While insisting that it did nothing wrong, a Central Valley schoolhouse district has quickly settled a lawsuit filed by several chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a one-half-dozen parents and teachers who charged that the district had adopted a destructive plan for English learners, which the state, in turn, failed to monitor.

ACLU Chief Counsel Mark Rosenbaum said no teachers defended the program.

ACLU Chief Counsel Mark Rosenbaum said no teachers dedicated the plan.

Marking Rosenbaum, main counsel of the ACLU of Southern California, vowed Friday that it would be filing similar suits in order to force the land Department of  Instruction to ready flawed programs that other districts offer English learners.

Under the terms of a settlement released last week, Dinuba Unified has agreed to immediately supplant the controversial reading program, 2d Linguistic communication Acquisition Development Instruction, or SLADI, to hire two English language learning consultants suggested by the plaintiffs, and to offer later-schoolhouse and summer interventions for students who had been assigned SLADI. The unorthodox program, which the district start tried in 2007, takes a grammar- and spelling-intensive approach to learning English. It started with first and 2d graders, who were pulled out of course for ii½ hours daily for the beginning one-half of the year to study parts of speech and learn sentence structure. Rosenbaum likened it to teaching pond past memorizing the chemistry of water. Teachers and parents who sued said that children fell behind their classmates in reading and were denied exposure to literature and vocabulary. The settlement says that the age-appropriate replacement programs volition exist designed to "to raise oral linguistic communication skills, written language skills, comprehension and access to core curriculum, equally well equally to integrate ELL students to the fullest extent possible."

Dinuba Unified Supt. Joe Hernandez said the program produced "great results." Click to enlarge.

Dinuba Unified Supt. Joe Hernandez said the program produced "slap-up results." Click to enlarge.

Nonetheless, in a YouTube video and printing release, Superintendent Joe Hernandez  defended SLADI, which he said brought "great results," and led 2 of five elementary schools to raise scores enough to escape penalties of Program Comeback status nether the No Child Left Behind law. He dismissed the accommodate as a philosophical disagreement and unsaid the simply reason the district is settling is to escape $i million in expenses from a protracted legal fight. (The district has agreed to pay plaintiffs' attorneys $142,000 in fees and costs anyway.)

"People tin e'er fight well-nigh philosophy, but we know the real factors in the success of our students are the quality of our teachers and the resources we tin can devote to them," Hernandez said. At the aforementioned time, he acknowledged that the district already had "formed a teacher-based commission to recommend improvements to its program," and planned to go before the school board when the lawsuit was filed at the cease of May.

Co-ordinate to the lawsuit, nevertheless, teachers had expressed articulate dissatisfaction with SLADI. In the fall of 2011, the Executive Lath of the Dinuba Teachers Assn. sent a argument to the district stating, "Teachers within our association have adamant that this plan is ineffective" and that "teachers have ethical and moral problems with this programme." A month before the lawsuit was filed, the full Association condemned SLADI as a "backwards model that could prove detrimental" to students and criticized the district for adopting a program that defied accepted inquiry.

Rosenbaum said the district would be hard-pressed to observe 1 instructor who defended the program.

Dinuba is a half dozen,000-educatee K-12 commune serving the 24,000-population city of the same name located e of Route 99, midway between Fresno and Visalia. More than 90 percent of Dinuba Unified students are Hispanic and nigh one third are English language learners.

Since Dinuba Unified was in Program Improvement equally a district, the state had to sign off on the plan that the commune adopted for English learners. In rubber stamping SLADI, the land was derelict of its oversight responsibilities, the lawsuit said.

"This is a good example of why the state needs to be involved," said Rosenbaum, accusing the country of an "apple-polishing failure to aggressively enforce the State Constitution (with its requirement for equal educational opportunity) and federal mandates." The rapid out-of-courtroom settlement left the ACLU without a chance to pursue activeness against the state, for now.

Recognizing that the quality of programs for English learners varies widely and standards for classifying and reintegrating English learners are inconsistent, Sen. Alex Padilla, a Los Angeles Democrat, proposed 2 bills this year. SB 1108 would require districts and county offices to study the criteria they use for redesignating English language learners as skilful in English to the State Department of Educational activity, which would and so made recommendations to the Legislature; that beak appears headed toward passage. Just SB 1109, which would have established a primary programme for English learners – looking at best practices and techniques for instruction, parent involvement, and the long-term learning needs of English language learners – died in Senate Appropriations.

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