Opinion

State testing fails immigrant students and their teachers Classrooms at Lee High School showcase issues with the existing battery of exams

Filmon Beyen, left, reads information off the board while Garrett Reed helps Hanan Barud during an ESL class at Lee High School on Monday. Beyen is Ethiopia and has been in the U.S. for two months while Barud is from Somalia and has been here six months. less Filmon Beyen, left, reads information off the board while Garrett Reed helps Hanan Barud during an ESL class at Lee High School on Monday. Beyen is Ethiopia and has been in the U.S. for two months while Barud ... more Photo: Dave Rossman, Freelance Photo: Dave Rossman, Freelance Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close State testing fails immigrant students and their teachers 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Next month, like high school students throughout Texas, my class will take the state's high-stakes standardized tests. Few of my students, if any, will pass. That doesn't mean that I'm a bad teacher, that my students lack intelligence or that I teach at a bad school. And it certainly doesn't mean that my students aren't trying.

I teach beginning level English as a second language at Houston Independent School District's Lee High School. With more than 650 English language learners, 165 of whom are refugees, Lee is an academic Ellis Island.

My class includes students from Nepal, Bhutan, Rwanda and the Oromo tribe of eastern Ethiopia. I have refugees from Burma. I have Rwandans, Iraqis, Nepalese, Darfurians, Mayans and Vietnamese. There are Angolans, Karens, Coptic Egyptians, Ugandans, Cubans and Kalash Pakistanis - as well as an Eritrean and a Gabonese.

As a rule, my students arrive in my class with little or no comprehension of the English language. Some attended schools for years in refugee camps. Others, from agrarian backgrounds, went to school only when it didn't interfere with farm chores. The least prepared have never before attended any school, anywhere. Most often those are girls. They can't read and write in their native languages, much less in English.

Intact families are the exception, not the rule. Most students come from war-torn countries whose atrocities I read about or see on TV. It's common to hear of parents who are missing, murdered or tortured. When students stare blankly into space during my class, I wonder what horrors they're reliving.

For five grueling days next month, those kids will spend most of the day in the gym. They'll take tests in language arts, math, science and social studies.

After a single year at Lee, my refugee students are expected to match the performance of American-born teenagers in suburban high schools. They might be asked to choose a pie chart or bar graph to illustrate population growth, or to explain Manifest Destiny, or to describe the components of a DNA molecule - and to do so in English, a language they're still learning. The tests determine whether my students can graduate from high school. They also figure heavily into Lee's state academic rating.

When my first-year students fail, it won't be because Lee or the district didn't do everything it could to help them meet the standards. Our weekly departmental meetings resemble war strategy rooms. To show each student's progress toward mastering State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness objectives, long color-coded spreadsheets are scrolled across the walls in the "data room." From January until test day, in intense strategy sessions, dedicated teachers, instructional specialist and assistant principals plot how to tweak lesson plans to focus surgically on missed objectives, each precisely identified through the flood of data we collect. We perform academic interventions to reteach those missed objectives. It's hard to imagine what more we could do.

I do not believe that, as a school, Lee is a failure. We consistently succeed in upholding the American value of welcoming immigrants, of giving dignity, safety and even love to those who need it most. That is why I teach at Lee.

I'd like to invite Texas state legislators and Texas Education Agency decision-makers to visit my classroom. I'd like them to sit side by side with my refugee students. I'd like them to think about my first-year English language learners as they make decisions about the test - decisions that will shape not only my students' futures, but also the future of our great country.

My school is one that educates the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free.

My students are the bravest people I've ever met. The STAAR labels them as failures. But the STAAR is wrong.

Reed has taught high school for 18 years.