A QuantCrit Analysis of Accountability and Long-Term English Learners: Patterned Disparities of Opportunities and Outcomes

• In Event: Reassessing the Long-Term English Learner: Theorizing and Conceptualizing Multilingual Learners in Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

When considering student success, where students are served is just as important as how they are served given the overrepresentation of English Learners (ELs), students of color, and students in poverty in schools with fewer qualified teachers, fewer resources, and less funding (Lankford, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2002; US Commission on Civil Rights, 2018). This is especially true in the case of Long-Term English Learners (LTELs) , who are more likely to suffer from inconsistent, inappropriate schooling (Menken & Kleyn, 2010) and come from families that struggle economically (Haas, Huang & Tran, 2014). These trends beg the question “Are schools doing enough to support LTEL students?” Current high-stakes accountability policies which forgo providing such students with increased supports in order to focus on sanctions become de facto mechanisms to punish students and the schools that serve them for their economic, racial, and linguistic diversity (Darling-Hammond, 2007). Accountability scores have been shown to be correlated with student demographics across the country (Martinez-Garcia, LaPrairie & Slate, 2011; McNeil, Coppola, Radigan & Vasquez Heilig, 2008), making high-stakes tests and the accountability policies they inform as much a reflection of student characteristics as they are of student learning (Glynn & Waldeck, 2013). This problematic dynamic is evident in Denver Public Schools (DPS), whose accountability formula has been found to have statistically significant negative correlations with EL students’ level of English proficiency when that proficiency is marked as “intermediate” through ACCESS scores of 3 or 4 (Strong & Escamilla, 2020). Since LTELs tend to remain in the intermediate stages of English development (Shin, 2019), this relationship indicates that the DPS schools that serve more LTELs are overrepresented in the lowest-rated accountability categories, the negative consequences of which include staff turnover and school closure. This study explores the impact of DPS accountability policies on LTELs through the research questions, “Are LTELs overrepresented in the lowest-rated schools and thus disproportionately facing the negative consequences of accountability? Are the lowest-rated schools provided the same supports as the highest-rated schools?” By drawing on quantitative, school-level data from 2016 to 2019, this QuantCrit (Gillborn, Warmington & Demack, 2018) study employs multiple regressions to investigate the relationships between accountability outcomes, student demographics, and school supports to reveal the patterned mechanisms through which raced, classed, and linguistically-marked populations such as LTELs (Flores, Klyen & Menken, 2015) are inequitably situated in public institutions. Because DPS is actively amending its accountability policies (Asmar, 2020), our findings not only advance the field of social justice accountability scholarship but can also can be immediately employed by policymakers who are striving to make accountability serve rather than disadvantage Denver’s most vulnerable students.

Authors

• Kimberly Ann Strong, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kathy Escamilla, University of Colorado - Boulder