Opinion ID: 3051186
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Policy Changes and Test Results

Text: Much of the improvement at NUSD stems from the suc- cessful management of Kelt Cooper, the district’s Superintendent from 2000 to 2005. His successor, Dr. Guilermo Zamudio, has largely sustained Cooper’s management policies. Despite the efforts of both superintendents, however, ELL students in Nogales continue to face serious challenges. Cooper, who took the helm at about the time the Declaratory Judgment issued, adopted policies that ameliorated or eliminated many of the most glaring inadequacies discussed by the district court at that time. Cooper was able to reduce class sizes by enforcing restrictions on the district’s open enrollment policy, significantly improving student/teacher ratios. In addition to lowering class sizes, Cooper improved teacher quality by changing the district’s policies regarding the hiring of experienced teachers and by refusing to pay unqualified teachers who had been certified on an emergency basis as if they had the proper experience. He also fired many teachers’ aides, many of whom were, he found, largely unqualified. Cooper also worked to institute district-wide student performance monitoring. Additionally, he pioneered a uniform system of textbook and curriculum planning, and he largely eliminated what had been a severe shortage of instructional materials by better accounting for and preserving available materials and by acquiring new materials when needed. FLORES v. HORNE 1831 Using careful financial management and applying for “all funds available,” Cooper was able to achieve his reforms with limited resources. His budget did, however, rise between two and four percent annually, partly because the district twice passed an override, that is, a county-wide tax measure. Nonetheless, Cooper’s successor, Dr. Zamudio, indicates that there are still significant resource constraints. Despite Cooper’s recruitment efforts, Nogales still must rely on some long-term substitutes, rather than upon permanent teachers. Other teachers have been “emergency-certified” and so have not been trained according to Arizona’s standards. NUSD’s starting base pay of $28,500 per year, which is below the statewide average, makes it difficult to recruit the fullyqualified teachers that NUSD needs. The recruitment challenges mean that Dr. Zamudio has been unable to reduce student/teacher ratios further, to 15:1, which, both he and a defense expert testified, would significantly enhance English learning success. He would also like to be able to hire trained teacher’s aides, who would be helpful in ELL programs, for the lower grades but has been unable to do so because of resource limitations. The limits of NUSD’s progress, even as it has improved its ELL programs, are apparent in the AIMS test results and reclassification test results introduced at the hearing, which show the same problems that appear in the statewide data. The test results, we caution, have the same limitations that we have discussed at the state level, and cannot be read unequivocally to demonstrate that ELL programs are failing in NUSD because we lack longitudinal data on the performance of student cohorts who began as ELL students and who may or may not have been reclassified. It is fair to say, however, that the indications provided by the test data largely do not point in positive directions. For instance, while it is clear that NUSD has reclassified many students, it is not clear how much of this success can 1832 FLORES v. HORNE be attributed to genuine academic progress and how much to changes in its classification methodology. During the 19992000 school year, there were 5,104 ELL students. The next year saw similar numbers, but between the 2001-02 and the 2003-04 school years, the number of such students hovered around 3800. Then, when Arizona implemented a new testing protocol (which was later concluded to be reclassifying too many students and replaced), the ELL population declined to about 3200 students in the 2004-05 school year and to 2474 the next year. In 2006-07 a new, reputedly more accurate and more difficult to pass test came into use, and Dr. Zamudio testified that he expects ELL student numbers to increase again. Because of these shifts in reclassification methodology, the meaning of “ELL” changed over time. Comparison of AIMS test data for ELL students and non-ELL students over time are therefore not reliable. But, as some patterns persist, we can point to several general trends based on AIMS test results for the 2003-04, 2004-05, and 2005-06 school years.23 First, within NUSD, ELL students in lower grades are doing substantially better than ELL students in higher grades. In 2005-06, for instance, while only 27% of ELL third graders failed24 math, 76% of ELL tenth graders failed. ELL third graders failed reading 37% of the time; 78% of ELL tenth graders failed. And 35% of ELL third graders failed writing, while 76% of ELL tenth graders failed. 23 Although the patterns we describe are consistent from year to year, passage rates varied somewhat from year to year. They rose from 2003-04 to 2004-05 but fell again in 2005-06. One of the defense witnesses suggested that the high 2004-05 passage rates could be related to problems with the reclassification system. 24 AIMS is graded on a four-part scale. Students may “fall far below” the passing score, “approach” but not meet the standard, “meet” the standard, or “exceed” the standard. When we refer to the percentage of students “failing,” we mean those who either “fell far below” or only “approached” the state passing score. FLORES v. HORNE 1833 Second, ELL students in NUSD generally do worse than the state average score for all students (ELL and non-ELL). Only students in the lower grades sometimes reached or beat the average. Older students are falling far behind. For tenth graders in 2005-06, for instance, only 36% failed math statewide, but 76% of ELL tenth graders in NUSD did. For reading, the tenth grade state failure rate was 29%, while the tenth grade ELL failure rate in NUSD was 78%. And for writing, the state tenth grade failure rate was 36% and the NUSD tenth grade ELL failure rate was 76%. Third, within NUSD, ELL students are still falling behind the district average for all students. Again, the gap grows more pronounced in higher grades. In 2005-06 in third grade, ELL students failed math at a 27% rate, reading at a 37% rate, and writing at a 35% rate, rates that were not too much worse than the district averages of 22%, 29%, and 30%, respectively. By tenth grade, however, ELL students failed math at a 76% rate, reading at a 78% rate, and writing at a 76% rate, far worse than the district averages of 50%, 42%, and 39%, respectively. The picture, then, is of relative success at lower grades (although not equal to that of English speaking students within NUSD), and increasing failures for older students, a significant majority of whom are failing the state’s basic achievement tests. Federal performance classifications under NCLB generally correspond with this portrait: In 2004-05, one of Nogales’ two middle schools failed to meet its adequate yearly progress goals under NCLB, as did the alternative high school. In 2005-06, the same middle school was under a restructuring plan, and corrective action was being taken in the alternative high school. The main high school had been given a warning, as had a lower-performing elementary school. 1834 FLORES v. HORNE In a survey of the test results of ELL students statewide, NUSD students’ performance was also consistent with this general snapshot. This survey, commissioned by Arizona’s Department of Education, reported the 2005 test results of students who were classified as ELL in 2003 and ranked schools by the average AIMS scores of these students.25 Some, but not all, of NUSD’s younger ELL students did very well. Four NUSD elementary schools ranked in the top ten schools in the state by this measure, with passage rates of over 70%. Two other elementary schools fared more poorly, ranking 41st and 152nd, with passage rates of about 60% and about 50%, respectively. Middle school performance was lower — one tied for 165th place, also with about a 50% passage rate, and the other ranked 409th, with only about 40% of its ELL students passing the test. The high schools are at the bottom of the heap. The main high school ranks 575th, with a 28.37% overall passage rate and Santa Cruz Alternative High School is four from the bottom at 625th place and a 8.62% passage rate. Finally, there is at least one clear bright spot: For all grades in 2005-06, reclassified ELL students were doing about as well as native English speakers, which is a notable accomplishment, and which suggests that the ELL programs may well benefit those who successfully transition out of them. But, as the data on such scores does not track individual students, showing when they passed through ELL programs and 25 No effort was made to verify that a given student was still ELL or that he or she had remained in ELL programming for the two intervening years. Nor are test scores available for these students in 2003. The result is that the survey data does not present a longitudinal survey of the progress of students who remained in ELL programs for that period. Nor is the data of value in demonstrating that NUSD’s ELL students are doing better relative to non-ELL students, as non-ELL students’ performance was not measured or ranked. More importantly, if, as Flores alleges, Arizona systematically underfunds ELL programs statewide, comparing one allegedly underfunded district with another does not show that funding in any given district is adequate. FLORES v. HORNE 1835 how long it took them to do so, and because the reclassification methodology continues to shift, this bright spot does not offset the otherwise troubling ELL test data. On the data available, it is possible that some high achievers may rapidly be leaving ELL programs while other students continue to struggle, never achieving at the same levels as non-ELL students. Indeed, Dr. Zamudio testified that reclassification in NUSD takes, on average, four to five years and the district court so found. The encouraging success of reclassified students is therefore of limited significance with regard to the overall impact of NUSD’s ELL program.