How to write smarter stories about English language learners

Three common mistakes in how media outlets depict English language learners in schools — and a handful of model stories and tips for better coverage in 2020.

By Barbara Gottschalk

Find a story about standardized test score results — federal, state, or district-level — and chances are you’ll see something about the poor performance of English language (EL) learners compared with their counterparts. Chances also are that the coverage will be misleading.

As a longtime teacher of EL students, I’m especially sensitive to off-base stories about this group of students, which has been growing in recent years.

Mischaracterizing EL students is a serious matter that has given the public the wrong impression of these children and the progress they are making toward English proficiency.

No, they’re not academic laggards with a poor prognosis. Once they’ve learned English, their scores often compare favorably with those of other students.

Neither, at the other end of the coverage spectrum, is mastering English an easy task that most students can nail down within a few months to a year. They typically take five to seven years to acquire enough skills to no longer be considered EL learners.

There are richer, more meaningful stories to be told about EL learners. But to get to them, we first have to examine what’s been going wrong in most of the stories about these students.

The author, pictured working with an English language learner.

Issue #1: Coverage of EL Scores Lacks Context

Nearly 10 percent of public school students in the United States were EL students as of 2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, ranging from less than 1 percent in West Virginia to more than 20 percent in California. They number nearly 5 million students.

Unlike static groups like race or ethnicity, the EL population constantly changes, and at all grade levels. As students gain proficiency and are reclassified, they leave the group and new EL students enter. By definition, EL students are still not fully proficient in English. It should be expected, then, that they won’t do as well on standardized assessments in English and that those scores might not improve over time.

It’s a self-defining issue, like saying that students who are a year or more away from taking algebra are not proficient in algebra. Students who haven’t taken algebra won’t be any better at it in five or 10 years, either. No one would expect them to be.

The question is and should be how well former EL students perform on the tests. And by then, of course, they are no longer EL learners.

Too often, the dynamic nature of the EL population is overlooked in the reporting of their results.

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Too often, articles like this one fail to remind readers that, unlike many other subgroups, English language learners are a dynamic group defined by an impermanent status.

One typical example is this November 2019 U.S. News and World Report article on the latest NAEP test results, which lump EL learnerresults in along with other groups. It quotes John King, CEO of the Education Trust and former U.S. Secretary of Education: “The persistent gaps in reading achievement of students from low-income backgrounds, students of color, English learners and students with disabilities on the NAEP require urgent action.”

The US News story only briefly mentioned EL students. But in a way, that’s my concern This is an easy oversight, but these single mentions of EL students as though they belong with static low-performing groups does them a disservice.

Current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made the same mistake when she referred to the EL performance gap on California’s state reading and math tests in this June 2019 article from LA School Report. She was disappointed because “those gaps have not narrowed at all” despite efforts over the past 50 years to help English learners.

Neither of these education secretaries apparently realizes the EL learner gap is one that can’t go away. The journalists reporting their remarks should have pointed out the gap can and should go away for former EL  students, i.e., those who have reached English proficiency.

Some journalists seem to get that EL scores are different and treat them accordingly.

A 2019 TV story from NY1 looked at the right group of students, giving us a refreshing break from the dismal narrative of the always-underachieving EL learners.

It reported a “surprising finding”— that former EL students performed even better than native English speakers on a statewide English assessment.

I’m not surprised, and the general public wouldn’t be either if they weren’t always hearing about bogus EL/non-EL achievement gaps.

This NY1 story clarifies that English language learners score much higher once they have learned English.

Issue #2: Confusing Current vs. Former EL Students

One likely reason that stories fail to differentiate between current and former EL learners is confusion even among education officials in how they represent these two groups.

A good example is this December 2019 story in Education Dive. It reported on a study that followed 18,000 EL learners who started kindergarten in the Chicago Public Schools. One “Dive Insight” that was reported: “At CPS, 80 percent of ELs developed English proficiency by 8th grade, much higher than the national average of fewer than 9 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education.”

The 9 percent figure, however, was NAEP data on current EL students, not those who had achieved language proficiency. The article was comparing two different groups of students and two different assessments.

It’s easy to understand how this happened when you read this press release about the study from CPS titled “Groundbreaking Research Shows Majority of CPS English Learners Match or Exceed Academic Progress of Other Students.” This headline implies current EL learners are the students meeting or exceeding the progress of other students. That’s not true; it’s former English learners who are doing this.

And indeed, this is what happened to Education Dive reporter Shawna De La Rose, who wrote the article. She told me that she had worked from the school district’s press release and lacked the expertise in EL issues to question which group of students was really involved. (Other reporters whose work is mentioned in this column did not respond to emailed queries about why they had reported matters as they did.)

This 2015 story from the Houston Chronicle also confused current and former EL students. It was titled “More English language learners graduating at top of class in Houston ISD” and featured a student who was one of 25 “ELL valedictorians” in the district. Puzzled, I called the Houston ISD and confirmed the valedictorian highlighted in the story was a former English language learner.

Giving wrong information was bad enough, but by treating EL learning as a forever label, the story also failed to give this student credit for an additional accomplishment—officially achieving English proficiency and moving out of the EL classification. Simply adding the word “former” would have made all the difference.

This 2015 Houston Chronicle story confuses current and former English language learners.

Issue #3: Unicorn stories

I’d also like to see more realistic news coverage of EL students that acknowledges the length of time necessary to attain English language proficiency. Too often reporters call this process “picking up English” (Chalkbeat, 2015).

There are too many aspirational/inspirational stories about new EL learners who seamlessly adapt to their school environment and make fast English progress. These make good reads, but they don’t acknowledge the long road ahead for most EL learners.

Amy Silverman pointed out a similar phenomenon in her 2018 piece for The Grade. Just as students with disabilities are sometimes portrayed in the media as one-dimensional super people, many stories about individual EL learners show them winning awards and effortlessly overcoming difficulties. This gives a wrong impression.

Without proper context, news coverage of these EL learner “unicorns” sets up unreasonable expectations for the vast majority of EL learners.

This 2019 WLKY TV news story from Louisville, Kentucky, celebrated the success of a student who won his school’s spelling bee after just two years in the U.S., but failed to point out widely recognized research has shown it can take EL learners five to seven years to reach proficiency.

By contrast, this 2017 article from the Houston Chronicle about a high school valedictorian who came to the U.S. as a 5-year-old noted her journey was a “years-long struggle to learn English.” Even better, it pointed out that “a large number of students once classified as English-language learners” in the Houston school district are now graduating as valedictorians and salutatorians. Covering the end of the EL journey as well as the beginning makes stories like this one both inspirational and realistic.

Coverage that doesn’t get EL learners right contributes to misconceptions about who these students are, what their struggles and successes are, and how much time it takes for them to reach proficiency. It furthers the misunderstanding of the EL/non-EL “achievement gap,” overlooks the accomplishments of former EL learners, and reinforces a biased public view.

It doesn’t take much to fix that problem. Stories that give context about who EL students are and reasons for the EL/non-EL performance gap would go a long way toward giving readers a more accurate picture.  So would more enterprise stories that look at how former EL students are doing. The hard work of moving to proficiency shouldn’t be skipped over, as though this is an easy accomplishment.

The real achievements of EL learners are noteworthy and deserve to be told.

Related work:

English-language learners make the front pages – but that’s not enough (2017 Conor Williams)

Careful about that dual-language coverage! (2017 Tara García Mathewson)

Writing better stories about students with disabilities (2018 Amy Silverman)