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Oregon’s K-12 student enrollment saw a sharp drop during the pandemic, and the state continues to face declines. But one group of students has experienced steady growth over the past four years: multilingual learners.
Multilingual learners are students who grow up in households speaking a language other than English, and consequently must acquire English language proficiency in the school system. In the 2023-24 academic year, 65,965 students held this status, up by about 3,500 from the year before, making them 12.2% of Oregon’s total student enrollment.
But while a fast-growing segment, these students are also part of the state’s lowest-performing student group on achievement tests.
In the latest batch of Oregon Statewide Assessment results, only 5.2% of multilingual learners demonstrated proficiency in English and language arts, 5.1% of them were proficient in math, and less than 5% of them were proficient in science.
The results worry experts who study strategies to lead these students to success. ”They’re pretty low,” says Dr. Julie Esparza Brown, a Portland State University professor whose work focuses on improving literacy outcomes for multilingual students.
Esparza Brown’s research partner, Dr. Amanda Sanford, says multilingual learners struggle more in Oregon than in other states. In nearby California, for example, about 10.3% of such learners are proficient in English, language arts and math.
Sanford says Oregon’s education system is not designed to support multilingual students, who often need to learn content alongside a new language, meaning they’re often playing catch-up at school.
“When you have your system set up to support monolingual English speakers, you lose the opportunity to make cultural connections, to make connections to a student’s language to elevate the value of the knowledge base that they bring in,” Sanford says.
For some multilingual students, Esparza Brown says, acquiring English skills can be relatively easy. If a student is coming from formal education in a home country, she says they often just need to understand English terminology and how the language works before they can bridge English with concepts they already understand in their native language.
But the challenge for schools is that multilingual learners come from a host of backgrounds. If a student, for example, was raised in a refugee camp and hasn’t had access to formal instruction in any language, Esparza Brown says they might benefit more from a different teaching strategy.
“A key component [to success] is having it be intentional at the school level to really understand the backgrounds of each of the students,” she says. “Their backgrounds are going to really then guide what kind of instruction that they need.”
Esparza Brown adds that the individualized attention each student needs is compromised because not all teachers receive adequate instruction in how to teach and support multilingual students.
The pair have been trying to tackle the teacher training problem specifically. They developed a framework they call PLUSS (an acronym for a set of principles too elaborate to list here), which helps prepare educators to instruct multilingual students. Strategies their framework emphasizes include making cultural connections and taking advantage of skills the student already has with a native language.
Both professors say progress is slow in Oregon, even as more districts are coming around to how they’ll have to adapt to changing demographics in their schools. There’s still work to be done when it comes to teacher training, and the two think there needs to be more urgency around multilingual learners’ performance.
Sanford says without greater urgency, Oregon will deprive a generation of multilingual learners of the full benefits of literacy. Literacy, she says, is a civil right that allows for learning, employment and self development.
“When we miss the opportunity to support multilingual learners to gain those skills, we’re really depriving them of access to educational opportunity, to basic rights in society,” Sanford says.