LA TIMES: The suit accuses California of poor oversight and says the state must, by law, act to make sure students who are learning English are keeping pace academically with their peers.
By Howard Blume State officials are neglecting their legal obligation to ensure that students who are learning English are receiving an adequate and equal education, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the ACLU of Southern California and other advocates.
The focus of the litigation is a small school system near Fresno, but the legal implications are broader: The suit accuses the state of poor oversight and says it must, by law, act to make sure these students are keeping pace academically with their peers across California.
The suit claims that the Dinuba Unified School District in Tulare County uses a substandard curriculum to improve the lagging performance of students who have yet to master English.
For the last three years, children in Dinuba "have been subjected to a program … that lacks sound educational support [and] contradicts bedrock principles of how children learn language," according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Sacramento County Superior Court.
In Dinuba, first, second and third graders are removed from their regular classes and instead taught grammar, in English, at a level beyond even what native speakers are exposed to at that age, the suit claims. The result, it says, is that students are missing curriculum they could and should be learning while being drilled on material that is not appropriate.
In a statement, Dinuba Unified Supt. Joe A. Hernandez declined to comment on the substance of the lawsuit but said the district hoped to work with advocacy groups "in good faith to avoid costly and excessive litigation."
The district has described its approach as teaching English as though it were "a foreign language" through methods that "help students understand how English is constructed and used."
Dinuba's approach is uncommon but not unique, according to advocates. The best way to teach students learning English has been a subject of debate for decades. Students learning English in Dinuba score lower on state tests, but so do such students in other school systems.
Dinuba has about 6,150 students. About 30% are classified as learning English.
The state approved Dinuba's approach, according to the suit, which is a main reason the California Department of Education also is being sued.
"No state has a greater stake in the education of children who are learning English as a second language than California," where 23% of students are learning English, said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the Southern California ACLU. "Yet no state does a poorer job of educating [these] students to communicate and comprehend English."
The state Education Department has frequently taken a hands-off approach to enforcing many education code provisions, citing a lack of resources and deferring to local authorities.
The suit was filed on behalf of two unidentified students, their parents and five teachers. The legal team includes three regional ACLU offices and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, among others.
"It is unfortunate that the parties chose to file suit rather than making a good-faith effort to meet with state officials to address their concerns," said Paul Hefner, an Education Department spokesman. State Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and the department are "working hard to help districts meet the needs of English learners."
Torlakson issued a release Wednesday commending the gains of students learning English in a recent state assessment, saying that these students are "making important strides toward English-language fluency."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-schools-lawsuit-20120531,0,6752589.story

ASSOCIATED PRESS:
By Christina Hoag and Gosia Wozniacka
A group of teachers, parents and students sued a small Central Valley school district Wednesday, alleging its program to teach English to young elementary school children is ineffective and violates the students' constitutional rights. Three chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in California and other civil rights organizations filed the lawsuit against Dinuba Unified School District in Sacramento County Superior Court.
The lawsuit charges that Dinuba Unified uses a grammar-intense curriculum that is unproven for first- and second-grade children and is causing them to fall far behind in both English learning and in other academic skills.
That is a violation of the children's right to a fair and equal education under the California constitution, the suit said.
District Superintendent Jose Hernandez did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement on a district website, he states the program is a high priority for the district to improve students' English proficiency.
More than half the students in the 5,700-pupil district, located in an agricultural community south of Fresno, are English learners.
According to the suit, the method known as Second Language Acquisition Development Instruction calls for the young students to deconstruct sentences and memorize formal parts of speech before they have even acquired basic reading skills.
Teachers have repeatedly complained to administrators that this method is inappropriate for young children, said Nona Rhea, a third-grade teacher who is one of four teacher plaintiffs in the suit.
"Day after day, when every minute counts, these kids are memorizing parts of speech, what a modal verb is, or diagraming sentences, when they should have been in the classroom with their peers learning how to read," said Rhea, who taught the method to first and third graders. "It's just been frustrating to see this experiment on these kids that has dire results."
Children suffer in their scores and even their attitudes, Rhea said.
"We don't see that much improvement," she said. "We might see the children able to repeat by rote back to us, but we see no correlation in improved reading."
Teachers are not allowed to have students read books, and instead use flashcards to teach which words are prepositions, nouns and verbs, said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California.
During the second half of the school year, students are moved into the regular reading curriculum, but are lost because they have had no reading instruction, the suit said. Students also have little opportunity to mingle with English speakers, according to the suit.
Last month, teachers voted formally to oppose the program. "I see the lawsuit as a last resort," Rhea said.
Rosenbaum said he does not know of any other district using the method, which Dinuba Unified cleared with the state Department of Education, also named as a defendant. A department spokesperson said officials had not yet seen the suit and could not comment.
"These kids are not getting anything close to an equal education," Rosenbaum said.
Since Dinuba implemented the method, the district's progress in English proficiency levels has dropped, the lawsuit said. In 2009, four out of five elementary schools met state English proficiency progress goals, only one school made the goal last year.
The suit aims to force the district to replace the program with a proven, pedagogical method. The current curriculum "should be placed in a receptacle never to resurface," Rosenbaum said.
The lawsuit reflects the latest move in a growing wave of criticism leveled against English-language instruction in California schools, which house the highest number of English learners in the nation — 1.6 million students who are mostly Spanish speakers.
Only 11 percent of them achieved proficiency levels in English in the last school year. About a third drop out of school. Only 13 percent go on to college.
Last fall, the U.S. Department of Education found that California's largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, was violating students' rights by failing to provide an adequate English program.
LAUSD is now overhauling its English learner curriculum, the largest in the country with some 200,000 students.
State legislators have also earmarked English learning with several bills designed to improve the quality of instruction. The state Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that would reform the system schools use to move English learners into regular classes.
"Our current system of education English learners is too often an afterthought," said state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima.
Dinuba teachers said they hoped the district would not only stop using the method for its youngest students, but also help students who were enrolled in previous years to get back on track.
"I feel like it's my moral duty to do something," Rhea said. "There's been three years of this already, and I hope the kids can get some kind of additional help to make up for the harm that's been done and get them at grade level."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/30/state/n121705D77.DTL