Supreme Court says AZ spends enough to teach English

Do federal courts need to intervene to make sure students in Arizona learn English quickly enough to succeed in school?

On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court said “no” in the case Horne v. Flores. In a 5-4 vote, the court reversed the judgment of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and overturned a district court order for the state to spend more to help its English Language Learners (ELLs).

The case originated in Nogales in 1992, when parent Miriam Flores filed suit against the state on behalf of her daughter, also named Miriam. Flores said that the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) provided “inadequate ELL instruction in the Nogales Unified School District (NUSD) in violation of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (EEOA), which requires states to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers in schools,” according to the court syllabus.

At the time, ADE allocated $150 extra per year for each ELL student, said Ana Doan Woolfolk, bilingual education director at NUSD from 1990 to 2000. The district spent its own funds to train teachers and buy materials to help the English learners, she said.

But Arizona school districts have come a long way since then, said Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction, who was pleased with the ruling.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has taken a major step to stop federal district judges from micromanaging the state’s education systems,” Horne said.

“In the last two years, the state more than doubled the percentage of (ELL) students reclassified as English proficient from 12 percent to 28.6 percent,” Horne said in a news release. “This is a result of a new program of four hours of intensive English instruction per day, implemented two years ago.”

The four-hour model was not required until the 2008-2009 school year, but “a lot of school districts were moving in that direction (in 2007-2008),” Horne said in an interview.

Angel Canto, school improvement coordinator at NUSD, said the Nogales schools began the four-hour model in fall 2008. By late June, she had not yet received the local reclassification rates for the 2008-2009 school year, she said. But Horne said the ADE’s English language acquisition department had the results.

Canto attributes some of the increase to testing of kindergarten students.

“All districts saw a large jump in reclassification rates because kindergartners were assessed in the spring 2008 as well as the fall,” Canto said. “(Before), you wouldn’t assess kinders until the end of first grade.”

Tim Hogan, attorney for Flores and other Nogales parents since 1996, said he would take a close look at the four-hour model to see if it is “effective in teaching kids English and maintaining their academic requirements.”

“If you teach them English all day, they’re not learning science and math,” Hogan said.

High school ELL students may not be able to complete their requirements in four years and may become discouraged and drop out, he said.

School districts are tracking ELL students better, but the test used to reclassify those students as English proficient “has changed three times in the past five years,” Hogan said. “Many people say the test has been ‘dumbed down’ so students reclassify more quickly.”

Hogan also questioned the increase in the reclassification rate that Horne described.

“That jump is related to kindergarten students,” he said. “It’s not attributed to the (four-hour) models.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion of the court, in which Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, joined. Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting opinion with justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg.

Alito asked the appeals court to look at four changes that affected NUSD in the 17 years since the case was filed.

1. After the 2000 order was entered, Arizona voters replaced bilingual education with “structured English immersion” (SEI). “Research and findings by the State Department of Education support the view that SEI is significantly more effective than bilingual education,” reads the court syllabus.

2. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which “provided evidence of the progress and achievement of Nogales’ ELL students through its assessment and reporting requirements,” according to the court document.

3. NUSD Superintendent Kelt Cooper reduced class sizes, improved student-teacher ratios, and improved the quality of teachers, the court said. “These reforms might have brought Nogales’ ELL programming into compliance with the EEOA even without sufficient ELL incremental funding to satisfy the District Court’s original order.”

4. All five sources of education funding increased in Nogales since 2000.

“Nogales students make up about one-half of 1 percent of the entire state’s school population,” Alito wrote. “The record contains no factual findings or evidence that any school district other than Nogales failed (much less continues to fail) to provide equal educational opportunities to ELL students.”

Alito said the District Court should not extend its injunction beyond Nogales unless it finds that Arizona is violating the EEOA on a statewide basis.

In his dissent, Breyer wrote that “the lower courts did ‘fairly consider’ every change in circumstances that the parties called to their attention.”

“How can the majority now decide that a school district �“ particularly a poor school district like Nogales �“ would be able to cover the additional expenses associated with English-learning education while simultaneously managing to provide for its students’ basic educational needs?” Breyer asked.