Positive attitudes toward school and access to dual-language immersion programs are associated with better academic performance among English learners. Learning in overcrowded classrooms and having a disability, meanwhile, are characteristics associated with lower reading scores among this growing subset of the student population.
These are some of the findings from a new U.S. Government Accountability Office report that examined the student, teacher, and school characteristics associated with English learners’ academic achievement, progress toward English-language proficiency, and growth in reading scores over time.
While the report, published in late August, is geared toward federal leadership, as the GAO is an office of Congress, Jacqueline Nowicki, a director on the GAO’s education, workforce, and income security team, said local educators can benefit from understanding the various factors at play in English learners’ education.
“It’s an opportunity for states, districts, and individual schools to find themselves in the data and see where they fit, and then think about, what can we do at the local level that can help move the needle in the right direction?” Nowicki said.
Data align with past research findings
Researchers used state and federal datasets—including state reading and English proficiency assessments, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study that examines groups of children over a multi-year period—for the new report. They examined potential relationships between students’ academic performance and characteristics including students’ race, teachers’ absences, and more.
Some findings across grade levels include:
- higher reading scores among female English learners,
- higher reading scores among Asian English learners, and
- lower reading and math scores, and less progress toward English proficiency, when students were faced with high levels of teacher absences.
Nowicki also noted that some associations were only apparent in specific contexts.
For instance, researchers tracked national reading performance for both 4th and 8th grades. But only in 4th grade was there a clear association between English learners’ stronger performance in reading and having a teacher of the same race or ethnicity. In math, having a teacher of the same race or ethnicity was only associated with better performance in 8th grade.
These findings—highlighting associations, not causation—offer schools a chance to take a close look at their setups to determine what systemic changes are needed to improve English learners’ academic performance, Nowicki said.
Some findings from the GAO report echo what’s been found in prior research.
The new report found that English learners dually identified as also having a disability had worse performance on national reading assessments.
“It’s challenging for schools to be able to really meet their needs,” said Rachel Garrett, a managing researcher at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research. “We see it in the research, we see it in the data, and we also hear it from those who are directly working to serve these students.”
Garrett’s past research also backs up the GAO finding on the potential benefits of dual-language immersion programs for English learners’ academic success. In dual-language immersion, students—often a mix of English learners and native English speakers—learn in both English and another language.
“This can be a pathway to helping their students, and not see their first language as a hindrance, but something that may actually benefit their outcomes in both English and their home language,” Garrett said.
However, access to such programs nationwide remains uneven, as past research has highlighted.
For Nowicki and Garrett, the new data analysis of characteristics can be a starting point for educators hoping to improve English learners’ educational outcomes, and a reminder that this work doesn’t need to happen in silos.
“No district or school is alone in thinking about this, and probably there’s an opportunity to take a more cohesive approach to figuring out how to tackle some of these issues,” Garrett said.
