If my child is learning English, why does he not get grades in English?
For second-language learners, we generally do not give letter grades in English/language arts until the children are proficient in English. There are rules we are told to follow as teachers, and this is one of them. We get a supplemental report card for English-language learners and fill out their progress in all of the areas of language acquisition, along with their effort and level of proficiency, but we do not give them As, Bs, Cs, etc., in the content area the same way we do with other students.
Parents react to this reporting method in different ways at different grade levels. Some parents are happy that their children are not graded because while they are learning to speak English, it seems unfair to fail them in classwork since they cannot do it yet. Others want to see how their children are performing on grade-level work even while they are learning the language. As teachers, we are caught in the requirements.
We want to convey the information to the parents if their children are failing to perform at grade level, but we are asked to only report on specific areas if the child is learning English. At the end of the year, kids are all tested, in English, on the same content for grade-level standards on the standardized tests. So all year, we report one way, but then kids are measured on how they did on the end-of-year tests, even if they are still learning the language.
It is a strange set of circumstances. Even if a child has been here for one year, or if his language proficiency is at the earliest stage with no fluency starting, we test them at the end of the year on the content all children are taught. This is not to say we are not teaching all kids, even our English-language learners, the content for the grade level, but we are not exactly reporting it in a way that always prepares parents for just how low their children are in comparison with the other kids at the grade level.
A child may be really trying to learn English with high effort scores, and he may be progressing in language acquisition above a beginning level, but still at an early intermediate level, far from reaching mastery of the language, but this report looks strong to parents.
Then, that early-language level student is tested in, say, fifth-grade content that includes grammar, spelling, reading and comprehension all at a level far above the child's performance level, and this is where he is measured at the end of the year. This is also where schools are measured, not on how well they are teaching the child to acquire language but on how well those children perform on grade-level material even before they are ready to understand it.