California ESL program is ineffective

Today met my daughter and some friends at an ice cream parlor. I don't often get to just sit and talk to my children's friends since I don't live with my kids. One of the friends is the guy she is going to the prom with next week (pictures coming ...) and the other one was a girl she has been friends with for 6 years. The girl, Twen, is Vietnamese and mentioned that I was the one that introduced her to Sarah. I was surprised and I had no idea what she was talking about. She reminded me when they were in 6th grade I substituted for an ESL class for a month.

She was in that class. That class was a mess. There was no learning going on, just crowd control. They had a variety of grade levels and English levels in one class. Every week they had one or two students added to the class and there was no way for any of them to leave. One of the students in the class didn't speak another language, but the school thought he was too slow for a normal class and since his last name was Spanish they put him in an ESL class. Since there was a constant stream of students into the class there were not enough desks for everyone.

Chaos, that sums up that class. They were being treated like special education, but most of them were smarter than the average student in the school. I went to the principal and asked him how these kids got out of the whole day ESL class and went into normal classes. Even special education wants to mainstream kids so they can feel productive and part of normal life. The California ESL system doesn't try to mainstream students, they want to keep them all together so they fail together. ESL students in California are not integrated into normal classrooms.

In the month I was a substitute teacher I found a way to get 6 - 10 of the students in that class out of that class. Twen was one of those students. She said that I had introduced her to Sarah during that time and Sarah helped her get comfortable with the normal classes. Twen told me she can remember the day I told her she would be able to attend normal classes. She said Eric was the other one that got permission that same day and they high fived each other. I can't imagine how that affected her life, if I hadn't been able to do that she wouldn't have enjoyed school so much.

If I hadn't been able to get her into a normal classroom she might have not been so successful in high school and been in leadership classes and gone into college to be a nurse. ESL classes are important in schools, my daughters were in ESL classes when they came back from Korea. That was in Arizona and it was a "pull out" program where students were pulled out to an ESL teacher for one hour a day a few days a week. ESL students can't be labeled ESL their entire scholastic career. My daughters spent half a school year in Arizona and by the time they came to California they were no longer labeled ESL.

I wish people that make decisions had those decisions affect them and their family and then they would rethink their fantastic ideas to save the world through our schools!