Teacher-Detectives

"It is important to [ ] both ways before you cross the street." Noelle Jaddaoui’s 1st- and 2nd-grade ESL class at Walker Elementary School in Skokie, Ill., knit their brows for a moment before hands begin to shoot up.

Kuong, a 1st-grader from Vietnam offers his answer tentatively: "Both?" Sitting next to him, Romeo, a 2nd-grader, also from Vietnam, shakes his head slightly: "Look." As if on cue, the 12 students erupt in a chorus of ding-ding-dings. This morning the class will add five new words to the Word Wall, a large, alphabetically arranged board at one end of the classroom.

Of the 12 students in Jaddaoui’s ESL class, three receive some form of special education services. Because they spend so much time with LEP (limited-English-proficient) students, ESL teachers are often the first to suspect that a student may need additional help.

When students struggle with language acquisition, a basic conundrum for ESL teachers is to disentangle language barriers from the learning process. In Jaddaoui’s words, it’s figuring out "which came first, the word or the thought of the word."

To solve that puzzle, a teacher has to be part educator and part detective, which is exactly what Andrea Ghetzler, director of the ESL program at Old Orchard Middle School (Skokie District 68), did in the case of a 6th-grader from Russia who struggled to learn English.

When she raised the issue during a parent-teacher conference, the child’s father told her the boy had experienced similar difficulty learning Russian. With that information, Ghetzler was able to call together the boy’s teachers and school support personnel to devise a plan that would bring together ESL and special education resources.

The district’s ESL department serves students with 42 different primary languages. Faced with this challenge, Skokie schools enlist community support. For students whose first language is Russian, for example, school administrators call on a Russian-speaking psychologist at the local Jewish community center.

Because Skokie and Evanston school districts are small enough, teachers, parents and counselors are able to respond fairly quickly when a student shows signs of difficulty. In Skokie/Evanston (joint) District 65, before a referral for special education testing can be made, a CARE (Child Action: Resource and Evaluation) team meets to discuss the student and the perceived problem.

CARE members may include a speech-language clinician, a school psychologist, a social worker, a learning-resource professional, the school principal and an ESL teacher. If the team decides that an assessment may be appropriate, they then consult with the child’s parents, who must give consent before an assessment can go forth

Beatrice Guttierez, a bilingual school psychologist in District 65, says that some school districts consider it easier to place students in special education classes than to address the underlying causes of a child’s learning difficulties. For Guttierez, though, there is a clear trade-off.

Although special education can provide important assistance, it makes for a more restrictive environment. Instead of placing students in special education programs, some students in Gutierrez’s district receive "related services" in a mainstream environment. These may include, for instance, an IEP (individual education plan) for speech and language, services from a social worker and counseling from a school psychologist.

In addition, a student who does not require the entire range of special education services might be a candidate for "resource services," which includes a limited number of hours each week with special education teachers.

At Senn High School in Chicago, more than 400 students receive ESL/bilingual service. According to Kathy Koshaba, who teaches ESL and directs the school’s Multicultural Resource Center, the latest school census identifies over 70 countries of origin and more than 50 primary languages spoken by its students.

Spanish is by far the most common language spoken by ESL students at Senn. Urdu and Vietnamese come in second and third. (Vietnamese used to be the second-most-common language, but the community has shrunk as immigration numbers dwindled.) Senn also has substantial numbers of Amharic-speaking students from Ethiopia and French-speaking students from Africa, as well as students from Bosnia, Indonesia and Kosovo.

Like their counterparts in Evanston and Skokie, Koshaba and her colleagues at Senn are acutely aware of the issues of disproportionate representation of language-minority students in special education. When a new immigrant student struggles in school, she points out, "it can be difficult to determine if it’s a case of culture shock, a language deficit or something else."

The stark contrast between urban Chicago and their home-countries (or communities) can cause some students to feel lonely and depressed, which affects their school performance.

In Chicago, teachers are required to keep "anecdotal records" for each student. If a student seems to be struggling academically or otherwise, school officials can turn to these records to look for potential causes.

The Office of Specialized Services (Chicago Public School system) has issued guidelines aimed at helping educators navigate the difficult straits. A resource manual covers every aspect of the referral process (ranging from student health issues to assessments of the child’s learning environment). It also outlines assessment procedures aimed at eliminating cultural biases.

Like every school district, Chicago faces the difficulty of recruiting qualified teachers to provide ESL and special education services. The city also faces a retention problem as teachers leave for the higher pay of suburban school districts.

Another challenge is the ebb and flow of populations. In a city as large and dynamic as Chicago, the movement of ethnic communities into and out of neighborhoods, and changing enrollments of different groups at area schools, creates new challenges for ESL and special education teachers, who must take into account the linguistic and cultural mosaic of the schools where they teach.