The School District of Philadelphia recently released a new 5-year strategic plan. The plan lays out five priority areas: (1) improve safety and well-being, (2) partner with families and communities, (3) accelerate academic achievement, (4) recruit and retain diverse and highly effective educators and (5) deliver efficient, high-quality, cost-effective operations. These are certainly worthwhile goals that I imagine will be further operationalized as part of their implementation. As they do, I hope more explicit attention is brought to the large and growing multilingual population of the district with a specific focus on the large and growing number of Latinx students who have historically and continue to have the lowest academic outcomes in the city.
The multilingualism of the student population of the district is only acknowledged three times in the strategic plan. Two of these are in reference to students officially classified as ELs. Priority 3.8 states that “in 2022-23, there were more than 20,000 EL students from over 130 countries speaking over 100 different languages” with Priority 3.9 noting that “38% [of teachers] said lack of support for teaching English Learners was a challenge” (p. 16). Yet, few specifics are provided beyond a generic call for “high-challenge, high-support activities for English learners” (p. 16). Considering the plan’s call for supporting teachers in engaging in culturally relevant instructional practices, I hope that district leaders have a plan for further fleshing out how they will support teachers in acknowledging, building on and extending their multilingualism as opposed to solely focusing on their English language proficiency.
The third time the multilingualism of the student population of the district is mentioned makes me concerned that this is not, in fact, the case. Priority 3.10 calls for all high schools to “offer at least two years of a foreign language in addition to Spanish and French, languages that many District students already speak as their native language” (p. 16). I certainly support the idea of expanding world language offerings beyond Spanish and French. Yet, the assumption seems to be that students who speak Spanish or French as a native language should take another world language and not continue to study Spanish or French. This is an especially interesting assumption to see in a document that also calls for purchasing and implementing “standards-aligned core instructional resources for English Language Arts,” which I imagine will be used for all students in the district, including those for whom English is their native language. If English language arts is offered to native speakers of English why can’t Spanish language arts or French language arts be offered to native Spanish and French speakers? In line with this, how might the district strategically expand its world language offerings so that other multilingual students also have the opportunity to take native language arts? Indeed, offering native language arts to as many multilingual students as possible seems like a worthy goal that I hope that the district considers as it further operationalizes this strategic plan.
Fortunately, the district doesn’t have to start from scratch here. It currently has 8 elementary schools with Spanish-English dual language programs that include Spanish language arts alongside English language arts as well as content-area instruction in both languages. Yet only one of the schools currently offering the program is K-8 and there are currently no middle school options in district schools in North Philadelphia where the largest number of Spanish speaking students reside. In addition, while there are no Spanish-English dual language programs at the high school level, the district does offer Spanish heritage courses at 10 high schools that focus specifically on teaching Spanish to students who grew up using the language that look more like language arts classes than traditional world language classes. As far as I have been able to gather, there is no opportunity for native language arts in any other language. This seems like a missed opportunity to affirm, build on and extend the existing multilingualism of Philadelphia students in line with calls for more culturally relevant instruction that I hope the district considers as it identifies additional languages that it would like to offer beyond Spanish and French. That is, the presence of native speakers of the language should be seen as a reason to include rather than to exclude the language with clear plans in place to differentiate for those who are new to the language who would benefit from learning it to better interact with multilingual members of their communities and those who come from homes where it is spoken who would benefit from further develop their literacy skills in the language. This could come in the form of expanding dual language education as well as developing heritage language classes for languages beyond Spanish.
While I hope that the district expands its dual language and heritage class offerings to include languages beyond Spanish, I don’t think the relatively more robust infrastructure in support of Spanish should be interpreted as an indication that Spanish—and by extensions Latinxs—are currently being well served by the district. For example, there are significant academic performance differences between Latinx ELs and non-Latinx ELs. In addition, Latinxs have the lowest graduation rates of any student population in the district perhaps at least partially caused by the fact that they are relegated to the most under-resourced and segregated school in the city. Yet, despite the unique challenges confronting this student population, Latinxs are only mentioned twice in the strategic plan. The first time is Priority 3.7 where it is noted that “Black/African American and Latino urban youth report having poor swimming skills at higher rates than their white peers” (p. 15) as justification for piloting new swim programs. The second time is Priority 4.5 that calls for recruiting “more Black and Latino male teachers and principals, in partnership with colleges, universities, and the Center for Black Educator Development” (p. 21). While these are both laudable goals, they hardly scratch the surface for what is needed to increase academic achievement and overall well-being of Latinx students in Philadelphia. Any strategic plan that is seriously committed to addressing the gaps between Latinxs and non-Latinxs must make the needs of these students a key priority area and engage with key stakeholders to develop a comprehensive action plan for meeting these needs.
The School District of Philadelphia’s 5-year strategic plan lays out a set of timely and important priorities. That said, considering the growing multilingual student population as well as the specific challenges that have historically and continue to confront Latinx students in the district, I hope that these issues are more explicitly addressed as the district works on implementing these ambitious goals.
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