The Boise School District's annual ELL awards night is May 8 at Borah High School's auditorium. The ceremony will feature student talent, such as a Korean dance group and African drummers, and will recognize individual students for their achievements.
The ceremony starts at 6 p.m.
Maryam Rahmatillayeva, a usually cheerful fifth-grader from Uzbekistan, knows how to use a computer mouse and can read some English. But the question she faced recently on a practice Idaho Standards Achievement Test in math stumped her nonetheless.
"Which is the best estimate of how long a basketball game lasts?" was the query, written on a computer screen and intoned by the computer's mechanical voice. The possible answers: one minute, one hour, 10 minutes, 10 hours.
Maryam didn't know.
"I not play basketball," she said. She frowned at the screen for a while and then made a guess so she could move on to the next question. She picked 10 minutes.
"I not like," she said, putting her head in her hands and sighing.
Of the Boise School District's 25,000 students, about 3,350 arrived at school speaking a language other than English at home. These English language learners, as they're known, come from 100 countries as varied as Burma, Iraq and Mexico, and speak 95 languages.
Almost 500 of those ELL students arrived in the United States in the last year, many of them as refugees. They're just learning to speak English, but they're sitting down to the same standardized tests as their fluent peers. Often, they can't even understand the instructions. Their poor performance on the ISATs damages the total scores of their schools.
As the district absorbs those students, its schools struggle to help the new arrivals learn what they need for the ISATs so the schools won't be labeled as "failing" and be punished under the rules of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Spring is when Idaho students take the ISATs in reading, math and language usage. Besides measuring performance under the No Child law, ISATs are used by state and local officials to judge how well schools are teaching children the basics. And some parents use the scores as a measure of a school's quality when deciding where to send their children.
Testing started April 15 at Lowell Elementary School, a century-old brick schoolhouse at 28th and State streets in Boise's North End.
For about two-thirds of Lowell's students, the ISATs are fairly straightforward, a routine they've been through before. Lowell draws its students from a mix of local neighborhoods. About 55 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, allowing Lowell to receive extra federal money to help students who start school less prepared than their better-off peers.
Even disadvantaged U.S.-born students can read the questions and select the answers from a short list offered. They can use the mouse to move through each of the one-hour segments in reading, math and language.
STUDENTS FROM REFUGEE CAMPS: 'NO SCHOOL, NO CLOTHES, NO FOOD'
But Lowell, like 10 other elementary schools in Boise, is also a designated gathering place for the students who speak little or no English, many of them refugees. Of 331 students at Lowell, 115, or one-third, speak a language other than English at home. Students at Lowell come from Iraq, from several African countries, from Burma, Afghanistan, Mexico, and from former Soviet republics.
Many of them arrived at Lowell from refugee camps where there were no computers and no standardized tests. For some, there wasn't even any school.
"No school, no clothes, no food," said Maria, 12, who moved to Boise from Congo in west-central Africa.
For those students, the tests can be mystifying. Even the math portion - the only part of the test that is counted for the brand-new arrivals to the United States - contains complex terms like "coordinates," "symmetry" and "mode."
One question on a practice test some Lowell children took last month concerns a Mr. Chin and his basketball team. Mr. Chin bought pizzas at $8 each, and spent $88. Test-takers are asked how many pizzas Mr. Chin bought. A 12-year-old boy from Tanzania who was taking a practice test knew what pizza was, but he didn't understand what he was being asked. The spooky computerized voice didn't clear things up for him. Expressionlessly, he took a wild guess and went on to the next question. Clicking through the test that way, he finished quickly without answering a single question correctly.
THE PROBLEM: ISATS DON'T FIT THESE STUDENTS
Some Boise teachers have been seeing this struggle for years now. For them, it illustrates the limits of using the ISAT to assess how well schools, teachers and administrators are doing - and the danger of state schools Superintendent Tom Luna's plan to give bonuses to teachers based in part on test scores.
"We're spending a lot of time and money on the test, and we don't get the information we need," said Megan Jones, an English language learners specialist for the school district who did her doctoral thesis on refugee education.
Jones works all day with groups of newcomers in her classroom, a portable building outside Lowell, to help them learn how to fit into regular classrooms and to prepare them for standardized tests.
Jones doesn't mind the tests themselves.
"Every kid should know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide," she said. But she thinks it's unfair and illogical to include children who barely speak English at testing time, and she's sorry to see the stress it puts on the kids.
The kids don't complain, but "they shut down," said Jones. "The kids are very polite; they want to do well. They become kind of rigid and tense."
SCHOOLS ABSORB BOISE'S NEW ARRIVALS
New non-English-speaking students do not automatically attend whatever school is closest. Instead, at the elementary level, the district directs them to one of 11 schools that have extra staff trained to help them learn English and function in a regular classroom.
Junior high and high school English language learners attend Riverglen Junior High this year but will move to a separate language academy at what is now Jackson Elementary School next year. Jackson's students are moving to a new school.
The skills of the new arrivals are as varied as the countries they come from. Some of the children's parents are professionals with good job skills. Others, who may have spent a generation in a refugee camp, have had little or no formal schooling.
Health and other problems hinder refugees, too. Jones remembers one Lowell student from Africa who, while in Boise, suffered an untreated burst appendix for several months. She missed a lot of school and learned little.
Asked what they like to do after school, a handful of 12-year-old girls couldn't think of a single thing.
But all said they cook, do housework and take care of their siblings.
NEWCOMERS TAKE THE TESTS, READY OR NOT
Whatever their story, all of the new arrivals have to take the ISATs. Only the math score is counted in their first year at school. But as the experience of the Lowell students shows, the math test requires a good understanding of English. Thus, even the math test is out of reach for someone whose English is shaky, who has never received a formal education, or has received that education in a language like Burmese, with its very different written characters.
"People think that math is an international language; it's not," Jones said.
The result is that schools like Lowell, which gather foreign students from all around Northwest Boise, show disproportionately poor ISAT scores. That can turn off parents and taxpayers. Lowell failed to show adequate yearly progress on its ISATs last year, so under the rules that accompany the federal No Child Left Behind law, the school could face punishment, such as eventually having its principal replaced.
As required by the law, Lowell parents got a letter last summer informing them of Lowell's performance and notifying them the district would pay for transportation if they chose to move their children to another school. Not one of Lowell's students took the district up on that offer, said Principal Paula Bell.
This year, Luna proposed a plan to link schools' ISAT performance to teacher pay bonuses. Lawmakers rejected his plan, but a task force convened by Luna this spring will look at teacher performance evaluations again. For now, ISAT scores are the best measure available to Idaho policymakers who want to reward the best teachers and schools, Luna said.
"If you're using (the ISAT) to show how much growth a child is accomplishing from one year to the next, then I think it is a good indicator as to how well the school and the teacher have done with that child academically over that year," he said.
'WE'RE A UNITED NATIONS ELEMENTARY'
Bell still loves working at Lowell, but she's annoyed that her school's standardized test scores don't reflect the hard work her staff is doing to get the children up to par with their native English-speaking peers.
"When you've got 23 languages, and everybody is at a different language immersion level, and then you pile on top of that trauma from refugee camps, it's not easy," Bell said.
She doesn't think teachers would leave Lowell in hope of bonuses at higher-performing schools.
"They love it here because they have a heart for these kids," she said. "To me, we're a hidden gem. We're a United Nations elementary. There are many of us in the Boise district."
Anne Wallace Allen: 377-6433
