Left Behind

Thousands of students from other countries are graduating from Durham Public Schools without learning English. The district is promising to do better.

BY GWYNETH BERNIER backtalk@indyweek.com

On his first day at Durham Technical Community College in September 2021, 19-year-old freshman Shahid Ali was lost in every sense of the word.

He wandered around campus, furiously typing building names into his Google Translate app. Grabbing random students and professors, he insistently pointed at his schedule. With pitying smiles, they chirped incomprehensible phrases in English too quickly for him to understand and shuffled along with their day, leaving him bewildered.

The frenzy of colorful banners, student organizations, and professors whirred around him; everyone seemed to know exactly where to go and what to do. Ali arrived at his first class with five minutes left in the period, holding back tears.

“That’s a hard memory,” Ali recalls with a shudder, closing his eyes. “I tried to keep smiling and stay positive like I always do, but it was hard.”

When Ali fled Afghanistan as a refugee in 2017, he and his family were resettled to the refugee hotspot of Durham, North Carolina. Just two months after his plane touched down at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Ali started as a freshman at Jordan High School knowing only a few words of English. When he graduated, he had barely learned a few more.

Ali’s story is typical of the fastest-growing student group in Durham: English learners, students from other countries who speak a language other than English at home. This school year, English learners make up one in six students in Durham Public Schools. Yet they lag far behind their peers in academic achievement, struggling with basic English comprehension.

Last year, test scores among Durham Public Schools’ English learners were among the lowest in the state—106 of 115 districts, while scores for DPS’ white students were the fourth best in the state. Meanwhile, performance by nonwhite, English-speaking students was in the middle of the pack.

This is despite the fact that the Durham school system was challenged in court five years ago over its service to English learners.

Durham Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Stacy Stewart says that the school district is aware of the poor performance by English learners and is putting new improvement plans in place in response. “Moving forward, we have a plan based on research to increase English learner student performance and bring parents into conversation.”

When Ali started his freshman year at Jordan High School, he only spoke Pashto, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Trekking miles through Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain to school with his younger sister came naturally to Ali. Navigating DPS route maps to find where to catch the bus? Not so much.

“Everything was so different, and I didn’t know anybody,” Ali recalls. “The people at Durham Public Schools, they don’t really make an effort to make sure the families and students understand where to go or what to do.”

Ali’s struggles continued even after he figured out how to get to class.

“My English [as a second language] teachers just talked at me and wrote things on the board rather than helping me participate like I did at school in Afghanistan,” says Ali.

“I didn’t know enough English to ask my teachers to slow down or tell them I couldn’t understand. I’m not sure they even noticed or cared.”

His English as a second language courses frustrated him to the point that he sought other avenues of learning.

“My locker neighbor Ryan and I would skip lunch most days so he could tutor me,” Ali remembers. “On the days he couldn’t, I would watch Friends in the bathroom on my phone with Pashto subtitles. That was much more helpful for me to learn English than my teachers were. It at least helped me get by in school.

Integrated classes like art and gym class were even worse; they made him want to stop going to school altogether.

“When we would play soccer in gym class, I would sometimes see the other kids make fun of me or not want to pick me for their teams because of my accent,” says Ali. “My gym teacher pretended it was not happening.”

By the end of senior year, he could not read at a second-grade level. Yet he was still permitted to graduate from high school in 2021.

Paradoxically, while few English learners in Durham Public Schools reach even basic academic proficiency, they still graduate on time. Sixty-one percent graduated in four years from Durham Public Schools in 2022.

The numbers do not surprise Assistant Superintendent Stewart.

“We’ve seen the data and this is unfortunate…,” Stewart said. “We all have work to do…It’s not just the job of the ESL teachers, from K-12 we’re implementing processes and strategies so that students are engaged, excited, and coming to school immersed in classroom work and overall language development.”

Stewart also pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic as a factor in poor student performance.

“The biggest challenge at this moment is the challenge of mitigating COVID-19. How do we make up for learning loss from students being online?”

But Durham Public Schools’ leadership recognized achievement gaps within the school system prior to the pandemic. At the end of 2017, superintendent Pascal Mubenga announced a five-year strategic plan to bridge the learning gap between the district’s high and low-performing student groups. The plan calls for at least 60 percent of all DPS students to achieve grade-level reading and math proficiency on end-of-grade tests by the end of 2023.

At a district-wide administration meeting in July 2021, Mubenga called the strategic plan a “powerful spark” in the school system post-pandemic.

“The plan creates a vision of equity in which students’ identifiers are no longer an accurate predictor of their academic outcomes,” Mubenga said with a booming voice, to snaps and whoops from the audience. “It marks a new beginning for [Durham Public Schools] that will lift up every student, without exception.”

Yet gaps persist. Last school year, less than a fifth of English learners at Durham Public Schools had reading and math scores at grade level, compared to 80 percent of its white students and half of its nonwhite English-speaking students.

During equity discussions at school board meetings, administrators mention English learners infrequently compared with other groups, despite English learners being the lowest-performing group by a wide margin. English learners also receive little attention in the school system budget. This fiscal year, $5 million was specifically allocated for English learners in Durham Public Schools’ $684 million annual budget.

In school board meetings, district administrators have said that inadequate funding and a linguistically diverse population explain English learners’ weak academic performance.

Durham Public Schools is indeed linguistically diverse. The vast majority of the system’s English learner population speaks Spanish, but the remaining students speak a wide variety of other languages, including Arabic, Farsi, French, Vietnamese, and Mandarin. The district currently employs 18 Spanish translators. There are no translators on staff for languages other than Spanish.

Still, other North Carolina school districts have similarly large and diverse populations. Compared with students in those districts, English learners at Durham Public Schools perform significantly worse. At Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, for instance, non-English speakers make up nearly a third of the total student body and speak 204 different languages. Yet English learners at Charlotte-Mecklenburg display significantly higher year-end test scores than English learners at Durham Public Schools.

“We are not happy with the data from last year,” Stewart said in response. “We know that COVID negatively impacted our efforts.”

Stewart also said the district has plans in place to improve programs for English learners, including a new Family Academy that provides foreign-born parents and students with additional in-person instruction on weekends.

“In January, we started to implement school improve-

Percent of Student Groups Performing at Grade Level in Durham Public Schools

ment plans and inspections on a day to day basis,” she said. “Those include the four points tested on year-end exams: English reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehension. We’re also working on the new English learner prep and family academy.”

Civil rights lawyer William Tobin thinks these are important steps, but “too little, too late.” For more than a decade, Tobin ran Duke University’s Citizenship Lab, a volunteer tutoring program that served hundreds of refugee students in Durham, including Ali.

Tobin initiated the aforementioned 2018 lawsuit against DPS on behalf of a Riverside High School English learner student. By June of his senior year, the student was reading at a first-grade level. Nevertheless, he was granted a high school diploma. The lawsuit, which was ultimately settled out of court, resulted in Durham Public Schools paying for a year of remedial English instruction for the student at Durham Tech.

Tobin says not much has changed since the lawsuit was settled out of court in 2018.

“Key metrics of English learners’ academic success in the school system are still just as bad and have never been in the neighborhood of okay,” he says. “What Durham Public Schools still desperately needs help with is the most basic, and vexing challenge: assistance on how all of us can live out every day—and not just talk about and mentally agree with—the truth that English learner students are intelligent and going places.”

The lawsuit was settled before Ali finished his sophomore year in high school. Yet Ali still didn’t learn English in high school.

And that wasn’t the only way the system failed him. He also wanted to learn skills, like basic algebra, that would open doors for him in college and career.

As an English learner, Ali was shunted into English-as-asecond-language courses with other English learners and isolated from the rest of the student body.

These courses are intended to benefit non-native speakers, with a slower pace and greater focus on vocabulary. However, the courses are meant to be transitory, lasting for a year or two upon a student’s arrival. They do not cover all the content needed to prepare students for standardized tests and the rigors of a college education.

At Durham Public Schools, English learners exit English as a second language courses by scoring high enough on year-end exams. Unfortunately, most do not make enough progress on year-end exams to do so. As a result, most English learners miss out on a wide range of courses. This lack of access to key knowledge bases severely limits their college and career options.

Azana Green says communication issues are a big part of the problem. She saw that firsthand while working at the Lincoln Community Health Center, which provides health care and social services for marginalized groups in Durham, including migrants. According to Green, English learners’ families were often the last to know about academic opportunities and classes, resulting in those students being shut out or missing deadlines.

“Durham Public Schools would call newcomer families from the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. unannounced and expect the parents to have several hours to work through forms,” she said with a sigh. “That’s just not possible for a family trying to get on their feet with the mom and dad respec- tively working long hours as a nail tech and cab driver.”

“From student registration to assessments to parent-teacher conferences, there was way too much red tape. They had to know that if I, a native English speaker, found the forms confusing, English learner families would, too.”

But lack of communication wasn’t the only issue—the messages the school system did send were problematic, too.

In the fall of his senior year, Ali realized he was only enrolled in three classes rather than the typical four. He brought up his concern with his guidance counselor. She dismissed his worries.

“[My counselor] said it wasn’t a problem because I would still graduate with the required number of credits,” Ali remembers. “But I knew it meant I wouldn’t meet the requirements for college admissions. She didn’t see a problem because I already had a job at Lowe’s.”

During high school, Ali began working part-time hours as a Lowe’s cashier. He didn’t see it as a permanent career, just a way to save money for college.

Durham Public Schools English learners typically must take remedial courses first.

Even within remedial courses, Burns says that English learner students from Durham schools have weaker language skills than other students.

“My colleagues and I find it distressing that these students who have taken four years of high school come to Durham Tech with no knowledge of simple English capitalization and punctuation rules,” says Burns. “Those of us who have volunteered at Durham Public Schools in our free time know it’s because the teachers and administration there share a rubber stamp mentality. For them, it’s about letting English learners pass and move on without insisting they master basic English skills. There’s zero accountability.”

Ali took Burns’ class in his freshman year in 2021. By the end of that semester, he was overjoyed to be able to read articles and watch the news in English.

How did Ali become English proficient in just one year at Durham Tech when he was unable to do so at Durham Public Schools in four? Burns cites two key factors: faculty experience and teaching style.

“In 2012, when the English learner population really started growing in Durham, English as a second language department director Paula Wilder started to recruit and retain incredible talent [at Durham Tech]. Many of our 17 faculty members earned doctoral degrees, speak a variety of languages, and have considerable experience teaching languages overseas,” says Burns, who spent years teaching English in Beijing, China.

Some experienced teachers may be drawn to teaching at a college level rather than in K-12 schools. But professors at Durham Tech also take a totally different approach to teaching English.

“In line with current research, we avoid lectures and instead focus on a student-centered approach that emphasizes individual participation and group activities,” says Burns. “We also carefully monitor student progress. I would never pass a student who didn’t have the tools to succeed.”

Durham Tech professors like Burns have recommended Durham Public Schools adopt its methodology. Yet the school system has not yet changed its approach.

Meanwhile, more students like Ali keep arriving at the schools’ doorsteps. One of these students is Ali’s little sister, Farishta.

Ali refused to let himself be “talked into failure.” Now, he strolls around Durham Tech’s campus, joking in English with friends. Confident in his ability to pick up new languages, he’s on his way to Spanish 101.

He’s proud of becoming fully proficient in English in two years at community college. He plans to transfer to UNC-Greensboro next fall to pursue computer science. But it will take him three years to obtain a two-year degree from Durham Tech before transferring, and that third year will cost him an extra $4,000 in tuition money.

It’s not just Ali. One in five English learners who graduate from Durham schools head on to college. Yet they face several years and thousands of dollars in setbacks, because they often can’t enroll in college courses immediately after graduation.

Adam Burns has taught remedial English language courses at Durham Tech since 2016. Most English learners from school districts across North Carolina matriculate directly into credit-bearing courses, he says. In contrast, he says

“I worry for my sister Farishta who still goes to high school at Jordan,” Ali says. “I try to help her with English at home. She wants to go to medical school to be a doctor and help people, but I am scared she won’t get the chance.” This problem isn’t going away soon. Currently, English learners make up roughly 10 percent of all U.S. public school students, and that number is expected to hit 25 percent nationwide by the end of the 2020s.

These figures don’t have to mean impending doom. Despite the obstacles he faced, Ali is a testament to what’s possible. He’s excited about his upcoming graduation from Durham Tech in May.

“This time,” he says, “I’ll be able to understand the speeches.” W

This story was published through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is produced by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.