Evaluation of Language Assistance Programs

The ninth key topic of the Dear Colleague Letter focuses on evaluating language assistance programs — which pulls several of the previous topics together. According to the Dear Colleague Letter, schools and state education agencies must “evaluate the effectiveness of a school district’s language assistance program(s) to ensure that students acquire English proficiency and that each program was reasonably calculated to allow students to attain parity of participation in the standard instructional program within a reasonable period of time” (U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, 2015, p. 9).

Guiding Questions

• What are the federal requirements for evaluating language assistance programming?
• What action steps should be taken to evaluate our language assistance program?

What Schools Need to Know

Schools and districts must regularly and consistently evaluate how effective their language assistance programming is — and determine what changes may be needed. This should be a collaborative effort amongst a working group of teachers, administrators, parents, specialists, students, and other stakeholders. While this is also discussed in Topic 2, it is critical that SEAs and schools and districts routinely undergo this analysis.

One way to harness the possibilities of collaboratively assessing the effectiveness of language assistance programming is to assemble a school-work group or team. Ensure that the group represents the various sectors of a school, district, family, and local community to support a shared mission and unified purpose. The U.S. Department of Education (2020) suggests that these be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible including “administrators, teachers...educational assistants, school counselors, and other staff who work with [ML] populations [as well as] parents, students, or community representatives who work with the same students in other settings” (para 3). It also states that these groups should identify successes and make improvements when needed.

To do this, it is helpful to include facilitators who will lead groups to continuously:

• Have a sense of curiosity, openness, and flexibility to different perspectives.
• Promote and nurture the mission of selecting and analyzing the strengths and efficacy of their language program model choices.
• Steadfastly and wholly focus the team’s conversations on supporting MLs to succeed.
• Support the mission of assessing, improving, and strengthening the effectiveness of our language assistance models.

For an additional resource, see Exhibit 1 of the English Learner Toolkit: Chapter 9.

Creating a Mistake-Safe Culture

Another key step is to create a mistake-safe culture. We all make mistakes; it’s a natural part of learning and discovery. A mistake-safe culture allows everyone the opportunity to try new ideas, make errors, and receive constructive feedback from a trusted colleague, mentor, coach, and supervisor, friend, etc. who wants the best for us because they have our and the collective’s interests in mind (Zacarian & Silverstone, 2020). It’s a culture that helps us see our individual and group’s strengths. It is a culture that values everyone’s contributions and voice and the possibilities of what might work better by suggesting new ideas and trying them with an open mind.

Helpful strategies for creating a mistake-safe culture include:

• collaboratively forming questions that support an open dialogue,
• consider what might be asked that has not yet been asked,
• fully supporting every member to be confident in speaking on behalf of their child, themselves, and others, and
•  consider MLs everyone’s students and a shared responsibility.

Zacarian, D. (2023), Transforming Schools for Multilingual Learners: A Comprehensive Guide for Educators (p. 200).