Abstract
Postsecondary education serves as a pathway to upward social mobility. Yet too often, students hailing from economically disadvantaged families, racial/ethnic minority groups, those who are first-generation learners, and immigrants frequently encounter barriers that deter their application, enrollment, and success in higher education. In this chapter, we focus on the role of identification, assessment, and course placement policies as a set of factors that impact the educational attainment of English Learners. In particular, we focus on the policies and practices commonly used in community colleges to sort students into prerequisite coursework and present a contrast between the 2-year postsecondary sector and the policies and guidelines that rule the identification, assessment, and placement of English Learners in public schools. We summarize the extant literature documenting the effectiveness of the assessment tools used to classify and sort English Learners into various prerequisite courses and link them to the observed disparities in outcomes between English Learners and native English-speaking peers. We conclude with a set of policy and research recommendations aimed at bolstering the postsecondary educational outcomes of English Learners and building the data infrastructure necessary to expand research in this area.
Shouping Hu was the Associate Editor for this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Recipients of federal financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Education include state-controlled education institutions in both the PK-12 and higher education sectors, private education entities, charter schools, nonprofit organizations, for-profit institutions, state and local education agencies, and subcontractors (U.S. Department of Education & Office for Civil Rights, n.d.).
- 2.
Language minority students typically refers to students whose primary language is not the dominant language spoken in a society. In the case of the United States, students whose primary language is not English are, in some contexts, referred to as language or linguistic minorities (Kanno & Harklau, 2012).
- 3.
The Lau v. Nichols case was a class action suit brought against the San Francisco public school district in 1974, in which the plaintiffs alleged that the majority of Chinese students enrolled in the district were being denied access to a meaningful education, and therefore the district was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (Abedi & Sanchez, 2021; Lyons, 1990). In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found the school district at fault, emphasizing that access to “the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum” does not translate into access to a meaningful education (Lyons, 1990).
- 4.
ELP assessments measure EL students’ skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and they are typically designed to align with State Education Agencies’ language proficiency standards.
- 5.
The WIDA Consortium is a US-based collaborative group of 41 member states, territories, and federal agencies.
- 6.
ELPA21 is a comprehensive assessment and instructional system supporting the growth of educators and English Learners in partnership with several state education agencies.
- 7.
Recent studies emphasize the crucial nature of the timing of EL reclassification where a premature exit can increase students’ chances of academic struggles while a prolonged continuation of the EL status can act as a gatekeeper preventing students from accessing advanced learning opportunities (Johnson, 2020; Linquanti & Cook, 2013; Robinson, 2011).
- 8.
For instance, Californian’s AB 705 is a legislation that was intended to support assessment and placement strategies for EL students, and has proven to increase student completion rates and close the achievement gap by requiring colleges to consider a student’s high school coursework and GPA as primary determining factors for placement.
- 9.
For more information on BPS:04, go to https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2012246. BPS:04 follows students, who started their postsecondary education during the 2003–04 academic school year, and these students were first interviewed as part of the 2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:04). BPS is the second and final follow-up interview of this cohort. Importantly, BPS data includes a wide collection of student interviews, transcripts, and administrative records matching. BPS is unique in that it also includes both traditional and nontraditional students and follows these students’ paths through their postsecondary education over the course of 6 years, and BPS is not limited to enrollment at a single institution.
- 10.
There is a growing number of scholars who have documented the postsecondary enrollment disparities among students due to higher education deserts (Black et al., 2020; Cortes & Lincove, 2019; Hillman, 2016; López Turley, 2009). In particular, low-income students (Cortes & Lincove, 2019) and racial and ethnic students (Black et al., 2020) are more sensitive to distance to postsecondary higher education locations than compared to their higher-income and white student counterparts, respectively.
- 11.
1.5-generation students typically refers to those who are first-generation immigrants and who moved to the United States as children.
- 12.
These data only track students who remained in Texas following their high school graduation. According to a recent report, approximately 5% of Texas high school graduates attend college out of state (Brunner, 2017); a small percentage of students in contrast with comparably large states such as California where the proportion of high school graduates who matriculate in out-of-state institutions is at least twice as high (Kurlaender et al., 2018).
- 13.
We tracked the courses of interest using an approval identification number that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board publishes in their yearly Academic Course Guide Manual. These approval identification numbers allow us to identify Developmental and ESL courses that do not have a consistent course naming convention at colleges across the state but share the same learning outcomes.
- 14.
Florida SB 1720 made placement tests optional for students who graduated from a public high school in Florida in 2007 or later (Hu et al., 2019) and required colleges to provide students with more advising services, academic supports, and restructure developmental courses to allow students to choose different content delivery formats. California AB 705 authorized the board of governors to introduce regulations for measures, instruments, and placement models to maximize the likelihood that students enter and complete transfer-level coursework in English and math within 1 year and 3 years for ESL students (Bill Text – California AB-705, 2023). It also requires community colleges to consider high school coursework, high school grades, and/or high school GPA when determining course placement and cannot place students on a course trajectory that extends their time to complete transfer-level work unless placement research that makes these considerations shows that students aren’t likely to succeed in transfer-level coursework. Texas HB 2223 requires an increasing proportion of students enrolled in developmental education be enrolled in a corequisite model that allows the student to enroll in a freshman-level college course alongside a developmental education course designed to support the student in completing the freshman-level course (HB 2223 Implementation, 2018). This requirement was paired with a reduction in the quantity of semester credit hours of developmental education that the state would provide funding for; however, this reduction did not apply to ESOL courses.
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Acknowledgments
My co-authors and I would like to acknowledge the assistance we received from our research assistants in supporting us to write this chapter. Please include the following acknowledgement in the notes section of the chapter.
We would like to thank Christian Aguinaga for constructing the dataset used to conduct our postsecondary enrollment analysis of K-12 identified EL students in Texas. We would also like to thank Brady Duke for identifying and summarizing articles referenced in this handbook chapter.
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Kosiewicz, H., Morales, C., Cortes, K.E. (2024). The “Missing English Learner” in Higher Education: How Identification, Assessment, and Placement Shape the Educational Outcomes of English Learners in Community Colleges. In: Perna, L.W. (eds) Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38077-8_7
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