WASHINGTON -- Representatives from the Los Angeles Unified School District kicked off a two-day lobbying trip to Capitol Hill on Thursday by advocating reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind education reform law, which Congress will consider before the end of the year.
"I'm here representing 700,000 children who absolutely need critical attention on No Child Left Behind. Your work to better serve English-language learners . . . is super, super important," L.A. Board of Education President Monica Garcia told aides to lawmakers.
Peter Zamora, co-chairman of the Hispanic Education Coalition, made up of organizations seeking to improve educational opportunities for the nation's Latinos, emphasized that the majority of the district's English learners are native-born, many of them second- or third-generation citizens.
"As a political matter, these people are Americans. They are future voters. They are our future economic machine," Zamora said.
Members of the lobbying group, which included Supt. David L. Brewer and two board members, are advocates of a new version of the act. They wrote the portion of the draft legislation that would expand the teaching of English-language learners.
The law, the Bush administration's signature domestic effort that was signed in 2002, emphasizes annual testing to ensure that all students achieve grade-level proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Its accountability provisions have been controversial, though -- particularly the performance benchmarks set for schools.
But flaws aside, the law "allowed for students we failed for so long to come out of the shadows," board member Yolie Flores Aguilar said, and English learners were among them.
In L.A. Unified, 94% of English-language learners are Spanish-speakers. All told, state records list English learners in Los Angeles speaking 55 different languages. More than 266,000 L.A. Unified students are English learners, about 37.6% of the total enrollment.
The school district last year redesignated 13.4% of its English learners as fully proficient in English, well above the state average. The district is concerned, however, that under No Child Left Behind, it has been and could continue to be labeled as failing for taking students out of the pool of English learners. The rules of the law require that all groups improve, including English learners. But the group of English learners changes from year to year, with some of the best students exiting as lower-performing students enter.
