Federal

Boston Settles With Federal Officials in ELL Probe

By Mary Ann Zehr — October 01, 2010 5 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

The U.S. departments of Justice and Education reached a settlement agreement today on how the Boston public school system will fix violations of the civil rights of English-language learners.

Since 2003, the Boston district “has failed to properly identify and adequately serve thousands of English Language Learner (ELL) students as required by the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the Justice Department said in a press release issued Oct. 1. The school district cooperated with a joint investigation by the two federal departments into those violations.

The 44-page agreement requires that, starting this school year, all of Boston’s 135 schools provide services to English-language learners, even if the schools don’t have large numbers of such students, something that wasn’t happening before. It also includes a mandate that the district offer “compensatory services” to students who previously had been deemed as “opting out” of language services that they were entitled to receive under federal law. Those make-up services will be offered during out-of-school hours—including after school, during summer, and on Saturdays—to make up for the ELL help that students should have gotten but didn’t.

The Boston settlement agreement is the result of one of 15 investigations into ELL programs at school districts that the Justice Department has opened since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009.

One way that the federal agencies have found the Boston district to be in violation of federal law is that the district inappropriately categorized many students as having “opted out” of language support.

Carol Johnson, the schools superintendent in Boston, where 28 percent of the district’s 56,000 students are ELLs, said in an interview today that the school system has been hard at work for a year in trying to bring its schools into compliance with federal civil rights law. The effort has involved training some 2,000 teachers in how to work with English-learners, retesting 7,000 students in their English skills, and mapping out plans to accelerate the learning of ELLs who should have previously gotten services but didn’t.

“We had to be fairly aggressive in our planning. We looked school by school at who was being served and who wasn’t,” Ms. Johnson said.

‘Comprehensive’ Settlement

The district has agreed to spend $10 million on improving ELL services, an expenditure that began last school year and will continue this school year. About $8.2 million of that money is being supplied by the American Recovery and Investment Act, the 2009 federal economic-stimulus legislation.

Roger L. Rice, the executive director of Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy of Somerville, Mass., praised the agreement as being “comprehensive,” compared with other settlement agreements on ELL services that have had the stamp of the Justice Department.

But he said he wasn’t satisfied with the extent of the compensatory services required of the Boston district. Those services should be provided during the regular school day, he said. Mr. Rice observed that many ELLs are obligated to get jobs or babysit to help support their families, and that those duties will compete with their ability to make up the services during out-of-school hours.

In addition, he said, it seems that the compensatory services “are not instructionally linked to what goes on during the school year.”

But Eileen De Los Reyes, Boston’s assistant superintendent for English-language learners, said that ELLs have already responded well to the district’s offerings on Saturdays and during the summer. “What I would not want to do is disrupt their day more,” she said. “They need to participate in the life of the school.”

She also stressed that the students eligible for the makeup services are already getting ELL services and academic-content classes tailored to their needs during the school day. The makeup services are also connected with what ELLs learn during the school day because the district provides the materials and teachers for them, she added.

The agreement doesn’t give a number for how many students are eligible for the makeup services. But Ms. De Los Reyes said 4,000 students who were found to be inappropriately categorized as having opted out of services are eligible, as well as 4,300 students who hadn’t been properly identified as ELLs because of testing issues.

Another important area of the agreement refers to the quality of services given to students at the secondary school level, which Mr. Rice describes as having been “horrible” in the past.

Spelling It Out

The agreement requires that ELLs be taught core academic content by teachers who use “sheltered-content instructional techniques,” or teaching methods tailored for such students. Examples of approaches “to make lessons understandable” for ELLs include grouping students by language-proficiency level, adapting materials and texts, providing visuals, giving native-language support or clarification, and facilitating students’ ability to work cooperatively, the agreement says. In addition, the agreement specifies that those sheltered classes be taught by either certified English-as-a-second-language teachers or teachers who have received a minimum level of training in ELL strategies, which Ms. De Los Reyes said is 70 hours.

The agreement says that, by December, all core-content instruction should be provided by teachers certified in the content area and adequately trained to work with ELLs.

The federal scrutiny isn’t the only effort highlighting problems with services to ELLs in Boston’s schools. In 2008, a state review of the school system’s ELL programs said educators told parents to opt out if programs were full or if they chose to send their children to schools that didn’t have ELL programs. A report last year by the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, found that the district wasn’t properly assessing and identifying many students as ELLs.

In May 2009, the Boston district hired Ms. De Los Reyes and charged her with addressing the lack of services to ELLs that were featured in the 2008 state review.

She said the settlement agreement was the result of a strong collaboration with the Justice and Education departments. “The agreement is a continuation of what we were already doing this past year,” she said.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the October 13, 2010 edition of Education Week

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Classroom Technology Webinar
How to Leverage Virtual Learning: Preparing Students for the Future
Hear from an expert panel how best to leverage virtual learning in your district to achieve your goals.
Content provided by Class
English-Language Learners Webinar AI and English Learners: What Teachers Need to Know
Explore the role of AI in multilingual education and its potential limitations.
Education Webinar The K-12 Leader: Data and Insights Every Marketer Needs to Know
Which topics are capturing the attention of district and school leaders? Discover how to align your content with the topics your target audience cares about most. 

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Federal Biden Credits School Shooting Survivors as He Creates Gun Violence Prevention Office
President Biden announced the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, fulfilling a long-time goal of school shooting survivors.
5 min read
President Joe Biden speaks about gun safety on Sept. 22, 2023, from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., applauds at left.
President Joe Biden speaks about gun safety on Sept. 22, 2023, from the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., applauds at left.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Federal A Flood of Public Feedback Has Delayed a Title IX Change Covering Trans Athletes—Again
The Biden administration has not taken the final step to adopt long-awaited Title IX changes that would explicitly protect LGBTQ+ students.
5 min read
Isaya S. waves out the window of a Seattle Public Schools bus while participating in the annual Seattle Pride Parade on June 25, 2023, in Seattle.
Isaya S. waves out the window of a Seattle Public Schools bus while participating in the annual Seattle Pride Parade on June 25, 2023, in Seattle.
Lindsey Wasson/AP
Federal Is Funding for School Archery and Hunting Programs Really at Risk?
A U.S. Department of Education document led to confusion among school administrators about funding for archery and hunting programs.
4 min read
Students participate in a school archery program. A group of congressional lawmakers are working to amend federal law to ensure schools can purchase bow and arrows and other supplies for archery, sharp shooting, and hunting programs in schools.
Students participate in a school archery program. A group of congressional lawmakers are working to amend federal law to ensure schools can purchase bow and arrows and other supplies for school archery, sharp shooting, and hunting programs with federal education funds.
Courtesy of the National Archery in the Schools Program
Federal A Senate Committee Takes Up School Book Wars, Complete With Sharp Partisan Divisions
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "book bans" included one Republican senator reading sexually explicit passages.
4 min read
Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois secretary of state, talks with Chairman Richard Durbin, D-Ill., right, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature," in Hart Building on Tuesday, September 12, 2023.
Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois secretary of state, talks with Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., right, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature," on Sept. 12, 2023.
Tom Williams/AP