Accountability of Education for Language Minorities in California

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to consider the impact of Proposition 227 in the State of California, and to give suggestions for relating the educational policy for language minorities with accountability focusing on policy evaluation and the politics of the policy problems of Proposition 227.

Proposition 227 criticized the state and public schools that had supported and implemented the bilingual education for not accomplishing their accountability to make LEP students more proficient in English.

After implementing Proposition 227, many papers and One Nation/One California which promoted Proposition 227 evaluated that Proposition 227 has succeeded and accomplished accountability in as far as the EL (English Learner) s' scores on the Stanford-9 improved. However, there were no standards and processes of evaluation in Proposition 227. And there was a lack of adequacy in the data to evaluate it, and their evaluations were inadequate from a methodological point of view.

What is in question in implementing Proposition 227 is that the policy evaluation system has to be established systematically to accomplish the accountability of education for language minorities, and to be adequate for their long term academic success. Also, the decision-making system has to be related to the accountability system to put into practice various education in a variety of educational situations indifferent school districts and schools.