There were 3,268 campuses with students beginning Grade 1 in 1992-93; LEP enrollment ranged from no Grade 1 LEP students on 788 campuses to 100 percent of Grade 1 students on 10 campuses. Campuses located in major urban school districts, the state's largest metropolitan districts serving the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and El Paso areas, had first grade classes with the highest average percentage of LEP students --28 percent of their Grade 1 students had limited English proficiency. Districts located in other central cities and their suburbs also had first grade classes that were, on average, over 20 percent limited English proficient. The lowest percentages were in rural districts, where an average of 8 percent of the beginning Grade 1 students in 1992-93 had limited English proficiency.
Districts and campuses with high percentages of economically disadvantaged students also had higher percentages of LEP students among their first graders. In their 1995 study of LEP students, Moss and Puma identified a poverty factor related to the performance of students in schools with high concentrations of economically disadvantaged students. This relationship is explored further in this study.
Larger percentages of LEP students were also found on large campuses, compared to smaller campuses. On elementary campuses with 800 or more students, an average of 26 percent of the Grade 1 students had limited English proficiency in 1992-93, compared to 9 percent on campuses with fewer than 200 students. This is due in part to the fact that more LEP students live in large urban districts where elementary campuses tend to be larger.
Students with limited English proficiency are not distributed uniformly across the state. In the border regions of Edinburg (Region 1) and El Paso (Region 19), the first grade classes consisted of 65 and 47 percent LEP students, respectively. By comparison, as Figure 1 shows, LEP students made up less than 5 percent of the first grade classes in the Beaumont (Region 5), Kilgore (Region 7), Mt. Pleasant (Region 8), and Wichita Falls (Region 9) regions. Twenty percent of the first grade students in the Houston region (Region 4) had limited English proficiency in 1992-93; however, this accounted for 24 percent of the Grade 1 LEP students in the state. Over three-fourths (78%) of the Grade 1 LEP students lived in five regions: Edinburg, Houston, Richardson (Region 10), El Paso, and San Antonio (Region 20).
One school of research on the effectiveness of bilingual education and ESL programs emphasizes the study of program effectiveness within the broader context of school effectiveness (Carter & Chatfield, 1986; August & Hakuta, 1997). School-wide performance on the TAAS is one measure of the effectiveness of Texas public schools. Schools with low overall TAAS performance have larger percentages of LEP students than schools with high overall TAAS performance. This pattern is also evident at the district level. This means bilingual education and ESL programs are more likely to be found in districts and schools with low TAAS performance. This relationship also is explored further in this study.
Return to the Table of Contents
Return to the Division of Accountability Research home page