By Andrea Estrada

A new study, featured in the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute’s current newsletter, finds that a growing achievement gap separates California’s linguistic minority students—those who come from households where a language other than English is spoken—from native speakers.

The study followed 9,976 students across the country from their first day of kindergarten in 1998 through the end of their fifth grade year in 2004, monitoring their progress in reading, language, and math. It reported that the gap in language and reading skills that existed in kindergarten improved for some groups, but worsened for others as they moved through elementary school. Math achievement, however, showed greater relative improvement.

Further, the study found the greatest disparities between English-only speakers and children who came from Spanish-dominant households.

“It’s a pretty sobering picture to see how far we have to go to improve the outcome for English learners,” said Russell Rumberger, director of the UC LMRI, a systemwide center based at UCSB. Drawing data from the long-term national study, Rumberger, who is also a professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, wrote the article that appears in the Institute’s winter newsletter.

“We’re not surprised to see these large achievement gaps early on,” said Rumberger. “The fact that there’s little improvement in reading and language skills isn’t hopeful considering how important they are for learning. Language demands increase with grade level, and the fact that they’re having trouble starting secondary school portends a lot of problems ahead.”

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of Kindergartners (ELCS-K) was conducted under the auspices of the National Center for Educational Statistics. The data reveal that in the fall of 1998 more than half of all kindergarteners in California came from non-English-speaking households, as compared to 16 percent in the rest of the nation. Of those California students, well over half came from homes in which Spanish was the dominant language, roughly a third spoke a second language at home but used English primarily, and the rest came from households with another dominant language.

To understand the differences in students’ backgrounds, the study also examined the socioeconomic status of their families. Family socioeconomic status measures family income, parental education, and parental occupational status. The study identified Spanish-dominant households as the most economically disadvantaged in California and the United States.

According to Rumberger, the study’s overall findings call into question California’s efforts to educate the state’s growing linguistic minority population—especially Spanish-speaking students. “These students represent half our school-age population, and with the population entering school increasingly an English-speaking minority, the future of the state rests on our ability to educate them. If part of our goal is to eliminate achievement differences, then we have a long way to go.”

The newsletter is published quarterly and distributed to 3,500 academics, educators, and policymakers throughout the United States.