The Best

I really hope some teachers disagree with me, but I think the best thing to teach is ESL.

The kids really, really need to learn what you offer immediately (if not sooner), and in most cases you see very rapid progress. Some of my colleagues hate to teach beginners, but I love it. There's nothing quite like watching kids go from mute to conversational in a matter of months. There's nothing like watching them open up.

I have one girl who's been here a very short time, and who sadly got dumped into my regents prep class. She's very small, and she sits next to a guy who looks like a professional boxer. Oddly, she hits him all the time. I tell her to stop, but she says, "No, in China, hit means love." I don't know about that, but the guy who sits next to her clearly enjoys her attention.

The other day, he didn't show up. I said, "Sandra, did you finally kill Raymond?"

"No," she answered, "Not yet."

It's a little morbid, I guess, but it's a remarkable response from someone so new.

Last week I was out one day. My beginners questioned me closely to find out if I was cutting. They didn't believe me when I told them I saw a doctor. As it happened, I had a medical note, which I pulled out of my pocket and showed them. For a moment there was silence.

Then a girl who rarely speaks raised her hand and asked, "Do you want us to sign it?"

I couldn't stop laughing. It's remarkable to hear wit bordering on sarcasm from a kid who barely spoke a few months ago.

Do you love your subject as much as I love mine? I hope you do.

Why?

English is Yours!

It's a mystery to most of us when exactly we master a second language. I speak Spanish after having studied it for years and lived in Mexico, but I have no idea exactly when I got a handle on it. I remember I could talk before I understood. My daughter, on the other hand, always understood it perfectly but didn't speak it for years.

Yesterday I spoke with the parent of a special-needs child who speaks English as a second language. She told me she was afraid to speak for many years and used to hide behind her husband. When she went to school she had him check her papers. After the second year he told her she didn't need his help. By the third year he told her she wrote better than he did, and she agreed.

But she still wouldn't talk. Not in public anyway.

She studied and studied everything she could find that affected her child. And once, when she went to a school conference, she began reading a report about her son that she disagreed with completely. She asked her husband to say something, but he didn't understand the report at all. There was no choice but to learn English right there and then.

So she drew herself up, opened her mouth, and objected. She objected specifically to many things in the report, and gave her opinions precisely, clearly, and in some detail. Something she said made the speech therapist cry. By the time she was finished, everyone in the room was quiet.

On the way home, she told her husband, "I can speak English. I could say whatever I want. And everyone understood me. Not only that, but they were afraid of me."

She was delighted. And the next week, when her child had a new and better speech therapist, she was even more delighted. Apparently, once she opened her mouth in English there was no closing it again, and she's been a big fan of English ever since.

As am I.

Another Day in Kleinworld

Imagine your kid's teacher gave an "A" on a test, and the next week gave a zero, just for the hell of it. Sure, you could say one wiped out the other, but you'd be upset for sure. I know I would.

That's how a lot of principals felt when Chancellor Klein handed them bonuses, then yanked the rug out from under them by cutting their budgets. Rather than using the money for enrichment programs, much needed improvements in facilities, or reducing class sizes, school leaders are using them to plug holes in their budgets.

Ernest Logan, president of the principals union, put it in blunter terms, noting how the mayor and the chancellor touted the awards a few weeks ago, then "sucked that money right back."

"It was not well thought out," Logan said.

Of course it wasn't. That's why schools with records of consistent excellence got Bs and Cs simply because their test averages went down a few points this year. The remarkably shallow rating system suggests that schools with long-term 65 averages are better than those with long-term 90 averages. Why? School A went from 60 to 65, while school B went from 92 to 90. Therefore, in Kleinworld, school A is improving while school B is going down the toilet. School safety? That's just 2.5% of the score (Keep your eye on your pocketbook in school A, and consider body armor in place of that pantsuit).

In Kleinworld, schools deemed in need of improvement simply have fewer resources to achieve it. Hopefully, they'll fail completely, the chancellor will shut them down, and squeeze 5 "small schools" in their place. Because the small schools will admit no special ed. or ESL kids, scores will go up, and Kleinworld can declare another victory.

Sometimes I have to go to seminars where reps from Tweed give long speeches about what great jobs they're doing. I ask them why they do things that don't really address the dysfunction of this system.

"Well, we had to do something," they say.

I ask why they couldn't so something meaningful.

They never have an answer.

Thanks to Schoolgal

Kleinspeak Is Universal

We're spending four-and-a-half million bucks a year to ensure that students like mine know all the new educational terms. That's for forty translators, and they've got every little nuance down, apparently:

In an earlier life, Xin Meng chased stories as a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper in New York. Now he spends his days figuring out how to translate mysterious phrases like “empowerment school” and “English language learner” into Chinese.

I've no doubt he's great at it. Still, he should be translating phrases like, "Your child is studying in a half-classroom with no insulation, and therefore can hear every sound from the adjacent classroom." Or the ubiquitous, "We're dumping your kids into a trailer in back of the school because you don't speak English and we figure you won't complain." Or the ever-popular, "We're closing your kid's school and eliminating all the language-support programs that used to be in it. Good luck finding someplace else."

Maybe statements like that would incite the parents to get off their butts and demand better for their kids. Or maybe not.

Probably the best place to begin such a project would be with parents of American kids. Now there are a few that are off to a good start, but we've got a long way to go.

I'm Rich!

Wow, check this out. It looks like we're going to have to spend 200 million a year to improve the English skills of newcomers, the legal ones. And if we want to help the illegals as well, we're talking 2.9 billion. As an ESL teacher, I gotta say that's some chunk of change.

The Migration Policy Institute has determined that learning English is very, very important for people who come here, especially if they need to pass citizenship tests. I'm glad that there are people to do these studies. Me, I'd just have said anyone with half a brain who wants a decent future here ought to get off his ass and learn English (Anyone who's unlucky enough to have me as a teacher had better do the same).

But wait a cotton-picking minute:

The authors assume that instruction would cost $10 an hour...

Whoa. I regret to tender my early resignation. I could make that at Baskin-Robins and get free ice cream too.

To all my newcomer friends--Good luck learning English with your 10-dollar-an-hour teachers. You're certainly gonna need it.

En boca cerrada, no entran moscas*

I told my students we'd be filling in DoE surveys this week. My kids don't speak a lot of English, so it takes a little while to explain.

"Surveys are wack to the heck," observed Paulo.

"What the heck does wack to the heck mean?" I asked.

"You're supposed to know that." Maria informed me. "You're the teacher."

She had me there. But then I remembered what my daughter had told me.

"You're wrong, Maria. That's slang and slang is for kids."

Much discussion ensued about who exactly was supposed to know what exactly. We finally decided to go to the source, and asked Paulo what he meant.

"I don't know, teacher." he confessed. "I just opened my mouth, and it came out."

Things like that used to happen to me a lot, too. When I became a teacher, I really had to work on stopping it. It's even rougher, though, for kids just learning English. Apparently, sometimes even they themselves don't know what they're talking about.

They'll get it, though, if we give them a little time and patience.

*Roughly, if you keep your mouth shut, flies won't get in.

Related: See what a city parent thinks should be on the parent survey.

Chancellor Klein Enhances His Image

According to Juan Gonzalez, Chancellor Klein forgets when he purges test ESL students from his test scores. But when they come back and get factored in, he remembers them all day long. In fact, 30,000 more ESL students were counted this year than last:

Fred Smith was outraged when he heard Klein's explanation. Smith, you see, spent three decades analyzing tests for our city's school system, so he knows a thing or two about how chancellors paint the prettiest picture for the public.

"They never told you that back in 2005, during the mayoral race, the school district quietly increased the number of exemptions for ELL kids and then claimed a record boost in scores," Smith said.

That year, Bloomberg and Klein announced "the highest one-year gains ever achieved" by city fourth-graders, a more than 10% increase in those scoring at or above grade level.

But, as Smith noted, Bloomberg and Klein never mentioned in any press release that the city had dramatically increased the number of immigrant students exempted from the test that year. Some children had been in the school system as long as five years and were still being exempted from regular state tests.

Gonzalez said Klein had photos with circles and arrows and paragraphs to be used as evidence against them. And despite all the hoopla, he remained unimpressed (as do I).

Closing their neighborhood schools (Take that, non-English speakers!)and busing ESL kids all over the city is highly unlikely to hasten their acquisition of English. Language acquisition is not as much about intelligence as wanting to fit in and be part of something. Kids who have to wake up at four in the morning to take a bus, a train, and a brisk run to Far Far Away Middle School are not likely to be unexpectedly break out singing "I Love New York."

"They all try to make things look better than they are to further their own ambitions," said Smith, who is now writing a book on how public schools doctor test results. Bloomberg and Klein just "have better public relations" than previous administrations, he said.

Gonzalez gets straight to the heart of the matter. Test scores from this administration are best sampled with a grain of salt.

Or more, if possible.

Small School Principals Plan Strategy

"How do we deal with those nasty, time-consuming ESL students? I mean, they bring down your test scores, you have to give them three English classes instead of one, and the whole budget is shot by the time you're finished."

"Well, we could just not give them ESL classes. If the state comes snooping around, just make up a phony class and ask the teacher to sign the attendance sheets."

"But what if the teacher refuses?"

" Now this is just one more reason we need to get rid of teacher tenure. How are we going to get teachers to tow the line if we can't threaten them with dismissal?"

"Good point."

"What if we use those "small-group tutoring" sessions and make them classes?"

"Isn't that against the contract?"

"Contract-shmontract. Who's gonna find out? We'll dump it on some new teacher who doesn't know the difference."

"What if someone with experience finds out?"

"What, you hire people with experience? Are you nuts? Get 'em in green, and make sure they quit before they know any better."

"That's the ticket."

"Thank God for that 05 contract."

"Amen."

My Window Faces the South

If not, I'm gonna have to move it.

I'm not saying the mysterious South is perfect. Last night, my daughter obliged me to stop at the ugliest diner on God's green earth, with a group of people who matched it perfectly. And there was a condom machine in the men's room, so someone is entering that joint and feeling lucky.

The whole southern concept of breakfast seems to depend a lot on grits, which don't much resemble food. Waffle House and Huddle House, two identical chains of dark, greasy, cramped breakfast joints, seem to draw customers from everywhere.

On the other hand, here in the USA, where we produce the best music in the world, some of the very best musicians are hidden in the mountains around Asheville, NC, from where I'm writing this.

But there's no need to come that far if you want to see real southern wisdom. In Virginia, people are starting to defy NCLB. It seems they've determined it's unfair to give the same tests to people who don't speak English.

A hundred years ago, people used to routinely give IQ tests to non-English speakers, who were often classified as mentally retarded. This was due to a failure to factor in the reality that these folks didn't speak English. Now, with a hundred years of progress behind us, we no longer label non-English speakers as retarded. We simply say their schools are unacceptable and need to be closed. Oh, and their teachers, like me, are incompetent for failing to press a button and make them magically fluent.

What does Uncle Sam have to say? He was unavailable for comment, but Aunt Margaret has little sympathy:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Virginia is "dragging its feet" and called the testing provision, the law's Standards Clause, a necessary measure to counter "the soft bigotry of low expectations." In a Feb. 4 letter to The Washington Post, Spellings said: "It's time to remember that yes, Virginia, there is a Standards Clause."

Spelling's comments incensed school division officials.

"We're all so angry," said Arlington County School Board chairwoman Libby Garvey. She called the required test a "painful and humiliating experience" for children who haven't grasped English.

Similar disagreements will arise in other states that have many students who aren't proficient in English, said Reggie Felton, lobbyist for the National School Boards Association. The association has asked that the federal education department grant each state flexibility "for real-life situations to ensure that the test is valid and reliable for each student."

In Arizona, where there are many Latino immigrants, school officials also are grappling with testing language learners.

"We believe that English language-learner students come to school with different levels of competency," said Panfilo Contreras, executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association. "They may not be proficient in their own language, let alone English."

That's very true, and it's absurd to blame American schools for this. Also, momentarily disregarding its effect on schools, there's no way such idiotic regulations keep kids from being left behind.

Anna Nicole update: as of this morning, still dead.

Britney update: as of today, still bald.

Mr. Bloomberg Vs. the Aliens

Mayor Bloomberg's teflon armor continues to erode, as Sam Freedman questions his policy of closing high schools and disregarding the needs of the kids who attended them. The schools are supposedly no good (as always, through no fault of the mayor or his minions) and they must go (even if they're improving). The DoE has spoken. That's it. All the failing kids will go elsewhere, and magically become excellent.

But does this policy serve NYC communities? It certainly doesn't serve Lafayette High School's Chinese community. Where will they go, particularly if they're in need of bilingual services? Not Lafayette, because its new "academies" will not be providing it.

It turns out that ESL students don't tend to score as well on standardized tests. Why? Because they DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH. It turns out that if you DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH, tests are somewhat more difficult. And Mayor Bloomberg really ought to make some accommodations for these folks, because even though he's renamed their schools and kicked them out, they still DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH.

Several Lafayette administrators and teachers joined Mr. (Steve) Chung, the president of a Chinese-American community association, in devising a proposal for a school specializing in international studies and submitting it to the department. At a public meeting, residents of the neighborhood lauded it. Meetings with department officials, he said, went amicably and productively.

Then, a few weeks ago, the department announced its plan for restructuring Lafayette, which now has about 2,100 students, beginning in September 2007. It would contain three new schools — one emphasizing sports management, another focusing on film and music, and a third offering “expeditionary learning” under the aegis of Outward Bound. None will offer bilingual instruction, at least at the outset.

“This is an absolutely unacceptable choice,” Mr. Chung said. “These three schools have nothing to do with our community. They’re forcing the immigrant students out of their own neighborhood. New York is an immigrant city, but I think the education policy is not for us.”

This is typical of Tweed--it makes public claims to care about parent input, then does whatever it wishes and gives parental opinions no weight whatsoever. While it reorganizes Lafayette and utterly disregards its immigrant community, it's doing much the same elsewhere:

Several miles to the east, in East Flatbush, something remarkably similar was happening at Samuel J. Tilden High School, which serves roughly 2,400 students. Like Lafayette, Tilden will be dismantled beginning next fall, and replaced by a collection of small schools. Like Lafayette, Tilden has a large population of immigrant pupils, about 250, many from Haiti. That critical mass allowed Tilden to operate a bilingual program in Creole, and its students outperformed peers at comparable schools on various standardized tests.

The new version of Tilden, however, will have one high school run by Outward Bound and another, called the It Takes a Village Academy, that says it will “prepare students for college and meaningful careers while fostering an appreciation for diverse languages and cultures.”

At best, according to the department’s own projections, those schools will take in a total of 50 English-language learners, as students entitled to bilingual or E.S.L. classes are officially known, despite the heavy presence of Haitian and African immigrants in the surrounding neighborhood.

While it may be convenient for Mayor Bloomberg to shuffle these kids around, it's not any way to treat immigrants, and one way or another, we're all immigrants. It's not their fault they DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH, but in a couple of years they'll catch up.

Kicking them out of their community schools, whatever they may be called, is nothing short of reprehensible. It's true their test scores are inconvenient, and that's because they DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH, but they need time.

Let's send Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein to China. We'll have them take the NY State English Regents Exam in Chinese. I'll give them one year to prepare for it. I'll even provide them with the answers, which I wouldn't do for my own ESL students.

And I'll bet every cent I've ever had that my kids outscore Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein. It's time to stop penalizing our immigrant population and give them a little support. I'm sorry their test scores are low, but they DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH. They can do everything they need to do in schools, but they'll need a little time.

Is that too much to ask?

In the trade-off for the closing of Lafayette and Tilden, with the net loss of about 800 places in bilingual and E.S.L. classes, the Education Department has announced the opening of only one small school geared to immigrant pupils in the entire borough. And even now, less than two weeks before eighth graders throughout the city must submit their applications to high schools, the department has not revealed the location of that school, the Multicultural High School. For all any parent or child knows at this point, it could be anywhere from Bay Ridge to Brownsville.

It behooves this mayor to do better. I know kids who wake up at four in the morning to trek to our school, and we ought to have fewer, not more of them.

It's cold today in Mr. Bloomberg's New York.

Stop and Go

My student observer was very surprised at what she saw in my classroom.

"I couldn't help but notice," she said, "that you have the kids all mixed up."

"What do you mean?"

"In the other classes I observed, the students were grouped by language so that they could help one another."

I was very surprised by that. How can anyone help you learn English by speaking to you in a foreign language?

I will never forget the three years I spent in high school not learning Spanish. All I really got was "Como esta usted?" and a little song about the Puerto Rican flag. But when I lived in Mexico I found that people didn't know what the hell I was talking about when I spoke English. I was highly motivated to learn Spanish, and I did.

From time to time people ask me, "How can you teach Chinese people English when you don't know Chinese?" If that were a prerequisite, babies, the best language learners in the world, would be mute the world over.

The observer noticed that my kids chatted with one another in English. That's a goal in my classroom so I was glad of this. Yesterday, her last day, she told me that English would be used exclusively in her classroom as well.

Moments like that are why people teach. It's remarkable, though, that none of her professors found the practice of teaching English in English worthy of mention.

But Can They Speak?

Here's some food for thought--- Chinese schools have classes of 45 in humid, non-air-conditioned 90-degree classrooms, yet the only voice you hear is that of the teacher.

Can you imagine doing that here? I can't. Is that because our teachers aren't as good as theirs? I don't think so.

If the students were talking, of course, they wouldn't be able to run schools in this manner. Despite their orderliness, I don't want my child in a classroom like this. Maybe they could make her pass more tests, and maybe I'm idealistic, but I think schools need to do more than that.

At the first school, we were told that, at the present time, more than 200 million Chinese students are learning English. Two hundred million children learning our language! And they do so because China is committed to becoming an economic superpower to rival the United States within 10 years.

They may not need to wait that long, given our profligate borrowing habits. But as for learning English, having taught hundreds if not thousands of Chinese kids, I think their government needs a new approach. There's absolutely no way 45 silent kids learn to speak English, or any foreign language.

One of the most difficult things about my job is forcing silent kids to speak. And if I succeed, I then need to work on making them speak audibly, which is another thing entirely. I'm always amazed that while my colleagues are working overtime trying to keep kids quiet (and of course I have kids like that too), I'm on my hands and knees, begging and pleading with improbably quiet kids to open their mouths and make sound come out.

Are you jealous? You might not be if you had to do this. It's more difficult than you'd imagine, as it takes extreme persistence to overcome lifetimes of trained silence. Still, it's very gratifying if and when you succeed.

No entiendo

I don't often write about NCLB, but I'm troubled by the way it treats ESL kids. Joseph Berger had a column a few days ago addressing this issue. Is it reasonable to give the same English test to kids who don't actually know the language? I don't think so (In the early twentieth century non-English speakers were give IQ tests in English. When they failed, they were deemed to be mentally retarded). But NCLB says within one year they have to do so anyway.

Some people say it takes five years to acquire a language. Others say that's too long (For young children, it certainly is). For older kids, like those I teach, I'd say a more reasonable target is three years (though there are exceptions). The column neglects to mention that age is a pivotal factor, and that our ability to acquire language goes into a nosedive right around puberty. From reviewing NCLB dictates, I see no evidence whatsoever that who administer the law are aware of this.

Port Chester schools, the focus of this article, claim to be worried about the self-images of kids taking these tests. It seems far more likely they're worried what the inclusion of these kids will do to their statistics. It's unfortunate when concerns like that overshadow the welfare of kids, but that's an inevitable result of rampant high-stakes testing.

There is no mention whatsoever of high school kids, who've been required to take the NY State English Regents exam for years. It was absurd to raise the requirements for older kids before younger kids, and it once again showed a complete lack of familiarity with language acquisition. I can make kids pass the Regents Exam, but I could serve them far better by helping them acquire English. As things are, I endlessly drill them on a simplistic formula for earning a bare minimum score on a test, teaching them "writing skills" that are hardly appropriate for anything but the test.

Oddly, the article focuses on two kids who were actually born in the US. It's hard for me to see why they should be exempted. They should have learned English by now, particularly if they've been attending school. I regret that these kids may be "embarrassed" by their scores, but I have no idea how they spent so much of their young lives in ESL. Perhaps they were in so-called "bilingual" classes, where they got little or no exposure to English.

Unless they live in caves with no TV, or schools work full-time at keeping them there, or both, it's very hard for normal kids to avoid acquiring English--with time. But all kids need time, and NCLB needs to consider that.

To Teach Grammar or Not to Teach Grammar...

A Kentucky eighth-grade teacher is enjoying some notoriety for teaching grammar, which is largely outmoded. I've been told since I started teaching 22 years ago that this was a huge no-no.

I've got decidedly mixed feelings. As an ESL teacher, I insist on teaching grammar. There is simply no way kids will learn to write acceptably without knowing and practicing the rules. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool, a robotic administrator, or both.

Although my first license was in English, I taught it for a very short time. The kids I taught were clueless about grammar, and I was inclined to teach them. However, if they'd known the rules I wouldn't have bothered.

I was taught rules about punctuation in first and second grade, and I never thought much about grammar till I started teaching. But I read a lot as a kid, and I think that helped me know the rules, even though I couldn't have explained them. Ideally, all kids would do that.

In New York City, though, conditions have been less than ideal as long as I can recall. I would teach grammar to American teenagers if they needed it.

Should we teach grammar as a matter of course? Or can we produce readers early and render it unnecessary?

Related: See what Graycie has to say.

Lunatics Take Yet Another Wing...

It's very important that ESL students take the same English tests as kids who've spoken it all their lives, say various so-called education advocates. After all, we used to give them the same IQ tests we gave English speakers. Why should they be exempt simply because they don't speak English?

“If the immigrant kids are studying English, but they can not take the regular test, how are we going to know if this program, NYSESLAT is working?” said Maria Gonzalez, an Ecuadorian mother of three schoolchildren.

It's unfortunate no one bothered to inform Ms. Gonzalez that NYCESLAT is not a program, but a test designed to measure English proficiency (and a highly flawed one at that). The writer of the article shows no evidence of having made that distinction either.

“The problem with the teachers is that they don't want to be tested. The ELA exam will test them,” said Fernando Salas, a Colombian teacher, who has two children in city public schools.

Mr. Salas, alas, knows who he wants to blame, but little about what's actually happening in this state. High school ESL students have been required to take the English Regents for years, largely at the expense of programs that could help them acquire the language. I've taught many of those courses, and I find it entirely possible to teach them how to pass the test.

Sadly, for my kids, passing the English Regents exam indicates only an ability to pass the English Regents exam (though NY State now removes them from ESL classes as a result). I aim and hit the lowest common denominator, get them to answer the questions via rigidly formulaic four-paragraph compositions, make them practice till their fingers turn blue, and they pass. The test is do or die (they can't graduate without it), and I don't have time to do anything more.

I don't delude myself that these kids will be able to make it to college without the instruction we withheld in order to spend more time teaching them how to pass the test. In college, they'll have to pay for people just like me to teach them the very same things I'd have offered in high school, and they'll receive no credit for it, as it's remedial.

This wisdom that fuels that phenomenon is now going to be replicated with elementary kids.

Thanks to Pissed Off Teacher

Lost in Translation Part 2

No one's a bigger fan of Mike Winerip than I am, but I think there's something missing from his recent column in the NY Times about Somali immigrants. He suggests that they're being denied translation services, and are therefore unable to learn English.

Actually, regardless of which classes they may or may not be taking, it's remarkable for kids to spend two years in the US without acquiring a significant amount of English. Also, while I do not oppose bilingual education, it is not absolutely necessary. Immersion ought to work for anyone. There's something really wrong here.

It could certainly be the inability of some of these kids to read that hinders them in many areas, but they still ought to pick up verbal English.

Winerip says their "English immersion" teachers explain in English and clarify in Spanish, for the benefit of the majority. If you're not an educator, you may be unfamiliar with specific pedagogical jargon, but we in the business refer to individuals who engage in such practices as "bad" or sometimes, the more colorful "clueless and incompetent" teachers.

If these kids were in my beginning ESL classes, I would force them to speak English, whether they liked it or not, by any and all means necessary. For me, that's fairly standard practice.

Those of us who sat through years of language classes, receiving passing grades, but learning little or nothing know this--translation is not, primarily, how kids acquire language.

Participation is.

Speaking English Is No Longer Necessary

We have fewer ESL students than we used to after 9/11, perhaps 40% fewer. Still, we ought to be able to come up with a reasonable method of testing their English.

In New York City, we had a test called the LAB that was used for 20 years. It had a version A, and a version B. For ease of scoring, the answers to both versions were identical. As the test was never updated, students started stealing it, and several told me that they’d received the answers via email. That explained the students I had who spoke no English, yet somehow passed.

After 20 years, some wise individual decided to revise the test. Unfortunately, the new test is extremely basic, and I’d say any student with one year of study could pass it. This was highly problematic until it was supplanted by a NY State exam called the NYCESLAT, and please don’t ask me what that stands for.

The new state test shared the low level of the city test, but the folks in NY State arranged it so you seemed to need a perfect score (at least) to pass it. This resulted in a highly critical column in the NY Times written by my favorite education columnist, Michael Winerip. The state was upset by this, so in a relatively short time (2 years) they revised the standard. Now, like the LAB, it's far too easy to pass.

The NYCESLAT, for reasons never explained to me, though, can only be given in the spring. Therefore, students who arrive at other points in the year (the majority) are given the LAB test.

Last year, I taught Transitional English, the last ESL course we give, in which I taught novels. I had one young girl who did no homework, no reading, and never participated in class. One day I informed her that if she did not start doing the homework and the reading, she would fail. At this, the girl ran crying from my class to her guidance counselor, who placed her elsewhere.

The girl was right to be upset. The test falsely indicated that she was ready for advanced English. It doesn’t take forever (as some “bilingual” programs seem to advocate), but it takes a few years for teenagers to acquire a second language. It really behooves state and city officials to get off their collective keesters and design a valid test.

My test?

“What’s your name?”

“Where are you from”

“How long have you been here?” or ungrammatical but simplified:

“How long are you here, in the United States?”

Beyond that I’d want to see writing samples.

Students who lack mastery of such basic verbal English should not be placed beyond level 2 of basic ESL. Talking is a huge part of language, and to place kids who can’t speak in classes where they’re expected to study Shakespeare does no service to the, or indeed anyone.

Why can’t all those smart people in Albany and Tweed figure that out?