Full Report - Center for Collaborative Education

education. There are no studies of the reasons for
parents’ decision to opt out of ELL programs in the
public domain.
But parents’ decisions have also been shaped by the
particular way in which Boston implemented the
“opting out” provisions of Chapter 386 (the legislation
that set guidelines for the implementation of
the changes required by Referendum Question 2).
Chapter 386 included parental “waiver” provisions
of the law allowing parents to petition to have their
children exempted from SEI programs. This waiver
did not disqualify students from enrolling in other
models of programs for English language acquisition
or from receiving language support services,
even if enrolled in general education programs. 4
In Boston, enrollment of LEP students in general
education programs continued to increase AND
no services were provided to LEP students whose
parents opted out of SEI.
Studies by the Office of English Language Learners
showed that parents may have been encouraged
to “opt out,” as schools sought to fill “seats” left
open by the steady decline in enrollments of populations
in general education (OELL, 2009). 5 Once
a parental petition to “opt out” was approved,
Boston did not test, monitor, or provide language
support services to these students (Tregar, 2008),
although the student still retained LEP status and
the district benefitted from the additional funding
this entailed.
With No Child Left Behind in 2001 and most
especially when Chapter 386 became law in 2002,
assessment and monitoring of and service provision
to all LEP students also became law, making this
Figure 3. Program Enrollment of LEP Students. BPS, SY2003-SY2009
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
SY2003 SY2004 SY2005 SY2006 SY2007 SY2008 SY2009
In ELL 9,667 5,992 5,532 9,122 6,324 6,604 6,972
Not in ELL 5,053 4,013 2,881 1,283 4,190 4,323 4,718
Data for SY2003, 2004 and 2005 come from Tung et al, 2009.
practice the center of MDESE’s complaint against
Boston for lack of compliance. In time, both
MDESE and the federal Departments of Justice and
Education found fault with Boston’s assessment of
LEP students, its process of parental information,
its process of authorizing waivers and opt-outs (at
the Family Resource Center rather than by principals
and the superintendent, as required in some cases),
and with its lack of provision of services to and of
monitoring of students who were now enrolled in
general education programs (MDESE, 2008a; U.S.
Department of Justice, 2010).
Figure 3 presents the figures from SY2003 to
SY2009 for LEP student in ELL programs and in programs
not specifically designed LEP students. These
data are drawn from two studies, Tung et al., 2009
and this study: we show this in the discontinuity
of the lines. 6 The circles represent the enrollment
of students in ELL programs and the squares that
of students not in an ELL program. SY2003 was
the year prior to the implementation of Question
2 and the data for the school years SY2003, 2004,
and 2005 come from Tung et al., 2009. The data
show that there have been TWO sharp declines in
the enrollment in ELL programs. The first, taking
place between SY2003 and SY2005, as discussed in
the introduction to this chapter, was due to a policy
decision on the part of the district to re-designate
4,366 LEP students in bilingual education programs
as English proficient and insert them into general
education as the implementation of Chapter 386
began in September 2003 (p. 40). By SY2006,
enrollments in ELL programs, although still not
reaching the high numbers pre-Question 2, had
Improving Educational Outcomes of English Language Learners in Schools and Programs in Boston Public Schools 31