ELLs) (Lara 2005). And discussion of how NCLB may have indirectly affected pre-K education has been missing from the research literature on this important legislation.

ELLs are likely to be immigrants or the children of immigrants, whether second or even third generation, as has been found by other research in this series (Capps et al. 2005). Because of the lack of data to identify students in U.S. schools by immigrant status, we have used ELL status as a proxy for immigrant status, while recognizing that these terms are not perfectly interchangeable. The proportion of the U.S. school-age population comprised of children of immigrants has risen sharply from 6 percent in 1970 to almost 19 percent in 2000 (Capps et al. 2005). The share of LEP students also rose during this period to make up 7 percent and 5 percent, respectively, of U.S. elementary and secondary schools, with a higher percentage of these students enrolled in the earlier years. About 52.6 percent of all LEP students were enrolled in pre-K to 5th grade compared to 47.4 percent enrolled in grades 6–12 (Fix and Passel 2003). While schoolage children of immigrants were highly concentrated in six states (California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey), their numbers grew even more rapidly in states that have not traditionally received immigrants: Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nebraska. LEP students showed a similar state distribution and growth trends (Capps et al. 2005).