International High School at Largo Aims to Boost Graduation Rates of EL Students

Last summer, the Council of the District of Columbia held a hearing on a proposed bill to enhance the city’s provisions for providing English learners (ELs) and their families with access to basic language supports (e.g. translation and interpretation) at school. Many D.C. students, the majority of whom were English learners, provided testimony about how difficult it was to navigate day-to-day school routines when they did not know English. As my former colleague Isabella Sanchez wrote in a blog about the hearing, “One student had such a terrible first day at school that she did not want to return. She said she felt ‘inferior and alone’ when she could not find anyone to help her navigate the confusing logistics of starting high school, or at least help her ask for lunch.”

Experiences like this student’s could be one reason that that American ELs have higher high school dropout rates and lower graduation rates than their non-EL peers. Consider: the average graduation rate in the U.S. is 82 percent, while the average EL graduation rate is just 62.6 percent.

States, districts, and schools clearly have substantial work to do in boosting the graduation rates of their English learners. In Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS), is the 20th largest school district in the U.S., 56 percent of ELs graduated high school within four years in 2014. That same year PGCPS partnered with the Internationals Network for Public Schools and local immigration advocacy organization Casa de Maryland to create two new high schools designed specifically to meet the needs of EL students.

Their effort was bolstered by a $3 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York as part of their Opportunity by Design Initiative that aims to support school redesign. In PGCPS, those funds are used to both build the capacity of school administrators and staff via coaching, specialists, and a school design manager and to support their work integrating competency based education (CBE) into their school models. CBE provides students with flexibility to demonstrate their mastery of a topic in multiple ways, which means ELs have the opportunity to show their knowledge even if they don’t have strong English language skills.

The new high schools opened in the fall of 2015. Students must apply to the school and are admitted via lottery, which means that these are schools of choice. Once admitted, students are assigned to one of the two schools based on where they live in the county. That has resulted in very different populations of ELs between the two schools. The International High School at Langley Park enrolls a high number of “newcomers” — kids who have recently arrived in the country and have very low levels of English proficiency. By contrast, at the International High School at Largo, twenty percent of the incoming freshman class are classified as Long-Term English Learners (LTEL), many of whom have been classified as ELs since kindergarten. Many of these students have strong speaking and listening skills in English, but have not mastered reading and writing in English. Only fourteen percent of students are considered “newcomers.” Partly as a result of these demographics, the school has a fairly even distribution of students across a range of WIDA’s English language proficiency levels.

That diversity of ELP might seem challenging, but the school sees it as an opportunity. It follows the Internationals Network for Public Schools'model for educating ELs, an approach that emphasizes student collaboration across lines of difference. In this case, students of different ELP levels, academic background, literacy levels, and native language are placed together in small groups to work together in projects. That allows students to teach and learn from one another. As the International HS at Largo’s instructional coach Andrew Sigal noted, grouping students together who speak different languages gives them an opportunity to use their developing English skills, since “English is the language they have in common.”

When I visited the school, the collaborative ethos stood out. Each student has her own laptop, which helped facilitate their work together. Students worked together to find answers on the internet or in-text and to troubleshoot problems. Teachers spent their time circulating to help groups that were stuck, review work, and answer questions.

Language and content integration is another key pillar of the Internationals’ model. That means all content teachers become language teachers by integrating language development into their content area instruction. As Sigal shared, it’s an “instructional shift to take a content-area teacher and say you’re going to be a language instructor as well.” To support this “shift,” teachers participate in a seven week training over summer break and receive ongoing coaching and professional development. (For a district-wide approach to raising the language competencies of content instructors, see New America’s recent report on the David Douglas School District.)

The program’s substantial resource requirements (material and human alike) have created some grumbling in the community. In recent years Prince George’s County Public Schools has undergone many changes in leadership and faced severe budget constraints that have made it difficult to implement and sustain policies aimed at supporting their most vulnerable students. Over the summer of 2015, PGCPS School Chief Kevin Maxwell had his plans to create universal pre-k, hire parent-school liaisons and expand talent and gifted programming rejected by the school board. Yet Maxwell was able to preserve the funding for the two new international high schools. The Washington Post quoted one school board member: “English-language learners deserve specialized attention and instruction. But basic learners need specialized instruction and support so they, too, can become college-and career-ready. We’ve got to be equitable.”

At the same time, the Prince George’s branch of the NAACP opposed the schools’ creation because they would segregate ELs. But from the perspective of Alison Hanks-Sloan, principal of the International High School at Largo, the school does not separate EL students to marginalize them, but to help them succeed. That is, the model does segregate ELs because of their unique language needs, but it also provides them with access to robust project-based instruction and opportunities to collaborate with peers who have different backgrounds and abilities (and frequently speak different non-English languages at home). “We define segregation as a forced situation and our school is an option, a school of choice,” wrote Hanks-Sloan in an email, “We provide students who traditionally have not participated in specialty schools or academies in our district with an alternative opportunity for high school.”  

The model's design (ELs-only) may also be particularly justifiable in a county where ELs have persistently had lower graduation rates than their non-EL peers. As Hanks-Sloan argued, it was time for the district to take a different approach and provide EL students with a high-quality school option that would actually support their unique needs.  

Fortunately, evidence suggests that the Internationals’ model holds major promise for high school ELs. Consider an example from New York, where several schools have used this model for many years. In 2011, EL graduation rates in New York City and New York state were only 37 and 36 percent respectively. By contrast, the 2011 four-year graduation rate for Internationals Network students in New York City was 64 percent. Even better, 79 percent of their 12th grade students were accepted into college. It’s hard to argue with those numbers — hopefully they’re a harbinger of similarly strong results for Largo’s ELs.

--This post is part of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Click here for more information on this team's work. To subscribe to the biweekly newsletter, click here, enter your contact information, and select "Education Policy.""