In 1990, advocates for Florida’s language minority immigrants sued the State Board of Education in an effort to improve Limited English Proficient (LEP) students’ access to educational opportunities. Their demands for equality of access to educational opportunity resulted in an agreement between several advocacy groups and the Florida Department of Education, dictating policies that require schools to provide LEP students with "understandable instruction." The agreement, usually referred to as the Consent Decree, also requires efforts to ensure that language limitations do not prevent students from receiving challenging, quality instruction .

The purpose of this paper is to better understand how the school context in general, and tracking practices in particular, affect the implementation of the policies contained in the consent decree. Political attacks on bilingual education, such as the 1998 anti-bilingual Proposition 227 in California, cite immigrant students' low achievement to support English-only policies. Few studies, however, actually examine whether bilingual programs are implemented as intended or not.

This paper uses qualitative methods to analyze the implementation of policies dictated by Florida's Consent Decree. I examine how the implementation of these policies is affected by school context, including schools’ organizational processes, such as tracking and testing practices, as well as other school characteristics, such as overcrowding, limited resources and attitudes towards immigrants. The paper addresses how the growth in LEP population in an already rapidly expanding school district undermines the feasibility and intent of such policies. Informal curriculum tracking practices for LEP students particularly penalize those immigrant students who come in with high aspirations and are well prepared, but who lack knowledge of how the American high school system works.

The methodology includes content analysis of written policies regarding evaluation and placement of LEP students at the State and County levels. At the school level, the research focuses on two high schools in Miami and includes interview, document collection concerning school policies as well as LEP students’ course credit analysis, and participant observation that focused mainly on guidance counselors. This research is part of a larger project on Academic Orientation among Native Minority and Immigrant Adolescents in Miami.

To protect the identity of those involved, I have used pseudonyms for both people and schools involved in the project. The sample includes staff in both schools with the main concentration on those who have the greatest involvement in student’s placement in academic classes: teachers, guidance counselors, department heads and the principal and assistant principal for curriculum.

I spent two semesters and a summer as a volunteer at Northern High School, where I was able to become familiar to all counselors, the assistant principal for curriculum, the secretaries and the College Assistance Program (CAP) Advisor. As a volunteer, I spent several days helping the guidance counselor who is also the test chairperson, responsible for standardized testing including the HSCT (High School Competency Test), the SAT (Stanford Achievement Test), the FCAT (Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test) and Florida Writes! test. I also spent several days at the "Student Services" main office area alphabetizing subject selection cards for the whole school. Although most of my volunteering usually meant doing some type of paperwork, I also did participant observation during subject selection week and attended preparation meetings for subject selection. I formally interviewed all counselors, the principal and assistant principals and several department heads. A large part of my data came from informal conversations with school staff during the time I was volunteering, when they generously shared their experiences and insights with me.

I spent two semesters at King High, where again, I formally and informally interviewed counselors, an assistant principal and the principal, the teachers who head the ESOL, the Math and the English departments, and the test chairperson. Most of my time at King was spent with guidance counselors, who shared their knowledge, their insights, and their stories with me.

The data presented here is based on work in two high schools only. Findings point in a certain direction, but it would be presumptuous to assume they provide a definitive answer to the questions posed. In both of the schools studied the majority of the immigrant students are of Haitian descent. In order for any of the conclusions to be extended to other groups, further research is in process in the other two schools in the project, with immigrants of other nationalities.

Research in the fields of sociology and anthropology of education has been informed by one of two competing theoretical paradigms that attempt to establish a theoretical relation between schooling and society. One paradigm sees schools as agents of social mobility and the other as agents of social reproduction. The status attainment research tradition, usually associated with functionalist approaches and the social mobility paradigm, assumes schools are neutral agents of social mobility.

Most research on curriculum tracking, however, falls under the social reproduction paradigm. This research interprets the assignment of students to different courses that lead into different learning sequences as one of the main mechanisms through which schools selectively distribute access to more highly valued types of knowledge . Bourdieu’s analysis of schools rewarding cultural capital epitomizes this line of thought . According to this theory, schools favor and positively reward the cultural capital, i.e., the forms of knowledge of the dominant class, while de-legitimizing other types of knowledge.

Saha has suggested that the paradigms of social reproduction and social mobility are not incompatible, and that in fact, the processes are interdependent. The distinction between individual and structural mobility, according to Saha, resolves the apparent contradiction between these two paradigms. Consistent with the theoretical paradigm that views schools as agents of social mobility, mobility is offered as an option to individual members of the non-dominant groups, whether they are working class or ethnic minorities, without altering the structure of domination. Success stories of specific individuals within the educational system reinforce the myth of a meritocratic society. At the same time, and consistent with the social reproduction paradigm, the educational system actually reproduces class relations for the majority of students. The process reinforces the related myth that public schools are a neutral place where the allocation of educational resources and the distribution of opportunities to learn are done on the basis of objective criteria .

The literature on tracking and ability grouping does not report positive effects with high achievers, and has unanimously pointed to negative effects for average and low achieving groups . The bulk of the research points to negative instructional effects of ability grouping that influence students’ learning through quantity, quality and pace of instruction . Lower-track classes not only provide fewer learning opportunities, but teachers in these classes also expect less of students. Students in these classes are exposed to a curriculum that is more restricted in scope and in exposure to resources and opportunities .

Research has also clearly demonstrated the unreliability of ability-group placements. Children with comparable levels of academic performance are found in groups that rank anywhere from the top of the class to near the bottom . Oakes also found that ability groups and tracks were far from being the homogeneous learning environments schools claimed they were . These findings indicate that factors other than student abilities are involved in their placement process.

These findings regarding tracking have originated a movement towards detracking, with a resulting debate on the merits of tracking and detracking in regards to equality of opportunity. Riordan has compared the debate on tracking and detracking to the one regarding policies of integrated and segregated schooling. As a result of this polemic, many counties offer comprehensive high schools, in which students supposedly can pick among different courses that lead into different learning sequences, without being considered "tracks," because they all lead to what appears to be the same high school diploma.

These new research trends have opened an increasing gap between the rhetoric used in educational policy and a fairly strong consensus in the theoretical and research fields. Political rhetoric has maintained the assumption that not only do students possess varying abilities, but also that all students are best served by ability grouping and curriculum tracking. Meanwhile, educational researchers assert that ability tracking does not help the best students and most likely harms the average and below average students .

Fleishman et al. , in a descriptive study of services to LEP students, found that a large percentage of them are in classes below their age/grade level. Rather than blame placement practices, Fleishman concluded that foreign students are entering U.S. schools educationally disadvantaged. Other researchers however maintain that while some immigrants indeed arrive with limited schooling experiences, many students arrive with a solid background in math and sciences. These authors point to the inappropriate use of assessment in placing foreign students in lower level courses that limit their educational opportunities .

Federal law and MDCPS follow the ethic of equal opportunity. Federal law, as embodied in the "Bilingual Education Act" from 1968, mandates that local districts take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in order to open the instructional program to these linguistically and culturally diverse students. . The stated goal is "high quality instruction and a challenging curriculum" for all students (ibid.)

MDCPS policy is subject to the 1990 Consent decree that resulted from the LULAC et al. vs. State Board of Education lawsuit. The agreement establishes the structure to guarantee the rights of LEP students to "comprehensible instruction." The district LEP plan mentions the need to ensure "special attention to the placement of high performing LEP students in honors, college preparatory and advanced placement courses" . LEP students who have been receiving services in an approved LEP program for fewer than two years are exempted from participating in the statewide assessment program. The District Plan goes on to establish that students however are not exempt from meeting these standards, and that alternative methods of assessment be used to determine levels of competency.

MDCPS schools can provide comprehensible instruction in one of two forms. Students who are placed in ESOL classes levels I and II are supposed to be in bilingual curriculum content (BCC) classes for mathematics, social studies and science. MDCPS schools can also provide comprehensible instruction to LEP students by requiring every content area teacher who has a LEP student in his or her class to complete training in using ESOL strategies .

In this context, my research is directed toward the goal of using a model proposed by Pallas , that looks at the interaction between individual student characteristics and school organizational processes and constraints to explain immigrant students’ academic achievement. This model is an alternative to other models that explain immigrant or minority students’ achievement on the basis of cultural discontinuities between home and school culture or on the basis of the mode of incorporation of minority groups into the dominant society .

The data presented in this paper comes from schools that belong in that category of officially detracked schools, meaning that they offer one standard type of high school diploma. Students do not belong to academic or vocational tracks while in school despite the fact that they graduate not only with different grade point averages (G.P.A.), but also with very different levels of learning that are reflected in a document called the "course credit analysis." For example, a student can have a high school diploma with the highest level of math course taken being anywhere between Algebra I (which some students take in middle school even before entering high school) and Advanced Placement Calculus or Statistics (both college level courses). While these schools are officially not tracked, I argue that LEP students are, in fact, informally tracked into courses that do not prepare them for college.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) is the fourth largest public school system in the country. With a student population of 333,444 students, 43,102 new students enrolled in the 1995-96 school year. Most schools are overcrowded and many have high proportions of LEP students. Across all grades, sixteen percent of the 1995-96 new students were classified as LEP During the same school year, 10.3 percent of MDCPS’ high school students were classified as LEP. Northern High was operating at 114 percent of its utilization capacity: the assigned program capacity was 2,183 students, and the school had 2,540 students enrolled at the time of the counting. Of those, about 493 students (19.4 percent) were classified as LEP. King High was operating at 107 percent utilization, with 160 students above its assigned capacity. At King High 28.7 percent of the students were classified as LEP.

Both of the schools’ populations have changed radically recently. At Northern, a population that twenty years ago was suburban white middle class youth with a large Jewish component, gradually became mostly African-American. An academically selective Magnet Program in the school brings in non-Black students to the school. These students make up the vast majority of advanced placement and honors classes in the school. Only ten years ago, King High’s student body was predominantly African-American, while now it is predominantly Haitian. King High does not have any magnet programs that could attract non-black students.

In the past few years increasing numbers of immigrant Haitian, West Indian or Hispanic students have entered both schools with Haitians reaching an estimated 40 percent of the population at Northern High and the majority at King High. The racial breakdown of the faculty at Northern High, however, remained mostly white (67 percent), with 26 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic. At King High, the ethnic breakdown was 46 percent white, 34 percent Black and 19 percent Hispanic for the 1995-96 school year.

The overall enrollment growth and specifically that of LEP students have dramatically affected counselors at both schools. At the time of the research, counselors’ average caseloads ranged between six and seven hundred students. In the past counselors met with groups of students from their own caseloads, but teachers complained that the process of getting each counselor’s students together was too time consuming and complicated. Now, instead, counselors go into classrooms at the beginning of the school year and give general advice regarding course selection to students.

Since MDCPS does not officially offer academic or vocational tracks, in theory students are allowed to pick the courses they want, and therefore, students have control over their opportunities to learn. In practice, classes that offer increased opportunities to learn, such as honors and advanced placement courses, require teacher recommendation and approval from the counselor. As a result, teachers and guidance counselors are expected to observe the variations in achievement and assign students to appropriate courses. A common remark made by several counselors regarding time available to guide students was:

The Consent Decree recognizes that LEP students may be competent in subject areas, but that English language tests in such areas as math may not accurately assess the student’s competence. Accordingly, the District is supposed to provide alternative means of student assessment. When I asked about the existence of alternative assessments for incoming LEP students’ knowledge in content areas, no counselor or teacher I worked with knew of any, with the exception of a math test. When they come to register, students may or may not be given a math placement test that contains very few instructions in English. Regardless of what test they are given, students have no time to prepare or review the material.

While the Consent Decree envisions rules that should lead to "comprehensible instruction," implementing these rules in schools that register new foreign students practically every single day of the school year is difficult, especially when these schools are already functioning over capacity. While the Consent Decree mandates teacher training in ESOL strategies for a teacher who has a LEP student, once a teacher satisfies the training requirements, there are few mechanisms in place to verify whether teachers are using these strategies or not. Teachers are required to mention the use of ESOL strategies in their lesson plans, and the principal is required to perform an annual evaluation of the teacher. In fact, in both schools I was told the evaluation was performed mostly on paper, and rarely in practice. Only new teachers tend to be observed, and teachers have the right to be informed of the date of the observation. What actually happens, according to one ESOL teacher is that:

District policy regarding teacher evaluation, although not directly related to LEP students, also affects them. When grades in a class do not conform to a normal distribution and are below a certain average the district calls teachers for re-training. As a result of this policy, a good teacher who grades according to demanding standards unable to be met by students is "punished," while mediocre or uncaring teachers who distribute good grades for lower quality work (or no work at all) are rewarded.

The Consent Decree established that ESOL classess must provide students with Language Arts credit. The District policy also requires students who exit the ESOL classes to take grade level English courses. Thus, someone who may have entered school for the first time ever at the age of 15 could take two years of ESOL and then be placed in 12^th grade English. Policy makers apparently presumed a correspondence between the material covered in ESOL and that in mainstream English classes. ESOL teachers, however, maintain they cannot reach this goal. ESOL courses need to teach basic grammar, and basic reading and writing skills. Moreover, many students do not have these skills in their native language, let alone English. Every counselor with whom I talked considered the transition between the ESOL program and 11^th or 12^th grade English a problem and all considered the policy absurd. Ms. Jones says she always tries to place these students with an understanding teacher, which she says: "sometimes works, but some teachers try to get the students back into the ESOL program because they already have too many problems in their classrooms and don’t want to deal with these students."

In the ESOL-English transition, as well as when students need math courses below high school level, district policy requires schools to give students high school credits for those courses. When students leave these special programs however they still lack the skills to deal with mainstream high school material.

Haitian students’ academic aspirations impressed most school counselors. "They all want to be doctors and lawyers but they just don’t know how" or "everybody thinks they are college bound." But they also added that these aspirations were many times unrealistic: "Haitians haven’t been to school as much as they would like to believe they did." Accordingly, teachers also mentioned that many students lacked appropriate study skills. Although counselors perceived immigrant parents as sharing their children’s ambitions, they did not perceive parents as being able to provide support to students. Several incidents mentioned by teachers or counselors reflect the lack of understanding between Haitian parents and school staff.

When I inquired about differences between children who grew up in the school system and the recent immigrants, one of the counselors at Northern illustrated the differences in cultural capital between the two groups:

Alternates and electives are another example of an unspoken way curriculum tracking occurs. An examination of the subject selection cards yielded a pattern where students who are in honors classes and advanced courses practically always take academic electives such as a foreign language, maybe an art course or even keyboarding. In contrast, the majority of students who are taking regular courses either choose or are placed in electives such as "Health and Nutrition" (cooking), family dynamics or weightlifting. In this way, the gap in terms of what students are learning in school becomes larger each year, because not only are some students getting a better education in their core classes, they are also taking academic courses in their electives, while the rest of the students are not.

To assess students for placement, counselors basically have to rely on their own personal impressions and on teachers’ evaluations. Teachers working in class sizes varying from 35 to over 50 students do not always have an opportunity to get to know their students either. The process of subject selection for LEP students was almost automatically restricted to either the few BCC classes offered or the least demanding courses, where counselors think students will have less difficulties. In terms of language being an obstacle to placement in honors, gifted or advanced placement classes: "It might (be an obstacle), but if you can’t speak the language how can you go to an advanced class anyway?" (Counselor, Northern High).

As a result of these perceptions, counselors commonly place students in courses that are lower in level than those requested by the students, even when they had the teacher’s recommendation. During the many days I spent alphabetizing subject selection cards I found several cases where the selection worksheet filled by the student and signed by the teacher in middle school was different from what the high school counselor wrote in the card which goes on to the data entry person. In several cases where the student had selected an honors class, the counselor had placed them in a regular class, particularly if the student requested honors placement in only one subject. Although this was especially true regarding the incoming students from the middle school, it also happened with students already in the high school. When I asked the head counselor why this was happening, she answered that "counselors know better, that middle school teachers don’t know about high school courses."

In theory the county offers students the chance to override teachers’ recommendations and choose to take a harder course. As do several other schools in the county, Northern High implements a rule establishing that if a student chooses to use their right to override the teachers’ recommendation, he or she has to stay in that class until the end of the course. This gate-keeping practice keeps students who do not have teacher recommendations from attempting to go to higher level classes, by scaring them with the possibility that they might find the class too demanding but not be able to transfer back into a regular class.

By the end of the first week of school in the 97-8 school year, one of the dozens of slips on the table of one of the new counselors, from a 9^th grader, said in huge printed letters, "I SHOULD BE IN ALL HONORS CLASSES." At that point that counselor was only dealing with emergencies, such as students who had registered for a course counting on taking a prerequisite during the summer which they failed, and were therefore in a class they could not be in. The case of the student who requested the honors classes was left for later, meaning that if the student actually got transferred to the classes he or she wanted it would probably not be until the third week of school at the earliest.

Once in a learning sequence, it is almost impossible for a student to change into a more advanced sequence, because the gap between what is taught in the regular and the accelerated tracks increases every year, especially in the math and science courses. For foreign students, who arrive without a detailed knowledge of how the system works, by the time they reach eleventh or twelfth grade and find out about the requirements of the Florida State University System, it is already very late. These students’ only chance of going to college is by doing remedial work at a community college. This means that students will need to pay for a course that was offered for free at their high school, many times using restricted financial aid that will be used up when they become ready for real college level work.

Counselors know what high school classes fulfill college entrance requirements and which do not. On the other hand, they also want students to graduate from high school. Since there is usually a less demanding course being offered, there is a natural tendency to "help" students by letting them take the less demanding course load. This tension between college standards and minimum requirement for graduation exists for both LEP and regular students. Despite Northern’s suburban location, it has characteristics of an inner city school. "This is a minority school anyway and in the whole school system, all minority youth has problems in education, we know that." The same counselor expressed concerns that "when they (Haitian students) identify with the African Americans, they get in trouble," a process he called "integrating into the wrong group and adopting a negative approach to education." Most students in the school have high aspirations, "not that they want to study hard, but most of them want to go to college." Some of the counselors interviewed (although not all) expressed awareness of the issue of immigrant students’ assimilation into the group which is the majority in the school. In the case of both King and Northern High schools, this majority is a group perceived by the school system as one with a negative academic orientation. When questioned about curriculum tracking however, counselors responded that "when you see the student in front of you, you know; there is not much science to placement."

While there is a constant tendency to downgrade the course choices of regular students, some counselors show satisfaction in helping those they perceive as high achievers, or students who manage to impress counselors as highly motivated. Most counselors at one point or another told me a story about an exceptionally motivated student along the lines of:

Federal and MDCPS policies promise equal opportunity to all students, including those who enter the system with limited proficiency in English. However, there are inherent contradictions between the rhetoric used in educational policy and the practices dictated by the existence of extensive informal tracking of students. While the rhetoric, both the policy found in print and the discourse in the school states that "every student can learn given quality teaching," in practice students perceived as low achieving for any reason are placed in the most overcrowded and unchallenging classes.

At the Federal level, the Office of Bilingual Education affirms its belief in two principles: equality of opportunity in terms of access to quality education, and educational excellence for every student . The Office also states that "Bilingual education aims to help students both master English and master challenging content in all areas of the curriculum. This role is based on two knowledge-based principles:

1. ‘That all children are capable of engaging in complex thinking tasks provided they receive high quality instruction and follow a challenging curriculum.
2. That developing and maintaining the native language in no way interferes with English language acquisition’ "

Educational policies state that schools are responsible for providing comprehensible instruction through either the use of ESOL techniques or the use of a native language. With the organization of the curriculum offering so many different course levels, offering every student in ESOL I and II the opportunity to take each and every class in the school through special instruction would require a staggering amount of classrooms and teachers. LEP students face an absence of commitment to teacher use and to administrative enforcement of ESOL strategies. This is due to constraints usually found in overcrowded inner-city schools, as well as, in some cases, to lack of will to help "these people," i.e. incoming immigrant children. In the absence of the required resources and commitment, the policy establishing that no student should be deprived of comprehensible instruction at the appropriate level becomes inoperable. The fact that schools offer certain less demanding courses in the BCC format pushes the absolute majority of LEP students at ESOL levels I and II to these classes, regardless of their level of knowledge. For students in ESOL levels III and IV, who are "mainstreamed," the problem becomes that of teachers’ failure to provide them with understandable instruction. Reasons for this failure include teachers overwhelmed by large classes with discipline problems, ineffective training in ESOL strategies combined with lack of meaningful enforcement, as well as sheer prejudice and lack of will to comply with the policies. Within this context, counselors’ attempts to place students in easier (lower level) classes, regardless of their level of knowledge in their native language, makes sense. However, the practice undermines LEP students’ ambitions for higher education and social mobility.

The analysis of the specific case of the two schools in this study confirms the fears expressed by Zehler et al in their examination of assessment of Limited English Proficiency Students. Classification of a student as LEP entitles the student to important special services particularly in terms of language instruction. On the other hand, "assessment and classification as LEP may also limit the student in terms of future opportunities and unfairly exclude LEP students from other opportunities, such as for advanced and other special instruction."

My findings at this stage of the research confirm Resnick and Resnick’s assertion that despite the commitment and the rhetoric that emphasize comprehensive schools, in reality there is considerable tracking in the high school, even if it is not formally labeled as such. The fact that such immense variability exists in the expectations and standards enforced in the different courses offered within the school points to the actual maintenance of tracking.

Thus, despite the assertions that "we don’t track students," students are in fact being tracked. While students taking honors and advanced placement classes take academic electives, students in regular tracks are encouraged to take non-academic electives. For immigrant students, especially recent arrivals who come straight into high school, the consequences of such practices are extremely relevant. The absence of formal labeling of tracking is misleading for these new students who are not aware of the intricacies of how the system works. Students, and particularly parents, come in trusting the educational system. By the time they find out that their high school diploma still does not mean that they can go to college, or that they still have a long course of remedial work in community colleges, it is probably too late for them to pursue their college aspirations.

Despite the limitations in terms of access to equal opportunity that immigrant students face in general, I found that the individual school atmosphere mediates between tracking and the students. The pressure towards less demanding courses was stronger at Northern High than at King High, where an administration that seems more understanding and supportive of the students sets a different tone in their dealings with students. Schools can be limited in the ways they provide opportunities for students by outside constraints (State and District policies, lack of resources) and also by internal constraints (such as resistance to providing certain groups of students with a better opportunity due to prejudice or (mis)perceptions about their abilities). Therefore, to explain students’ placements, one needs to understand the constraints under which the school functions, the school’s own organizational processes within this context, and how these interact with student characteristics as suggested by Pallas .

Theoretically, the findings in this paper support Saha’s description of the role of schools as both agents of social mobility and of social reproduction. While the majority of the students in these schools seem to be destined to social reproduction, those who bring the social or cultural capital to impress the "gatekeepers" (in this case, teachers and, or counselors), are able to get the doors to mobility opened. What then is the kind of capital that leads to mobility in different school contexts? To answer this we need further research on what constitutes the desired social or cultural capital for minority groups in different contexts.

As a final remark, I wish to make clear that although I have just called teachers and counselors "gatekeepers," I did not use the word in a pejorative sense. In general, the school staff I had the chance to meet is made up of dedicated people with a genuine interest in the welfare of their students. Many mentioned the fact that they are all "spread too thin" and expressed a desire that the school system would give them better means to achieve their goals. In the words of Ms. Jones, Northern’s head counselor:

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