Conference shines light on help for Hispanic students

From a former Fresno gangbanger to the presidents of the California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and national school boards associations and beyond, speakers at the Celebrating Educational Opportunities for Hispanic Students conference in Albuquerque, N.M., March 23-25 presented a mosaic of backgrounds and experience.

Hispanic students loom large in the nation’s future, NSBA President E. Jane Gallucci told an audience of nearly 400 school board members, teachers, administrators and others attending the event. One in nine public school students across the United States today is Hispanic; the proportion will be one in four by 2025. To a growing extent, then, the success of Hispanic students will help determine the success of American education.

The numbers—and the stakes—are already much higher in the four southwestern states whose school board associations produce the Celebrating Opportunities conference every year; nearly half of the students in California, Arizona and Texas schools are Hispanic, and more than half of New Mexico’s are. Because those students often face cultural, language and educational challenges that can undercut their academic achievement, the states’ school boards associations have been taking turns hosting the Celebrating Opportunities conference for 16 years now to share strategies for fostering Hispanic students’ success. California will host next year’s conference April 25-27.

“Every year I come away with something that’s very, very practical,” said David Brooks, a board member in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District who has attended more than a half-dozen Celebrating Opportunities conferences. “None of this is rocket science. They’re real practical things that are working.”

Model programs
At the Albuquerque conference, participants took advantage of small-group breakout sessions to learn about model programs in place at schools, districts and county offices of education throughout the Southwest.

For example, Chula Vista Elementary School District board President Bertha J. López joined a team presentation from California’s largest K-6 district, located near the Mexican border, on “Data Driven Analysis: An Essential Tool for Improving English Learner Performance.” Four of the district’s schools recently exited the federal No Child Left Behind Act’s Program Improvement status, and three more are expected to this year.

John M. Nelson, executive director of instruction and assessment, attributed the district’s progress to extensive use not only of quantitative data from tests and other assessments, but also of qualitative data, gleaned from close administrative monitoring, classroom visits and structured conversation with staff and students.

“There has to be action behind the data,” stressed Sandra Villegas-Duvanich, who is responsible for language acquisition and development in the district. “The action needs to be structured and aligned, and it has to be focused.”

In other California presentations:
• Rio Rosales Elementary School Principal Barbara C. Ybarra, of the Rio School District in Oxnard, and Wanda Kelly, migrant education coordinator in the district, spoke on “Mythbusters: Debunking Remediation and Targeting Acceleration.” “We’re very strong on collaborative lesson planning,” Kelly said. “The only thing that works is collaborative consensus.” The cooperative approach yields meaningful changes in curriculum and instruction. “We have to begin at the beginning, but we have to begin with the end in mind,” said Ybarra.
• Officials of Salinas Union High School District explained their “System for Improving Student Achievement.” The district administers 108 benchmark tests to achieve a comprehensive measure of what is taught—and what is learned—and that information guides the district’s actions as it fine-tunes its programs. “The value that comes from all this process far outweighs the time” it requires, said John Favero, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.
• Earl Shore, principal of Mead Valley Elementary School in the Val Verde Unified School District, discussed “Transformational Schools: How to Turn Around an Underperforming School.” One tip offered by Shore, who has served as a consultant to schools in several states, was to take advantage of the excellent resources that all four border states’ education departments put on their Web sites. “They’re getting better all the time,” he noted.
• Jennifer Elbert-Rasmussen, who facilitates Escondido Union High School District’s “Spanish for Spanish Speakers” program, and teacher Karen Thielman explained how their district modified the program to address wide differences in cultural and education backgrounds among their Spanish-speaking students—from college-bound honors students to first- or second-generation immigrants who may not be literate in Spanish, let alone English. The program, which earned a CSBA Golden Bell award in 2006, is aligned with the state’s language arts standards and framework for foreign languages. “We want to foster their biliteracy; we don’t want it to decline,” Elbert-Rasmussen said.