Full Report - Center for Collaborative Education

Table 19. English Proficiency Levels of MEPA Test-Takers in ELL Programs, K-12. BPS, SY2009
N MEPA MEPA Levels MEPA Level MEPA Levels
Test-Takers 1 & 2
3
4 & 5
All LEPs 9,351 23.6% 32.0% 44.4%
Not in ELL Program 3,623 11.0% 30.4% 58.6%
In ELL Programs 5,728 31.6% 32.9% 35.5%
In SEI 5,002 30.6% 33.9% 35.5%
SEI Multilingual 560 31.1% 36.3% 32.7%
SEI Language Specific 4,442 30.6% 33.6% 35.8%
In Two-Way Bilingual 346 20.8% 30.6% 48.6%
In TBE 142 14.8% 31.7% 53.5%
In SFE 238 76.9% 17.2% 5.9%
SIFE Multilingual 13 38.5% 46.2% 15.4%
SIFE Language Specific 225 79.1% 15.6% 5.3%
D Which MEPA English Proficiency
Levels Are Most Frequently
Represented Among Those Who
Pass MCAS ELA? What Proportion
of English Language Learners
Reach This Level?
Although federal and state laws require that LEP
students’ scores in standardized testing be reported
in the aggregate, this practice obscures our understanding
of the true academic achievement of ELLs.
First of all, it creates the misconception that all LEP
students should achieve at the same level, without
regard to their English proficiency, even when all
logic suggests that those at the lowest levels of
English proficiency (MEPA Levels 1–3), should not
be expected to perform well on the MCAS or any
other standardized tests developed for English proficient
students. In contrast, students at the higher
levels of English proficiency should be achieving
at rates more comparable to those of English
proficient students but it is also impossible to assess
this when ELL scores are observed only in the
aggregate. Finally, aggregated reporting of ELL test
scores results in faulty comparisons across time as
well as across schools, districts and states because
it treats all ELLs as if they had the same distribution
of English proficiency levels at all times and across
all settings.
Table 20 shows the MCAS ELA pass rates of LEP
students at different levels of English proficiency. 5
The comparison shows that the command of
English required to pass standardized tests designed
for English proficient students, such as the MCAS,
far exceeds the levels of English proficiency represented
by MEPA Levels 1–3 and to some extent
4. 6 Pass rates among elementary school students,
for example, range from a low 0% among those
in MEPA Level 1 to 95.3% among LEP students at
MEPA Level 5. At Level 5, LEP elementary school
students surpass the pass rates of English proficient
students but at Level 4 there is close to a 10-point
gap between LEP and EP students. Middle school
and high school LEP students scoring at MEPA Level
5 also surpass the pass rates of English proficiency
students at those levels and the gaps between
those scoring at MEPA Level 4 are much narrower.
Improving Educational Outcomes of English Language Learners in Schools and Programs in Boston Public Schools 43