“You won’t believe how bad the district is now.”

That’s how a friend started his email to me on Saturday morning. He’s talking about LAUSD (obviously). And it’s not about Superintendent Deasy’s likely departure. Instead he’s talking about the dismal situation for English language learners as described in this article. In particular:

As a result of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Education, which had accused the district of doing poorly by its English learners, the district was required to submit an evidence-based plan for improvement, and that plan calls for sorting the students by English skills.

Here’s my friend’s full email update about the situation:

You won’t believe how bad the district is now. The district decided it needed to do something about the Long Term English Learners, so it through them all into classes together with huge class numbers 35 plus. The curriculum they gave us was a crappy old work book and then after two months they sent some really cool young adult novels- Book Thief, 13 Reasons Why, The Fault in Our Stars and some others. They sent the books with no plans, but wanted us to read the books and only teach the parts that are school appropriate and to ignore the rest of the book. Crazy stuff man.

Crazy stuff indeed.

1 thought on ““You won’t believe how bad the district is now.”

  1. martha

    Instruction time in L1 positively impacts academic achievement. As a parent, educator, and researcher of ELLs teaching our ELLs in their native language equates to fluency in English and academic success. This is not fresh news… Why don’t administrators look at research and welcome multilingualism? A Dual language curriculum is what our ELLs need…

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