Learning the Language

Today--April 30--is designated by the American Library Association as a day to highlight the importance of helping every child learn to read regardless of his or her linguistic or cultural background. It's called El dia de los ninos/El dia de los libros or Children's Day/Book Day and is a day in which libraries in several hundred locations will feature bilingual literacy, according to Melanie Anderson, a lobbyist for the American Library Association. Her association will hold an event to highlight bilingual literacy today in the U.S. Capitol at 3 p.m.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jorge Bustamante, an independent expert from the United Nations, begins a three-week mission today to examine the rights of migrants and immigrants in this country. His official title is the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. According to the April 27 press release from his office, he comes at the invitation of the U.S. government and will try to see firsthand what the conditions are for migrants and immigrants by visiting border areas near Nogales, Ariz., and San Diego, Calif., as well as several cities that are popular destinations for immigrants.

I'm curious about how much Mr. Bustamante will examine the educational opportunities for immigrants in this country. Some previous country reports by the Special Rapporteur tell about conditions affecting children, but don't say much about education. A 2002 report on Mexico, for example, tells about how children who try to cross that country to get to the United States and reunify with family members can become victims of the sex trade or drug trafficking.

Mr. Bustamante will be visiting the Florence Service Processing Center in Florence, Ariz.; the T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas; and the Monmouth County Jail in Freehold, New Jersey. All three are detention centers for immigrants. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, children have been housed before at the Hutto center, but I'm not sure what's been the case with the other two. In November, I wrote about the schooling for detainees at the Boystown shelter in Miami. Unaccompanied minors--children without their parents who are picked up by immigrant authorities--are entitled to a full day of school while in detention. I found it amazing and sad that children as young as 7 sometimes ended up at that shelter without their parents, after trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

The ACLU, one of the groups scheduled to meet with Mr. Bustamante, filed several suits against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in March on behalf of 10 children detained at the Hutto facility. One of the ACLU's complaints was that the children weren't receiving adequate educational services while in detention. The children have since been released, according to information posted by the ACLU. That group says this visit is the first ever by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants to review conditions of migrants and immigrants in the United States.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The speech that Tom Horne, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, gave at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, in which he criticizes implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act for English-language learners, takes me back to the 1970s. I remember how in that decade, my high school teachers talked about various kinds of dysfunction in Russian society, such as how people at times had to stand in long lines to buy bread.

In his speech, Mr. Horne compares implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act with attempts by the government of the former Soviet Union to micromanage the Russian economy. An excerpt of Mr. Horne's speech says: "When a central bureaucracy attempts to manage a complex continent-wide system, extreme dysfunction results. My theme today is that this is true of No Child Left Behind, with a 1,000-page bill and an intrusive federal government." (You can listen to the speech as well.)

For several years, Arizona didn't use the test scores of English-language learners who had attended U.S. schools for less than three years in calculating adequate yearly progress under NCLB. The U.S. Department of Education has told Arizona that it must comply with the same regulation as other states: that the scores of such students be included after they've attended U.S. schools for one year.

Mr. Horne isn't happy about that.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Alexander Russo's post today on This Week in Education piqued my interest regarding how the Virginia Department of Education is instructing school administrators to include English-language learners in testing this spring. I've previously noted that after several Virginia school districts put up a good fight in defiance of a federal mandate to give the state's regular reading test to beginning English-language learners this school year, the districts now have agreed to comply with the requirement. The writers of an editorial published in the Washington Post today opined that the Virginia districts did the right thing by backing down.

I got a copy of the April 19 memo Virginia officials sent to schools regarding testing ELLs so I could read it for myself. As Mr. Russo and a Washington Post article yesterday mention, Virginia education officials say that English-language learners will be permitted to stop taking the test if they shake their heads, "No," to indicate they can't continue.

What's also interesting is that the memo spells out procedures for testing participation for all students, not just English-language learners. It says that students who answer at least five questions are considered to have attempted taking the test. In addition, students who DON'T answer at least five questions and officially refuse to continue with the test are also counted as test participants, though their scores are recorded as "0." Both the attempters and refusers are considered in Virginia to be participants in testing under the No Child Left Behind Act and their scores are used for calculating adequate yearly progress, according to the memo.

Those procedures have been applied for testing under NCLB and weren't created in response to the recent conflict with the U.S. Department of Education over testing English-learners, according to Charles B. Pyle, the director of communications for the Virginia Department of Education. He told me in a phone interview today that educators have done their job by putting a test in front of a child--and should be able to count that child as a test participant, even if he or she refuses to take the test. He also noted that it's not just an English-language learner who has the opportunity to stop taking the test by shaking his or her head, "No." Any student can do so.

Counting every student who sits for the test--and doesn't even answer as many as five questions--strikes me as a low bar for test participation, but I'm thinking that other states might have practices similar to those in Virginia. Readers: Could you tell me what your state's policy is on this matter?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It may seem obvious that immigrant youths who are "out of school" aren't going to get much educational help, but a couple of researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California suggest in a research brief and study that educators should try to figure out how to reach such youths anyway. The researchers define out-of-school immigrant youths as young people ages 13-22 who are born abroad and don't have a high school diploma or a General Educational Development certificate.

They note that the mission of the federal migrant education program officially expanded in recent years to include out-of-school immigrant youths. Yet, few of the dollars from that program spent in California go to out-of-school immigrant youths and the program is influencing the educational progress of such young people "only slightly," the researchers say.

When I read the description of some of these youth in California--that half of out-of-school youths ages 13-15 live apart from their parents, that more than half in that same age group have less than a 7th-grade education--I thought of an out-of-school teenager from Oaxaca, Mexico, who I met five years ago when I visited a camp for migrant farmworkers in Hillsboro, Ore. I was writing about how local educators reached out to migrant families. Briefly I met Juliana, who told me she was 15 and had come to the United States with her husband. She and her sister, who was also a teenager, were illiterate and stayed at the camp during the day to care for their young children. On that particular day, Juliana was more interested in talking with the outreach workers about the need for clothing for her family than schooling.

It probably won't work for educators to reach some of the youths in this "little-noticed" and "hidden" group through traditional classrooms, the researchers observe.

I remember that the Hillsboro school district offered evening classes in English during the summers for youths who worked in the fields during the day. That struck me as a creative way to reach out-of-school youths who were motivated to learn.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most presenters at a session about the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on English-language learners at an American Educational Research Association meeting in Chicago April 9-13 were sharply critical of the federal education law, according to their slide presentations from that meeting that have been posted by the Institute for Language and Education Policy.

For example, in his case study about two Cambodian 5th graders who take the regular math test of Texas after attending U.S. schools for 6 months, Wayne E. Wright, an assistant professor in bicultural-bilingual studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio, writes that "to expect newly-arrived non-English speaking students from third world countries with poor education systems to perform on the same tests at the same level as English-fluent peers exhibits the 'hard discrimination of unrealistic expectations.' " He notes that his characterization is a critique of President Bush's frequent comment that to say that low-income, minority, or ELL students can't do well on standardized tests is to show the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

Kate Menken, a linguistics professor at Queens College of the City University of New York, didn't even wait to get into the substance of her presentation to say that state and federal accountability provisions have caused some problems for ELLs. The title is: "Language as Liability: Why the Drawbacks of Accountability Outweigh the Benefits for ELLs in New York."

I keep wondering how much members of Congress or their staff who are likely to write the provisions for ELLs in the reauthorization of NCLB are tuned in to the views of people who they don't deliberately invite to their meetings or hearings--such as the researchers who gave presentations in Chicago.

Earlier posts: "U.S. Senators Hear Views about ELLs and NCLB" and "What Happened at the Subcommittee Hearing on ELLs?"

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three months after the Fairfax County, Va., school board passed a resolution permitting administrators to defy a federal requirement to give the regular reading test to some beginning English-language learners, school officials have announced a turnaround on that position, according to an article today in the Washington Post. [Update follows.] Spokesmen from the Arlington and Loudoun County school systems in Virginia told me today that their school districts, which had also resisted the federal mandate, have also decided to comply with it.

Fairfax County Superintendent Jack D. Dale told principals that they should follow federal requirements and use the test for English-language learners who have been in U.S. schools for one year but also allow students to stop taking the test if they can't continue and say they are finished, according to the Post article.

Earlier posts about this topic: "Bill About Testing ELLs Is Introduced in the U.S. Congress," "Virginia Backs Down on Testing Showdown," and "Testing Showdown."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When the staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, convened a meeting on English-language learners and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act recently, they invited two of the same five people who had testified last month before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Those two were Cornelia M. Ashby, from the Government Accountability Office, and Peter Zamora, the co-chair of the Hispanic Education Coalition. The meeting was April 10.

But the Senate staff also chose two panelists who hadn't yet made presentations on Capitol Hill regarding reauthorization of NCLB. Valeria Silva, the chief academic officer for St. Paul public schools, in St. Paul, Minn., spoke about how English-language learners are subjected to an extraordinary amount of testing under NCLB. And Charlene Rivera, the executive director for the Center for Equity and Excellence in Education, at George Washington University, spoke about how tests for English-learners should be improved and how teachers should be better prepared to work with such students.

In a phone interview this week, Ms. Silva said she told the senators that English-language learners in her district shouldn't have to be taking tests three or four times a year, as they are now. In addition, she recommended that new immigrants shouldn't have to take the math and reading tests used for accountability purposes under NCLB until they've been in U.S. schools for three years. Currently the test scores of such students count for accountability purposes after they've attended U.S. schools for one year. Ms. Silva said she believes she was invited to be a panelist because the Council of the Great City Schools told congressional staff that the St. Paul school district had done a good job in implementing NCLB's provisions for English-language learners. (In December, I wrote an article about both the strengths and weaknesses of St. Paul's programs for English-learners, focusing on students of Hmong heritage.)

Ms. Rivera supports federal regulations that require schools to count the test scores of English-language learners for accountability purposes after they've been in the country for one year. But, particularly in English-language arts, the tests for such students need to be improved, she told me in an interview last week. In her presentation in Congress, she suggested that states develop alternative computerized tests that adapt the difficulty of test items according to how students answer questions while taking the test. "There would be a point where the student would stop, if he or she couldn’t move forward--so he or she wouldn’t have to sit through the whole assessment," she explained to me in an interview.

Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), as well as the staff of a number of other senators, were present at the meeting, according to attendees.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The U.S. Department of Education, which is in a tug-of-war with several Virginia superintendents who are protesting a federal mandate to change how their school districts test beginning English-language learners, met with those chiefs on April 13 to discuss the impasse. Maria Glod, of the Washington Post, reported in an April 14 article that a solution wasn't reached. The Virginia superintendents and school boards resisting the mandate will have to decide soon what they will do for the spring testing season. Paul Regnier, a spokesman for Fairfax County schools, which could lose $17 million in federal funds if it disregards the requirement, has told me that testing in that school system begins in May.

See my earlier posts about this topic: "Bill About Testing ELLs Is Introduced in the U.S. Congress," "Virginia Backs Down on Testing Showdown," and "Testing Showdown."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The U.S. Department of Education has posted descriptions of some of the guides it expects to have ready this summer for states to better include English-language learners in large-scale testing. The guide for native language assessments, for example, is expected to answer such questions as "When do the numbers justify the cost?" and "What states have the most experience in using native language assessments?" More information from the Education Department on the LEP Partnership, an initiative of the federal government to help states on testing issues for English-language learners, is available here.

Also, see my March 15, 2007, post "Who's Who in the LEP Partnership."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One year after students from immigrant families organized school walkouts to protest some of the proposals in the U.S. Congress to change federal immigration laws, most of those students aren't doing the same this spring.

In a March 26 article, the Dallas Morning News noted how Gustavo Jimenez, who organized walkouts among fellow high schoolers last spring, has been concentrating on finishing his senior year, working a part-time job at J.C. Penney, and making plans to attend a community college in the fall. He has continued his interest in activism, though, by lobbying for passage of the DREAM Act (see "The 'DREAM Act' Is Reintroduced in Congress").

On April 1, a Sunday, an immigrant-rights rally was held in Dallas to mark the social protests of a year ago, according to the Dallas Morning News. It attracted an estimated crowd of 2,000 to 6,000, which was small compared to the size of the crowd that reportedly attended an immigration-rights march in Dallas about a year ago.

In Pomona, Calif., 35 Pomona High School students left class at noon one day late last month and headed to City Hall, but were soon persuaded by officials of the Pomona Unified School District to return to class, according to a March 31 article in the Daily Bulletin of Ontario, Calif.

The immigration proposals that drew students into the streets last spring are now dead. A new proposal for comprehensive immigration reform was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last month, and President Bush has floated a planabout how to change current immigration law. But students aren't voicing their views publicly about the proposals. (Read HR 1645: The Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy Act of 2007.)

I'd be curious to hear from some of you who teach students who participated in last year's immigration-rights rallies—many of whom are English-language learners—whether their interest in national immigration policy has been sustained.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new research brief about children in immigrant families contains some interesting observations that indicate education policy can make a difference in whether children of Mexican heritage go to preschool.

The researchers from the State University of New York at Albany who wrote the brief say that in Mexico, where preschool is free, 81 percent of 4-year-olds were enrolled in preschool in 2005. By contrast, in 2004, 55 percent of children in Mexican immigrant families living in the United States participated in preschool. (Preschool is NOT free in most places in the United States, though the researchers don't say this explicitly.)

I find it particularly interesting that the preschool enrollment rates in Mexico were also higher than those for children in white U.S. native-born families; 71 percent of children in those families went to preschool. You can find this information on page 7 of the 14-page brief, "Children in Immigrant Families--The U.S. and 50 States: National Origins, Language, and Early Education."

The researchers cite the data in an effort to explain why "cultural preferences" are not an adequate explanation for why participation in early education programs is low among immigrant groups--particularly Latinos, though they are often given as a reason. They argue that socioeconomic barriers can account for a least one-half or perhaps the entire gap in enrollment rates between children in immigrant families from Mexico and those in white families that aren't immigrants.

The research brief draws mostly on Census 2000 data and is the first of a series of eight briefs planned by Child Trends and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the State University of New York at Albany about children in the United States who have at least one parent who was born in another country. These children now account for 20 percent of all children in the United States.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A bill that would require Colorado students, starting in the graduating class of 2012, to show they are competent in English before they can get a high school diploma is working its way through the Colorado legislature. The Colorado Senate passed the bill, SB 73, on March 20, and it has been introduced and assigned to an education committee in the Colorado House.

A March 20 article in the Rocky Mountain News tells about the bill, which requires each of the state's 178 school districts to decide how it will determine if its students have mastered English. Sen. Chris Romer, the chief sponsor of the bill, has said that the bill will help to get school district officials to talk about how to prepare foreign-born students for the workplace, according to the Rocky Mountain News article. But interestingly, the bill says that "each student" must show competency in English to graduate, not that only English-language learners must show mastery, or that only foreign-born students must show mastery.

Thus, it seems to me that if the bill should pass, all students would have to show mastery in English. I have to wonder if some native speakers of English--who struggle with reading, for instance--might fail to show such mastery.

The bill specifies that school districts cannot use students' scores on statewide achievement tests as the criteria for mastery of English. It doesn't say if school districts could use Colorado's English-language-proficiency test to determine mastery of English. I rather doubt that the school districts would give the English-language proficiency test--which is designed for English-language learners--to native speakers of English.

Many states require students to pass an exit exam in English in order to get a high school diploma. Colorado is not one of those states.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For at least the second time, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has hired someone for an important post in the Arizona Department of Education whose views on the education of English-language learners were widely publicized in statewide controversies related to such students.

Last month, Mr. Horne hired Kelt L. Cooper, 47, a former superintendent of the 6,400-student Nogales Unified School District, as the director of technical assistance for English-acquisition services of the state department of education. Mr. Cooper said in an interview with me this week that he was offered the job after he testified in federal court on behalf of the state in a 15-year-old battle regarding how the state pays for the education of English-language learners. A federal judge recently ruled for the second time in the case, Flores v. Arizona, that the state hasn't produced legislation that provides adequate funding for the education of English-language learners. (See "Another Chapter in the Saga Over How to Pay for ELL Programs in Arizona.")

Mr. Cooper said that the state already provides adequate funding for ELLs. He testified in January for Flores v. Arizona that when he was superintendent of the Nogales school district from 2000 to 2005, the district's educators were able to significantly raise the test scores of English-language learners, along with all students, he said. The Nogales school district is at the center of Flores v. Arizona because the plaintiffs came from that school district.

But U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins noted in his March 22 ruling that the plaintiffs in the case argue that one reason the Nogales school district was able to improve the achievement of its English-language learners was that its program costs for such students were $1,570 more per student than the base level normally provided by the state.

"The State Superintendent and State Legislators sing the praises of Mr. Kelt Cooper," the judge writes in the ruling, noting that Mr. Cooper has been called "Super Cooper" for his work in the Nogales district. However, he writes, "the success or failure of the children of [the Nogales district] or any other school district should not depend on having a 'Super Cooper' at the helm."

Still on board at the Arizona Department of Education is Margaret Garcia Dugan, who was involved in very public debates about the education of English-language learners before Mr. Horne hired her. While she was the principal at Glendale High School in Glendale, Ariz., she helped to lead the campaign in 2000 to get Proposition 203 passed, a ballot initiative that greatly curtailed bilingual education in the state. Now as Arizona's deputy superintendent of public instruction--the No. 2 person in the education department next to Mr. Horne--she's in charge of programs for English-language learners. (I wrote a profile of her in February 2006.)

Unlike Ms. Dugan, Mr. Cooper told me this week that he doesn't have a strong view about whether English-only methods or bilingual education are more effective. Initially he had reservations about Proposition 203 because he thought local school districts should be free to determine what kind of programs were best for English-language learners, he said. Later he came to believe that Proposition 203 has been beneficial because it helped to standardize programs for English-language learners in the state.

"What I saw over the years was everyone was doing what they wanted and Proposition 203 eliminated that whole conflicting discussion. I thought, 'I don't have to contend with 900 views and philosophies on how students learn English. Let's focus on best practices and systems management.' "

In his new job, which he began about a month ago, he'll try to help school districts struggling to meet goals for English-language learners under the No Child Left Behind Act to improve their programs for such students. "If a kid is in the school system for ten years and the kid can't write a paragraph in Spanish or English, there's something wrong," he said.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Joe DeSantis, the director of communications for a public relations firm working for Newt Gingrich, passed on some additional information about the former House Speaker's study of Spanish.

The classes are being provided by an Atlanta-based institute, Bilingual America. (The institute's name seems a bit ironic, given that Mr. Gingrich reportedly said last weekend that "allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous." But of course, I have to remember that he's offered a clarification for what he said last week.)

Mr. DeSantis says that Mr. Gingrich has studied 100 hours of a 280-hour Spanish course offered by the institute. In the first 120 hours, he is focusing mostly on vocabulary development and structure. After that, he'll focus on pronunciation, speech flow, and advanced structure. "When he finishes the course," Mr. DeSantis wrote in an e-mail, "Bilingual America projects him to communicate at a professonal level of Spanish or at the advanced-plus to superior level as rated by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who reportedly equated bilingual education with "the language of living in a ghetto" in a recent speech, has offered an acknowledgement on You Tube that his words "produced a bad feeling within the Latino community" and that "the words I chose to express myself were not the best." This Week in Education made note of Mr. Gingrich's clarification yesterday.

What's most surprising to me about Mr. Gingrich's acknowledgement, though, is that he offers it in Spanish. What I just wrote in the previous paragraph is a translation that appears in subtitles on the video clip of Mr. Gingrich's clarification. I had no idea that Mr. Gingrich was studying Spanish, and that he could speak it (or perhaps read it?) for nearly three minutes.

I called up Mr. Gingrich's public relations firm, Gingrich Communications, (I found it through newt.org) to ask just how serious Mr. Gingrich is in learning Spanish. Joe DeSantis, the director of communications for the firm, said Mr. Gingrich has taken about 100 hours of Spanish with a private tutor, mostly in the last six months.

In his clarification, Mr. Gingrich emphasizes the importance of learning English and says that bilingual education classes in this country should be replaced with "intensive English instruction courses."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These days, if you pay attention to issues affecting English-language learners, it's hard to overlook what used to be a little known fact about them--that most are not immigrants but rather were born in the United States.

Peter Zamora, the Washington counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, included this fact in his recent testimony on English-language learners and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee. (For more on Mr. Zamora's views about English-language learners, see my profile of him in this week's Education Week.) He's the first person I've heard cite this fact in defense of the regulation of the U.S. Department of Education to include the test scores of English-language learners in the accountability system after they've been in the country for only one year, something he did in an interview with me for Education Week.

Interestingly, the U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings reportedly made the same argument during her visit on April 2 to the Mesa Arts Academy, a charter school in Mesa, Ariz., apparently in response to Arizona officials and others who have indicated they want more flexibility for including English-language learners in tests.

“Most of our English-language-learner students are born here. Two-thirds of these kids were born in the United States of America,” she said, according to an April 2 article in the East Valley Tribune. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable that by the end of the third grade they would be able to read on grade level in English.”

For more on U.S.-born English-language learners, see my earlier post, "Immigrant Student vs. English-Language Learner?"

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This bit of news has received so much comment by bloggers that I need not add any more.

I merely note that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich apparently equated bilingual education with the "language of living in a ghetto." He also reportedly said in a March 31 speech he made to the National Federation of Republican Women that "allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous." The March 31 Associated Press article about the speech is here. Here's the Tennessee Guerilla Women's response. Likewise, "la bloguera" of the Adventures of the Coconut Caucus disagrees.

For someone who agrees with Mr. Gingrich, see the Hill's pundits blog, here.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not sure exactly when it was released, but the National Center on Educational Outcomes at the University of Minnesota has posted a "new" study on its Web site about how language-minority children spend their time before and after school and what difference it makes in how well they do in school. Language-minority children are those who come from homes where a language other than English is spoken; the researchers surveyed parents who spoke only English or Spanish. They surveyed parents or guardians of 9,583 children who participated in the 2001 administration of the National Household Education Survey Program of the National Center for Education Statistics.

If you don't have time to wade through 296 pages, skip to page 59, where the summary and conclusions begin.

The study, "Before- and After-School Care Arrangements and Activities of School-Age Language Minority Children," concludes that language-minority children spend less time in center-based care and more time being cared for by relatives than do their native-English-speaking peers. Sixteen percent of children from English-only homes, compared with 11 percent of language-minority children, are responsible for themselves before and after school. In other words, language-minority children are less likely than their native-English-speaking peers to be "latchkey" kids.

As the level of parent education increases, both language-minority and native-English-speaking children tend to participate more in what the study calls "non-program activities," such as the arts, sports, and clubs. Only 24 percent of language-minority children participate in such activities, versus 52 percent of children from homes where only English is spoken.

The researchers found a correlation for both groups of children between participation in before- and after-school care and activities and the likelihood of receiving higher grades, though the effect was weaker for language-minority children.

The researchers are Martha L. Thurlow, Kentaro Kato, and Deb Albus, from the National Center on Educational Outcomes, and Richard P. Durán, from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of you might remember that about this time last year, Arizona had racked up nearly $21 million in federal fines because the state's Republican-controlled legislature and Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, couldn't agree on how to meet a federal court order in the case of Flores v. Arizona to pay adequately for the education of English-language learners.

The stalemate finally was broken when Gov. Napolitano permitted to become law--without her signature--a measure approved by the legislature last spring to address the problem. But U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins then rejected the law, saying it didn't bear a "rational relationship to the cost of providing ELL programs," according to court documents.

Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, appealed the judge's decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco. In July, the appeals court reversed Judge Collins' orders and ordered the judge to hold an "evidentiary hearing" on whether the legislature's plan provided adequate funding. The appeals court also erased Judge Collins' order for the $21 million in fines to be distributed; Arizona doesn't have to pay them.

Last month, with an 8-day evidentiary hearing behind him, Judge Collins came to the same conclusion that he had earlier: that the law that increases to $444 from $365 the extra funds that schools get to teach each English-language learner is not adequate.

The legislature intends to appeal the decision, Barrett Marson, the press secretary for James P. Weiers, a Republican and the Speaker of the Arizona House, told me last week in an interview for Education Week.

Let me pause to say that I believe I'm not being too dramatic to characterize this ongoing news story as a "saga." In its March 23 article about the recent ruling, the Arizona Republic included a time line concerning important news regarding Flores v. Arizona dating back to 1992, when it was first filed. It's been seven years since the federal court ruled that Arizona didn't adequately pay for programs for English-language learners. (For another take on this news story, see this article by KVOA News 4.)

In the March 22 ruling, the judge gave Arizona lawmakers until the end of their current legislative session--likely to occur later this month or in May--to come up with a solution.

Timothy M. Hogan, the executive director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, the lawyer for the plaintiffs in Flores v. Arizona, told me in a phone interview last week that he was happy with Judge Collins' latest decision, but he added, "This is silly going back to court all the time. I'm interested in getting resources to these kids sooner rather than later."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)