| For almost a decade the No Child Left Behind Act's rigid accountability measures have been imposed on school districts and their schools to ensure and promote systemic reporting and tracking of individual student data. Although several legislative attempts in California have been made to create and implement a statewide universal longitudinal student data management system, these attempts have been stagnated by the state's economic troubles and an inferior design of the current data management system. To date, California K-12 individual student data records are managed and transported via paper records stored in students' cumulative folders. As a result, these files currently serve as an ultimate source of information for the longitudinal individual student data. Such an arrangement presents a number of challenges for the state's districts, their schools, and in due course, students, as well as research, policy, and practice. This empirical exploratory case study was designed to closely examine the current state of individual language minority student data and the implications classification practices for language minority students have on school-level services, allocation of funds, and expenditures of entitlement categorical dollars earmarked to serve English language learners---a largely understudied area in education finance. Although additional research is needed to further inform the findings presented in this exploratory case study, there are several salient implications for policy and practice that can be derived from this study to help inform districts, schools, policymakers, and the education community at large to improve learning conditions for language minority student subgroups. |
