NOLA – by Julia O’DonoghueLouisiana schools will be able to administer the new Common Core standardized test in Spanish as well as English this March.
State schools Superintendent John White said the test — called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers or PARCC for short — can be given in Spanish to newly arrived immigrants who are still learning English for the first two years they are enrolled in school. Then, the students must switch to the English version of the assessment.
Some Louisiana school districts have recently seen an influx of immigrant students, mostly from Central America. The federal government placed over 1,200 children in Louisiana homes after they were picked up trying to cross into the United States along the southern border. The children are awaiting deportation hearings, which could take over a year to schedule.
Jefferson Parish had seen the largest increase in Spanish-speaking students,with over 500 new pupils. But Orleans, St. Tammany, East Baton Rouge and Lafayette have also been affected.
Louisiana’s previous standardized test did not have a Spanish option. While it has been common for states with large immigrant populations, like New York or California, to offer standardized tests in Spanish, developing a Spanish translation would have been expensive for a small state like Louisiana, White said.
Louisiana was able to have a Spanish version of the PARCC test because PARCC is being administered across several states, making the cost of the Spanish translation cheaper for all states to develop. If PARCC wasn’t a multiple-state test, it’s likely there wouldn’t be a Spanish standardized test offered in Louisiana, White said.
But PARCC has been controversial, in part, because it is being given across several states. Common Core critics, including Gov. Bobby Jindal, have said the assessment doesn’t reflect Louisiana’s cultural values as much as it does of more northern, liberal states.
Jindal unsuccessfully tried to block White and Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from purchasing the PARCC test for Louisiana schools this summer.
But a state judge ruled against the governor, saying Jindal had acted inappropriately in blocking the test purchase. Jindal is appealing the ruling, but White and the state school board, mostly Common Core supporters, have moved forward with implementing the PARCC test, which will take place in March.
This is a developing news story. Please check back with NOLA.com for more details.
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Julia O’Donoghue is a state politics reporter based in Baton Rouge. She can be reached at jodonoghue@nola.com or on Twitter at @jsodonoghue. Please consider following us on Facebook at NOLA.com and NOLA.com-Baton Rouge.
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/09/louisianas_common_core_test_wi.html
I’m not tolerating this bilingual nation crap. If you can’t speak in clear and fluent English, you can’t talk to me, and if your business is conducted in any foreign language, I’ll take my money elsewhere.
Two languages on your store’s sign? Two languages on your advertisements? Employees who can’t communicate in clear, intelligible English? You can keep whatever the hell it is that you’re selling, and stick it up your vent hole. I don’t want it for free.
As for the commie core test being offered in Spanish; it’s a good thing, because they’re only stupefying people with that nonsensical “education” system anyway, so let it be the wetbacks. Spanish is America’s language of communism, and globalism, so avoid it, don’t learn it, and don’t speak it. English only, or get the hell out. We have a national language, and anyone who refuses to learn and use it has no place within our borders. Anyone who caters to foreigners doesn’t belong here either.
You beat me to it. All non-americans should be home schooled. Leave the public education? for the losers.
Outstanding, JR! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Wow…it’s bad enough that we have Common Core. Now we have to have Common Core in Spanish. It just more bullshit upon bullshit.
Once again,
President Teddy Roosevelt;
“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.
In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American.
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile.
We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Enough said.