Sara Kangas Provides Insight into High Percentages of English Learners with Disabilities in Schools

In the middle schools and high schools that she visited for her research and studies, applied linguist Sara Kangas noticed a disturbing trend: high percentages of English learners (ELs) with learning disabilities.

What is going on here? Kangas, an assistant professor of special education, wondered. Why do so many of the English learners in that school or any secondary school have learning disabilities?

“That was something that was bothering me,” she says, “and it was bothering me because I feel like [it was] very disproportionately high.”

Kangas’ concerns are at the heart of a recent study, “Reclassification of Emergent Bilinguals with Disabilities: The Intersectionality of Improbabilities,” published in the journal Language Policy. In the study, Kangas and co-author Jamie L. Schissel of the University of North Carolina analyzed federal and state policies that govern procedures for reclassifying ELs as fluent in English, along with the standardized assessments that the reclassification policies rely on and that impact students’ educational paths.

“My work focuses on policies and structural issues in schools, and how those are barriers [to learning],” Kangas says. “That’s my lens in a lot of the work I do.”

In another recent study, “Breaking One Law to Uphold Another: How Schools Provide Services to English Learners with Disabilities,” Kangas explored why schools persist in providing students with only one set of services—special education or English language supports—when they are legally entitled to receive both services. The study is published in TESOL Quarterly.

Providing language supports is a critical issue in education, as students work to attain English proficiency and meet academic achievement standards. An estimated 4.9 million U.S. public school students, or 9.6 percent of the school population, were identified as ELs in fall 2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. About 700,000 students, or about 14 percent of the total EL population in public schools, were identified as ELs with disabilities.

Kangas’ rich body of research—including a new ethnographic study that aims to better understand how schools can improve learning environments to better support EL students’ linguistic and academic needs—provides deep insight into the high percentages of ELs with disabilities that she’s found in the schools she visited.

“We can make a strong case that there are several reasons,” Kangas says. “One is political. The policies that we make don’t know how to account for language and disability intersections and how that influences learning. I would also say, it’s structural in the way we organize schools and have academic tracks, where certain services occur and where we place children in those tracks and services. I would also argue ... that it’s ideological. What do we assume about these children? Do we assume they’re capable?

“Those together—those political, structural and ideological factors—are part of the reason why so many English learners with disabilities get stuck in ESL [English as a Second Language programming] and cannot meet proficiency standards,” she says.

Reclassifying English Learners

In the “Reclassification of Emergent Bilinguals with Disabilities” study, Kangas and Schissel focused their research on the policies and practices in two states that have a high percentage of ELs but differing criteria for assessing proficiency in English—California and New Mexico. California is more stringent in its approach, with multiple components to its reclassification criteria, including teacher input.

Their findings were illuminating: The policies and practices at play in both states marginalized ELs with disabilities, the authors say. Because the students had intersecting needs, namely in academic development and acquisition of a second language, it was improbable that they would be reclassified as English-proficient.

“[English language proficiency] tests can’t account for disabilities,” Kangas says. “And yet, tests are used to determine if [ELs with disabilities] are proficient in English.”

Kangas and Schissel addressed an overriding question in their research: How does the intersection of education and assessment policies inform the reclassification processes for ELs with disabilities? They also explored how that intersection can create multiple roadblocks for students along the path to reclassification.

Laden within the processes, they say, are annual assessments that stem from federal education policies. The researchers noted that ELs with disabilities have to meet two assessment requirements: one that measures academic achievement based on their identification as students with disabilities, another that measures English proficiency based on their classification as English-language learners. What constitutes English proficiency, however, varies state by state.

New Mexico used a single composite score in its measure of reclassifying students as English proficient. Such a high-stakes assessment puts ELs with disabilities at a disadvantage, Kangas and Schissel argue, because the schools provide accommodations—extended time to test, for example—that are intended to help students with disabilities, not language learners with disabilities.

California, in contrast, had multiple components to its criteria for reclassification, including teacher input, parental approval and a comparison of students’ performances in basic skills to those of English-proficient students of the same age. Test accommodations included administering the test at a time of day more beneficial for ELs.

Still, in testing in the 2015-2016 academic year, ELs with disabilities scored at the lowest ends of the proficiency scales, raising questions about the validity of the assessments and whether the accommodations “level the playing field,” Kangas says.

Though teacher evaluations or grades in certain courses figure into the process too, Kangas and Schissel say, such criteria would be open to interpretation, which could reinforce or reveal biases. “For example,” they wrote, “the importance placed on a single grade by a single teacher brings into question whether or not the teacher understands the implications of such a grade, and previous teacher training in working with emergent bilinguals with disabilities.”

The educational consequences can be profound, the researchers argue. Over time, they say, the students might become disproportionately represented in the schools’ special education programs, where they might languish academically rather than flourish.

Kangas and Schissel recognize, however, that ELs would be subject to inconsistent criteria for English proficiency if assessments were completely removed from the reclassification process.

“Thus, we advocate for reclassification policies that are flexible and responsive to emergent bilinguals with disabilities,” they write. “Specifically, we advocate an approach to reclassification that relies on interdisciplinary teams of education professionals, with parents/guardians and learners, working together to support emergent bilinguals and their educational needs.”

The researchers also call on scholars to investigate equity issues in schools so that ELs with disabilities have the same educational opportunities as their peers.