Of the 58 suburban school districts visited by state monitors in the past three years, none met all of Illinois’s tough education requirements for students learning English, and 22 failed to provide a bilingual program for all of the students who qualified for it, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of Illinois State Board of Education records from fiscal year 2009 to October 2011.
Compliance problems included bilingual courses taught by teachers who lacked required language or subject-matter certification, classes with substandard content, and failure to make yearly assessments of how well students are learning English. English-language learners, about 80 percent of whom speak Spanish as their native language, are struggling academically in many suburban districts.
