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Arizona Report
There were 729,244 students in Arizona schools. 528,264 of
them, or 72%, spoke English in the home, while 200,980 spoke some other
language in the home. Of these "PHLOTE" ("Primary Home Language Other
Than English") students, 80.9% spoke Spanish, 9.3% spoke Navajo, and the
remainder spoke one of 41 other languages, including Apache (1.5%) and Vietnamese
68,174 of the PHLOTE students are classified as English proficient. Each year, students in these programs are 35% more likely than students
in bilingual education programs to be reclassified as proficient in English:
5.34% of ESL students are reclassified each year; 3.95% of bilingual education
students are reclassified each year. (Individualized Educational
Programs, which account for fewer than 6% of LEP students, were the most
successful at mainstreaming students.) ESL students were also much more likely to take the Stanford 9 achievement
tests. 49% of ESL students took the tests, compared with 34% of
bilingual education students. Because teachers have some discretion
in having new and poorly-performing students skip the test, this indicates
that the test-taking bilingual education students may have represented
a more elite body. Also, the scores of those students who have been
reclassified as English proficient were not reported. This prevents
using the Stanford 9 as a direct measure of the relative success of ESL
and bilingual programs, since the truly successful students -- who were
much more likely to have been taught through the ESL program -- are not
measured. |
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