The LEAP initiative in Colorado is being paid for by millions of dollars supplied by the Gates Foundation to major metro areas across the country. These sweeping new state legislated programs are being designed to force compliance with state standards in schools.
The position of this document and its enforcement is unique – it is not just another passing fad in education. Alignment with state standards and national guidelines is now a requirement and not an optioni. Either the teacher instructs in accordance to the standards or face losing their jobs.
The main intent of the standards and the ACTFL position statement is simple – teachers must no longer speak about the language in their world language classrooms, they must speak the language, and do so 90% of the time.
Last week, when I modeled adherence to the 90% rule at a meeting with our district teachers to make the LEAP position clear, there was some pushback from traditional teachers. They said that they had not been given a voice in the creation of this document.
This was false, however – they had been invited to all the focus meetings leading up to this point of rollout in Denver Public Schools but just didn’t come to any of those meetings. Their voice was not heard for the years leading up to the creation of this document because nobody ever showed up to represent their position at the meetings.
Being a state legislated document (read: a law), it is not some kind of mere recommendation about teaching. The changes that this document represents force adherence to the use of the target language in the classroom. This will affect all states, probably within the next few years.
Meredith Richmond, my colleague at my old school (we both left last year along with three other teachers in an exodus of half of the largest WL department in Colorado) applied for and got the job as the LEAP evaluator for the district. Meredith has actually worked with Blaine Ray in doing research at East High School on multi level instruction in TPRS classrooms (around 2003). That work appears in Blaine’s book, Fluency Through TPR Storytelling.
Since East was one of four pilot schools for testing of the LEAP document in Denver Public Schools last year, Meredith and I became familiar with the program and were evaluated under it ourselves all year. As the new district evaluator for the next three years, Merdith is now going around to the classrooms of all the teachers in the district to begin this work. Any of this group who know Meredith know that she is the perfect person for this job.