Reclassification Patterns Among Latino English Learner Students in Bilingual, Dual Immersion, and English Immersion Classrooms

12 years of student records from a large school district

Latino English-learner students in English immersion, transitional bilingual, maintenance bilingual and dual-immersion classrooms

Hazard analysis of time-to-reclassification using twelve years of district administrative data. Observational; students are not randomly assigned to linguistic programme, and the paper does not use the preference-matching strategy of Valentino & Reardon. The value is the long horizon - it follows students to the end of high school, which almost nothing else in this literature does.

The timing result inverts the level result, and this is the single most useful fact in the cluster for anyone reading short-horizon programme evaluations. Latino English learners in two-language programmes are reclassified as English-proficient MORE SLOWLY during elementary school, but have HIGHER overall reclassification rates, higher English proficiency, and higher academic threshold passage by the end of high school. An evaluation that stopped in grade 3 would have concluded that bilingual programmes hurt English acquisition; an evaluation that ran to grade 12 concludes the opposite.

High. Programme enrolment is chosen by families and schools, and the families who choose dual immersion differ systematically. The internal inversion of the result over time is more informative than the level difference, because selection cannot easily explain a sign flip within the same students.

Unreplicated as a hazard analysis, but the direction agrees with the Portland lottery's EL-reclassification result at a shorter horizon.