The Need for Nuance: Relationships between EL English Proficiency and Accountability Outcomes

Federal law requires states and school districts to institute accountability systems that report disaggregated student data to ensure that all children make academic progress. However, one of the mandated categories for disaggregation -- English Learner (EL) -- is reported as a single group despite representing students who are beginning, intermediate, and advanced in their acquisition of English. We argue that such a disaggregation is not sufficiently nuanced and may inadvertently hurt the very students it seeks to serve. Through the analysis of one large metro-area's accountability framework, this paper finds that there is a statistically significant relationship between EL level of English proficiency and school accountability rating that negatively impacts schools with large Intermediate EL populations.