Photo courtesy: Portland Public Schools

PORTLAND -- Oregon’s public schools are pondering what, exactly, Ballot Measure 58 will mean for them, how it will be implemented and what impact it will have on students.

Portland schools officials say it’s difficult to gauge how much the so-called bilingual education ban would impact public education, but that it would affect thousands of students and hundreds of teachers.

School officials would not voice support or opposition to the initiative itself; however, Portland schools ESL director Dianna Fernandez did say she believed Measure 58 was based on a “common misconception” that schools here instruct students in languages other than English.

She also said the measure could face legal challenges if approved by voters.

“There is a lot of vagueness. What is English immersion? How would it work? There is confusion, maybe, for the creators of the measure,” Fernandez said.

The city’s English as a Second Language director added that Measure 58 supporters also may have some misconceptions about how much of the day ESL students actually spend “immersed” in English instruction, since those classes are primarily delivered in English already.

Approximately 4,700 students in Portland’s public schools are in the ESL-Bilingual Program, or about 10 percent of the district’s overall population of about 47,000 students.

The state mandates at least 35 percent of non-native English speaking students show demonstrable progress in language mastery through state and federal testing, according to Portland schools officials.

Fernandez says new numbers released in late September show that 51 percent of the students in her ESL program progressed in accordance with the testing standards.

She also said that other education officials in Massachusetts and California, where similar ballot measures to alter English teaching to non-native students have passed, say the new mandates have done nothing to help children.

“Their own experience is that this hasn’t helped students to progress in those schools -- students weren’t ready when put into mainstream English (classes) with non-support at the typical high school level,” she said. “There are no statistics to support it and both states have been at it for a while.”

Voters will decide for themselves this fall whether or not to bring the experiment to Oregon.

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