OC schools fall behind in fluency // 25% of students speak English a bit or not at all

DATE                  02/23/92
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               NEWS
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  a01
STORY LENGTH          25 INCHES
HEADLINE              OC schools fall behind in fluency // 25% of students 
                         speak English a bit or not at all
BYLINE/CREDIT          Dan Froomkin:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS          OC:SCHOOLS:LANGUAGE:STUDENTS:IMMIGRATION
 
     As recently as a few years ago, the fate of students with
  limited English skills may have seemed a minor issue in Orange
  County education.
     But last year, more than 14,000 students who speak little or no
  English streamed into Orange County's 27 school districts. Their
  number now totals about 100,000, or at least one-fourth of all
  county public school students.
     Three-fourths of the limited-English students speak Spanish as
  their native language. Other common languages are Vietnamese,
  Korean, Chinese and Cambodian. And there also are hundreds of
  students who speak one of about 40 other languages found in the
  county's schools.
     Orange County school administrators believe that they are doing
  as well as can be expected with those students. But when pressed,
  they agree that their schools could be doing more.
     Among the shortcomings they acknowledge:

   While one-fourth of Orange County students have limited English
  skills, only 3 percent of the county's teachers are bilingual and
  only 3 percent more have special training to teach English as a
  second language.

   As a result, some county students spend their whole day in classes
  where they barely understand a word.

   Many students get most of their instruction from an
  English-speaking teacher through a bilingual instructional aide.

   Many limited-English speakers lag far behind native
  English-speakers in standardized tests, and catching up takes years
  -- if it happens at all.

   Even the most motivated non-native English speakers -- those
  entering local colleges and universities -- are often found to have
  English skills so poor that they need intensive remedial help.

   Although language is not the only factor, the dropout rate for
  Hispanic students in Orange County is 10 percent from grades 10
  through 12, or three times the rate for white students.
     Orange County school administrators agree that the biggest
  reason limited-English students aren't achieving more success is
  that the county's teaching force has not kept up with the times.
     The county's teachers historically have spoken only English --
  and 97 percent of them still do.
     By the latest count, only 430 of the county's 16,000 teachers
  are bilingual. An additional 526 are trained as
  language-development specialists, which means they have learned
  special strategies to teach non-English speaking children.
     The Orange County Department of Education reports that at least
  2,000 more teachers are in training to join those two groups. But
  the vast majority of the graduates from teaching programs in the
  state's colleges and universities still speak English only and have
  no special bilingual training.
     "I think we're making progress," said David Brown,
  superintendent of the Irvine Unified School District and former
  president of the Association of California School Administrators.
  "But we're faced with numbers that are scary."
     Regardless of the particular approach -- be it bilingual or
  English-immersion -- Brown said the key is "making instruction
  understandable."
     And the lack of properly trained teachers -- countywide and
  statewide -- means that "too many kids do not receive understandable
  instruction," Brown said.
     Even bilingual instructional aides -- increasingly a mainstay of
  districts trying to get primary-language instruction to their
  immigrant students -- are sometimes hard to come by.
     "How we meet the need is not as well as I would like," said
  Anaheim City School District Superintendent Meliton Lopez, who is
  one of two Hispanic superintendents in the county. In his district,
  about half the students have limited English skills.
     "None of us have enough bilingual teachers," he said.
     In the Anaheim district, most classes with limited-English
  speaking students are led by a teacher who speaks only English.
  Generally, a bilingual instructional aide is also assigned to the
  classroom, but only for about three hours.
     But being taught through an aide is like "instead of seeing the
  doctor, the nurse takes care of you," Lopez said.
     "I think that if we had the trained teachers to do the job, we
  would get the results faster," he said.