While major strides have been made in education reform over the past 10 years, improvements are not nearly enough to satisfy new federal requirements. Migrant/Bilingual Education Director Richard Gomez says, "It's not about 'thinking out of the box.' It's about getting out of the box altogether."

Over the past 4 years the percentage of Hispanic seventh-graders passing the state's WASL assessment test, for example, has risen from 14.7% to 17.7%, but to meet federal goals, there must be an improvement of 6.86 percentage points per year over the next 12 years, Dr. Gomez told the August Institute conference of migrant/bilingual educators.

The consequences when a school's overall student body and its individual at-risk groups do not meet mandated improvements can be severe, Dr. Gomez explains. And the state anticipates that hundreds of schools in the state will fail the first year.

The first year a school fails to meet improvement goals, its failure is publicized. The second consecutive year it fails, parents are given a choice to have their children bussed to a different school in the district. The third year, the district is obliged to pay up to $1,000 per struggling student in supplemental services.

If a school fails for four straight years, the school district is expected to step in and make "substantial changes," including possible top-to-bottom staff changes. And if a school fails five years in a row, the state is obliged to take over and do whatever is necessary to get the school on track, Dr. Gomez explains.

In meetings with the federal government, officials pointed out that 30 years of test scores nationwide showed no significant improvement among at-risk students, including migrant and English as a second language students, despite billions of dollars in special funding.

"If we're not going to make a difference with these kids, then why are we spending all this money," Dr. Gomez quoted officials as saying.

On the other hand, federal officials showed that 4,500 schools across the country that are among the 30 percent with the most at-risk students still manage to be in the top 10 percent of schools in academic achievement.

"If these other (4,500) schools have done it, so can we," says Dr. Gomez.

The state director is familiar with some of the top schools from his work in Texas.

Hollybrook Elementary School in Houston, for example, has 1,000 students, 87 percent of which receive subsidized lunch and 67 percent of which lack English proficiency.

These obstacles give the school plenty of excuses to fail, but instead it is one of the top schools in the nation, Dr. Gomez explains.

One key to the school's success is parent involvement. Every day there are 60-70 parents in the school.

"You can't reach federal goals without parental involvement," Dr. Gomez says.

An analysis of what factors account for a school's success showed that class size only accounts for about 8 percent, teacher quality and development 43 percent, and parent involvement 49 percent.

More student involvement is also key to student success. When teachers do all the talking, Dr. Gomez says, students have very low retention. They may cram for tests and pass them, but they have no long-term retention of the information.

If students get involved actively in projects and in the teaching, their retention soars.

"We can get up to 80-90 percent retention when we help students do the learning and teaching," says Dr. Gomez.

"The best reason for change is TTWWADI ["That's the way we've always done it."] isn't working," he says. "It's not about teachers working harder or longer; it's about working better and differently" with techniques that have been proven through research.

Dr. Gomez says for the past 30 years schools have been riding a dead horse. Solving our educational problems don't just require a new saddle.

"We can't just tweak the horse," he says. "We need a new horse.

"It's about starting from scratch. If we continue to do what we've always done, we will continue to get the same results," he says.

Dr. Gomez says enhanced federal funding comes with high goals, but also with a lot of flexibility for schools to develop their own programs -- if they work.

"Yes, it's a challenge, but it's also a great opportunity," he says.

One goal Dr. Gomez has is to phase out ineffective "pull-out ESL classes" that take students out of other classrooms for English language training about an hour a day.

The students may eventually learn English -- although perhaps not academic-level English -- but, in the meanwhile, they fall further and further behind in all other subjects.

"It's not just about learning English," Dr. Gomez says. "It's about being at grade level. Students have to be at grade level or above to have true success."

The most successful model for helping students gain bilingual proficiency and overall academic success, according to research, is the Dual Language Immersion Model.

In this model young students -- both English-speaking and foreign language-speaking -- are taught all subjects in two languages, becoming truly bilingual and, at the same time, achieving higher retention and higher test scores, on the average, than other students by the end of their 12 years of public schooling.

Manson, Shelton, Toppenish, Grandview and Sunnyside School Districts are using the dual-language model this year. Pasco, Seattle, Walla Walla, Wenatchee and Yakima School Districts are considering it for 2003-2004.

Improvements recently accomplished or ready to be implemented by the Migrant/Bilingual Education Program include:

• Implementation of the statewide Washington Language Proficiency Test (WLPT) to assess students across the state more accurately and consistently.
• Creation of English as a Second Language standards and benchmarks.
• Better communications between migrant/bilingual educators and parents through the department's website, its list-serv and the Migrant Education News newsletter.
• Competitive grants to individual teachers of migrant students who are trying to enhance their classroom instruction.
• Better tracking of students as they migrate from one school to another.
• Use of Title III funds to enhance teacher development.
• Increased state and regional staffing to support migrant educators.
• Simplified, "transparent" application processing of migrant students into summer programs.

Additional goals for the future include:

• Continued support for statewide testing. Dr. Gomez opposes those wishing to abolish the WASL test. "If not for WASL, there would not be the focus on our children. It would take our children off the radar screen."
• Improvement of the WASL to make it fairer for all students. One improvement would be to translate math sections into other prominent languages, including Spanish and Russian.
• At least one second-language acquisition class required for all pre-service teachers.
• Automatic acceptance into college for the top 10 percent of all graduating high school students. In other locations this has doubled or tripled the number of migrant/bilingual students attending college.
• In-state college tuition for all children graduating from Washington schools -- whether or not they are documented.
• Financial incentives for teachers serving in the critical needs areas, including English as a second language, math, science and special education.
• Increase of special ESL funding for students from 3 years to 5-6 years. Dr. Gomez thinks it's strange that native English-speaking students are required to take 12 years of English in public schools because it's so hard to learn, but foreign students are supposed to learn English in 3 years. In that short time, he says, they might learn street talk, but they won't learn the English required in academic classes.

Dr. Gomez points out that all Washington citizens should support these improvements. One chart he uses to show the growth of students in Washington schools reveals that for the past 30 years, the number of white students has not increased significantly. On the other hand, the number of Hispanic and Oriental students has increased by 600 percent.

"Who's going to pay for your retirement and mine?" asks Dr. Gomez. "Who do we need to prepare for the future to maintain our economic way of life?"

More than 70,000 students in Washington schools speak English as a second language. While 43,656 of them speak Spanish as a primary language, the rest speak 180 different languages. The most numerous, besides Spanish, are, in order: Russian, Ukranian, Vietnamese, Korean, Cambodian, Somali and Tagalog.

STATE MIGRANT DIRECTOR MAKES STATE OF THE STATE REVIEW

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