ELL Students and Testing

While we listened in class today about the test given by the teacher in Pennsylvania, I felt incredibly sorry for the ELL students in the classroom that were being forced to take this test full of American idioms and phrases. It brought me to continue thinking about how the test makers write the tests that all children are being forced to take in this country. I feel that these companies are creating tests where it sets that point of 50% above and 50% below as what the average natural-born American student knows. What these companies haven’t accounted for is that a large portion of the students taking these tests haven’t grown up in environments that are rich with these random and sometimes archaic language patterns. Of course minorities score lower on the test; they are starting at a large disadvantage from students who have a better grasp on the English language. I’m sure if we took an exceptionally “smart” student who had only ever spoken English, moved them to another country and gave them a few years to learn the language, they would probably get a poor grade on that country’s reading test. America likes to compare its scores on tests to other countries in the world, but what we aren’t accounting for is that some of these countries have a more homogeneous population of students who have all grown up with more similar experiences. The article [http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/] spoke to this, saying that these countries might have an easier time testing because most of the students understand the same things. It also mention, however, that there are about 18 states in the U.S. that have similar demographics to that of Finland, which is usually used as an exemplar of education. Why then can’t these states model their educational policies after Finland and get the same results? The United States needs to look inward to better understand how to educate its own students instead of looking to others to model after.