The students the reading wars forgot

NEW BEDFORD — In the kindergarten wing of Hayden-McFadden Elementary, 5-year-old Anderson sits at the back of the rug in the “newcomer” classroom. From here, he’s in the perfect position for Maria Herrera — the classroom’s paraeducator — to sit on a chair behind him and whisper in Spanish while the class reads a story.

“¿Qué animal es?” Herrera whispers in Anderson’s ear — what’s that animal? She’s repeating every question that Samantha Rego, the lead teacher, asks the class.

“¡Oso!” Anderson shouts. “Bien. Diga ‘bear'” — Herrera prompts him to say the English word, which Anderson excitedly does. Then he repeats himself — “b- b- bearrr” — carefully shaping his mouth around the new word.

This quiet exchange at the back of the rug represents an overlooked frontier in a revolution sweeping through the nation’s reading instruction. 

As a debate rages about how to better teach reading in the U.S. — a controversy often called the “reading wars” — little of it has focused on the students who most need help: English language learners. A rapidly expanding population in American public schools, English learners scored markedly low on the most recent national reading assessments. 

New Bedford is at the forefront of this reading crisis. In 2023, after many years of patchwork reading curricula across the city’s 20 elementary schools, less than 30% of students could meet the state’s expectations for reading and writing in third grade, as measured by its year-end MCAS test. 

Part of the challenge in New Bedford is preparing the district’s more than 3,200 English learners for the exam. Only one in four Massachusetts school districts has as many total students as New Bedford has English learners. And only 8% of New Bedford’s English learners met the state’s third-grade expectations last year.

This year, however, the district’s literacy strategy is in the midst of an overhaul. Laura Garcia, the district’s English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum manager, is leading the effort to revamp everything from curriculum to teacher preparation. That includes an important shift in mindset: “Home languages are honored,” Garcia said.

In New Bedford, literacy instruction must engage English learners because that’s who the students overwhelmingly are. One in four New Bedford students is an English learner — almost double the statewide rate in Massachusetts (and higher than any statewide rate across the country). Beyond “English learners” — the kids receiving special language instruction — roughly another 20% of kids are former English learners: kids who no longer need special support. 

After English and Spanish, the next most commonly spoken languages in the New Bedford schools are Cape Verdean Creole, Portuguese, K’iché (a Mayan language spoken in parts of Guatemala), Haitian Creole, and Vietnamese. In total, the students speak more than 40 languages — everything from Arabic to Urdu.

Many students are like Anderson, the little boy who sat on the back of the rug during story time. A recent immigrant from El Salvador, Anderson showed up to school months after the year began. His classroom at Hayden-McFadden Elementary is full of other newcomers like him.

Anderson still doesn't speak much English — "bear" counts among his first words — but he was only in his second week of school when he became engrossed by a story his teacher read. He giggled along as the pages turned and a parade of animals — a rabbit, hedgehog, mouse, and bear — improbably snuggled together inside a single mitten.

Herrera, the Spanish-speaking paraeducator, marveled as Anderson wrote a perfect sentence about the story in Spanish: "Yo veo el oso." Then she helped him translate and write each word into his very first English sentence: "I see the bear."

"He's so eager to learn," Herrera said, looking on proudly as Anderson scooted back to the rug, sitting and laughing among his new friends.

Using students’ home languages as “leverage”

Laura Garcia, now two decades into working in New Bedford schools, grew up in the city and graduated from New Bedford High in 1991. Before she began overseeing the district’s English Language Arts strategy, she was a teacher, instructional coach and building-level administrator. 

When Garcia was growing up, her parents spoke Portuguese around the house — they were part of New Bedford's historic Portuguese community, one of the largest in the United States. But in the 1980s, her parents’ and schools’ attitudes toward language were very different.

Garcia’s parents always expected her to respond in English, she said. They feared that speaking two languages would be confusing for her, or limit her ability to speak proper English. To this day Garcia understands Portuguese, but does not speak it. 

And she can’t remember her teachers ever acknowledging the large Portuguese presence in their classrooms. "When I was going through school, it wasn’t looked at as an asset,” Garcia said. 

Now that she has taught in New Bedford’s classrooms and is responsible for much of the district’s instructional strategy, Garcia is trying to change this mindset. Connecting with students in their home language is “leverage,” she says, “because they’re thinking in their home languages anyway.”

The philosophy is known as “translanguaging” — which means allowing students to read, write, think and speak in their home language, with the aim of supporting their academic English. It’s a concept gaining attention in education circles because, when successfully executed, it helps students to more effectively become developed thinkers — and in multiple languages, not just English. 

Translanguaging is being used beyond elementary and English as a second language (ESL) classrooms in New Bedford. One middle school provided a striking example.

Garcia led a tour into the sixth-grade room in Roosevelt Middle where Alexia Soares was teaching — and Garcia was noticeably excited.

Soares, in her mid-20s, is a former (and beloved) student of Garcia's who has gone on — like Garcia herself — to teach in the community where she was raised. Soares also grew up speaking another language at home — Spanish, in her case — and has the same impulse to allow students the freedom to think, speak, and write in their native tongue.

After Soares explained the day's objectives and tasks, students got to work answering questions posted on the smart board. When students turned to work with their assigned partners, the room came alive with a chorus of intermixing languages.

One group of boys, near the front of the room, was engaged in an animated discussion about the text, mostly in Spanish. After reading the assigned questions in English, they contemplated and argued in Spanish, in which their skill and comfort was best suited to grapple with complex ideas.

Research supports that students' background knowledge, verbal reasoning skills, and semantic language skills support their development as complex readers — and as such are essential tools for becoming strong readers at any age. Allowing these boys to continually hone these more advanced skills in their home language will support their overall literacy development, Garcia explained, including helping them to improve their English more quickly.

Later on, Garcia would explain that the boys had all immigrated from villages near each other in Honduras, then met and built friendships in the halls of their New Bedford school. They formed a community around Soares' classroom, and often will stay after school in her room.

Throughout the day's lesson, they often switched languages, and occasionally would point to the small screen of a Chromebook computer, navigating to the built-in dictionary when helpful. All of their work in Spanish was to help them better process and understand the English texts they read or listened to.

But when they go to Soares' classroom after school, she encourages them to speak Spanish for its own sake.

"I tell them that their English brains must be tired from the day," Soares said. "So come here and take a break."

The acceptance of their home language and culture, both in the classroom and after school, has made these boys feel connected to their school and teacher. 

After school they chatter with each other and Soares in the language they first learned to speak thousands of miles away. And they delight in the serendipity of new friends from an old home — and a teacher who welcomes them.

A growing population of English learners

In New Bedford, the number of English learners has exploded. In the last decade, official tallies show a nearly 400% increase — from 6% of students 10 years ago to 26% today. 

Part of that increase, however, is because of unrecognized need. New Bedford used to be woefully unprepared to serve English-learning students. “There wasn’t an ESL program to speak of" 10 years ago, said New Bedford’s mayor, Jon Mitchell. 

Many students who likely needed services were not identified, nor did the district have the teachers or resources to help them. 

One consequence came in 2020, when the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into New Bedford’s schools for failing to provide adequate language support, especially for speakers of K’iché. According to parents’ complaints, many of the Guatemalan natives who spoke K’iché were lumped together with Spanish-speakers — a language they didn’t know. 

The district and the Justice Department reached a settlement in 2022, which led the district to hire more translators and teachers, employ a third-party translation service, and provide all written communication to parents in multiple languages, including K’iché.

Most of the district’s professional development sessions this year, according to Garcia, have focused on helping teachers better communicate with multilingual students and families — especially speakers of K’iché.

Teachers are learning how to make lessons that connect to students’ backgrounds. K’iché-speaking staff and community members have led presentations about connecting with families. And the seven full-time members of a growing “translation and interpretation department” offer day-to-day services.

“We have been doing a lot of work to support educators in helping our K’iché-speaking students to succeed and feel safe and supported in our classrooms,” said Garcia. 

For many community members, this newfound focus is long overdue.  

Gordon Duke, a co-leader of the Organización Maya K'iché, a community group that supports New Bedford’s Indigenous Guatemalans, says he thinks the district’s official tally of 252 K’iché speakers is still low. 

“We got hundreds more,” Duke said. K’iché families are “third-class citizens” in Guatemala, so are often unlikely to identify themselves to officials, he said. “Kids know to hide it from people.” And Duke says he still doesn’t trust the schools after years of feeling overlooked. 

The students the “reading wars” forgot

Nationwide, English learners’ challenges are often overlooked. They consistently have among the lowest scores on national reading assessments of any measured group. 

The reading gap between English learners and their non-EL peers is larger than the gap between white and Hispanic students; between white and Black or Indigenous students; and between students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and those who were not.

Even in Massachusetts, a self-described leader in education, the data is troubling.

Less than half — 43% — of Massachusetts fourth-graders are demonstrating proficiency in reading — a number that has been declining in recent years. Although state-by-state data doesn’t include English learners, Massachusetts is among the top 12 states for English learners (along with its neighbor Rhode Island), and its immigrant population is growing quickly.

In the last decade, the percentage of English learners in Massachusetts has increased by 65%. English learners now make up more than one in eight students in the state.

Even as the national debate about how to improve reading education — the so-called “reading wars” — fully arrived in Massachusetts last year, English learners didn’t get much attention. 

An October survey by the Boston Globe found that nearly half — 47% — of Massachusetts' school districts did not use evidence-based curriculum to teach students how to read. But the state's largest teachers union opposed a bill calling for a shift toward evidence-based programs. Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, described the bill as “a flawed, one-size-fits-all approach to a complex task," according to the Globe.

The bill has no mention yet of support for English learners. 

Around the country, 223 laws have been passed in 45 states and the District of Columbia since 2019 to ensure that reading instruction is "evidence based," or taught in a way that's proven to help students learn, according to a 2023 report from the Albert Shanker Institute. 

But only three of those 45 states (Alabama, California, and Florida) have included any mandate that English learners are taught using evidence-based practices too, the authors found. Only 13 of the states with new reading laws had provisions for English learners at all.

The stakes of not learning to read — for English learners and all students — are high, wrote Heather Peske, a former administrator in the Massachusetts department of education and now the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. Peske wrote there could be "excruciating consequences, both for our students and for us as a democratic society that depends on engaged and informed citizens to thrive."

New Bedford’s curriculum shifts support English learners, too

Shifting to a new reading curriculum in New Bedford has led to some controversies, including some resistance from teachers. But Garcia explained that a new curriculum does not mean that teachers have less choice or control.

“The program by itself is not going to solve our problems. You can use good curriculum in a bad way,” she said. 

Garcia said that improving the curriculum was a necessary part of supporting teachers: "Teachers were literally making [their own] materials, and they could be different in every building and every classroom," Garcia said. “We needed to provide more services without adding more work for teachers.” She feels the state has supported the district’s efforts. 

The proposed legislation in Massachusetts also does not mandate a specific curriculum or teaching method, and only stipulates that schools use "instruction practices aligned with science-based reading research."

“Teachers matter,” Garcia summarized. “Change is harder without the right resources in place.”

That change has started to show up in the classrooms at Hayden-McFadden, where the procession of forest creatures snuggling into a mitten captivated Anderson and the other children.

In this building, half the students are classified as English learners — that’s double the district’s rate and quadruple the statewide rate.  

But all the children — whether in Anderson’s “newcomer” classroom of recently arrived immigrants or in another room down the hall — were reading the same story that day. 

Samantha Rego, Anderson’s teacher, is an eight-year veteran. She sat on the floor reading while Herrera, the paraeducator, whispered with Anderson. Next door, Kaitlyn Forrester, a paraeducator covering for a teacher on parental leave, was leading the students through an art project reflecting on the story. In another room, Taylor Higgins, a second-year teacher, was asking the students to anticipate events in the story.

Garcia acknowledged that some of the educators may have been uncomfortable with the curriculum shift. But she said that all classrooms, including the English-learning newcomers, now better support each other without sacrificing the teachers’ creativity. 

All three rooms had strong reading instruction, she said, that was “literally changing lives.” 

Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org

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