The majority of students in public Montgomery County middle and high schools who don’t speak English fluently are meeting Maryland’s improvement goals toward proficiency, according to a new report. All middle school students enrolled in English for Speakers of Other Languages instruction, or ESOL, made the expected annual progress toward proficiency, while findings among high school students were a mixed bag.
The county measures progress by year-to-year score increases of 15 points or more on the Language Assessment System Links, the state’s proficiency test. In the 2009-2010 school year, 83 percent of eighth-graders, 77 percent of seventh-graders, and 69 percent of sixth-graders achieved the benchmark, blowing past the state’s target of 58 percent of students.
