Dr. Soyoung Park, an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin, is a collaborator in our ODE/OSU partnership and national expert in supporting English learners with disabilities. Through the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), she and colleagues published a report that calls for additional research and policy guidance for supporting English language learners with disabilities.

The report explains that little research exists regarding best practices for this population. This gap is troubling in light of the growing number of dually identified students who struggle academically, and the fact that teachers require more focused training to support these learners. Dr. Park and colleagues recommend that the federal government and state and local education agencies collaborate to conduct research and develop guidance on the following: 1) identification, assessment, and eligibility determination for English learners with disabilities; 2) special education and targeted intervention to meet these students’ needs; 3) policies for appropriately exiting these students from ELL and special education services; 4) recommendations for effective family engagement.

At the March 2018 State English Learners Alliance Conference hosted by the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators, Dr. Park presented a draft of guidelines for exiting English learners with disabilities. You can access her Power Point presentation here: Park_ExitingELSWD_PreConference_3.7.18.

The journal Exceptional Children recently published a paper from our researchers in the ODE/OSU ELL Partnership. The featured study tests the effect of the ever-EL framework, a method for including current and former ELs in considering outcomes for all students who entered school as ELs.

Partnership researchers Dr. Ilana Umansy, Dr. Karen Thompson, and Dr. Guadalupe Diaz compared the use of current-EL and ever-EL frameworks to understand how English learners K-12 are proportionally represented in special education, and more specifically within the different disability categories. They found that current ELs are highly overrepresented in special education at the middle and high school levels. However, there was no evidence of overrepresentation of ever-ELs at these higher grades. In fact, ever-ELs were significantly underrepresented in special education overall and in most disability categories.

Patterns for reclassification (exiting students from EL services), might help explain these results. ELs with disabilities are far less likely than ELs without disabilities to exit EL services. The outcome is a bottleneck, with a substantial proportion of dually identified students remaining in EL services at the secondary level.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) published a blog post authored by our partnership about how Oregon is using the Ever EL category to more accurately capture outcomes for the full group of students who started school classified as English learners. As we explain in the IES blog post, one major reason why the Ever EL category is useful is that at higher grade levels, former ELs far outnumber current ELs. Reporting outcomes for Ever ELs allows us to understand how well schools and districts are serving both groups of students.

In our post, we go into more detail about how analyzing outcomes only for current ELs provides incomplete information. Typically, graduation rates are reported only for current ELs, with former ELs included in the “non-EL” group (as illustrated by the panel on the bottom left in the figure below). However, this reporting scheme provides no information about how schools are serving the much larger group of former ELs. In fact, former ELs graduate at rates slightly higher than students never classified as ELs (comparing the red and yellow bars in the top panel of the figure below). It is certainly concerning that only about half of current ELs graduate from Oregon high schools within four years. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the full group of current and former ELs–in other words, the Ever EL group–is graduating at rates much closer to their peers never classified as ELs (comparing the red and green bars in the bottom right panel below). This information combats deficit narratives about EL students and about how effectively schools are serving this group of students. While there is still much room for improvement in how education agencies meet the needs of current and former EL students, having complete data about outcomes for both groups, by using the Ever EL category, can facilitate better decision making.

We are pleased to announce the release of a policy brief examining English learner students with disabilities in Oregon. Both practitioners and policymakers have raised concerns about this group of students, including whether ELs are over-represented in special education and how best to determine when ELs with disabilities have become proficient in English and no longer need EL services. In this brief we present results of a variety of analyses that compare likelihood of special education identification for English learners and other students.

For one of the three main analyses in the brief, we examine special education enrollment rates for Oregon students in 2013-14. As the lefthand panel of the graph above shows, nearly 40% of students classified as ELs in the middle school grades were in special education. This far exceeds the special education enrollment rate of approximately 15% for students never classified as ELs at this grade level (the Never EL group, shown in the righthand panel of the graph). However, as the middle and righthand panels of the graph illustrates, when we compare special education enrollment rates for all students ever classified as English learners (the Ever EL group) to rates for students never classified as ELs (the Never EL group), the rates are quite similar. As explained in more detail in the full brief, ELs with disabilities are much less likely to meet the criteria necessary to become considered proficient in English and exit EL services. Therefore, large proportions of students in middle and high school who remain classified as English learners qualify for special education. We discuss a variety of implications of our findings, including a need for more guidance on how to effectively determine when ELs with disabilities should exit EL services.