November 2007 Archives

"Citizenship Requirements" is a field of entry in the latest directory of college scholarships for "America's Latino students," published by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. For each listing of a scholarship organization, the directory says whether being a U.S. citizen (or legal resident, in some cases) is a criterion for eligibility. Quite a few private scholarship programs have no requirements in this regard (publicly funded programs are another story).

Getting a copy of the directory in the mail reminded me that the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or "DREAM Act," was introduced but did not proceed in the U.S. Congress this fall. While for years, versions of the DREAM Act introduced into Congress contained a provision clarifying that states could provide in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who would benefit from the act, that provision was dropped from the version of the act filed in Congress in September. That September version did, however, give undocumented students who met certain criteria a path to legalization. But the proposal stalled in Congress.

Since then, the idea that anyone might provide any kind of break for undocumented students has become a hot issue among politicians running for president, as my Education Week colleague Michele McNeil has been noting on her blog. See here and here.

In publishing its directory on college aid, I believe the Los Angeles-based Tomas Rivera Policy Institute wants Latinos to know that they shouldn't give up on getting a college education in the United States, regardless of their immigration status. Why else would the institute spell out for Latinos the college-aid organizations that care about the students' legal status in this country and the ones that don't?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:11 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Over at TESOL in the News, I came across a courageous attempt by a reporter to explain what educators mean by reclassification rates for English-language learners. This is the rate that children are reclassified from being English-language learners to being fluent in English each year.

Often, when I ask superintendents or state officials what their reclassification rates were for the previous year, they tell me "I can get that," which I suspect is another way of saying they haven't paid much heed to the statistic.

Not so in California.

In California, because school districts must report the statistic publicly every year, a staff writer of the Morgan Hill Times has the chance to explain what it means that 135 of 1,900 ELLs in the Morgan Hill Unified School District were reclassified as fluent last school year. California school districts report this statistic to the state department of education, which publishes it on its Web site. (Click here to see that 9.2 percent of ELLs were redesignated as fluent in the 2006-2007 school year, for example.)

I recognize that a reclassification rate doesn't tell us a lot in itself about the quality of instruction of a school district. The level of academic preparation of new ELLs coming into a district may differ from year to year, for example. It's also important to know what the criteria for reclassification are.

But I think other states can learn from California in this respect. It's a milestone when a student reaches fluency—and districts should be constantly gauging how well they are helping students to meet that milestone.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:02 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

About half the states in the nation are using one of four tests created by four consortia since 2002 to meet English-language-proficiency testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. A report edited by Jamal Abedi, a professor of education at the University of California, Davis, released today tells a great deal about those tests. Mr. Abedi says they are a big improvement over tests typically used prior to NCLB in that they assess "academic English," the kind of English children need in order to learn subjects in school. (For a Nov. 28 Education Week article about the report, click here.)

The World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment consortium of states, for instance, created a test, ACCESS for ELLs, that has been selected by 15 states—and Virginia just decided to adopt that test next school year as well.

But some other states selected new English-proficiency tests put on the market by commercial developers. That doesn't mean, however, they can't have a consortium, too.

This week, six states that have all adopted a commercial test, LAS Links, developed by CTB/McGraw-Hill, joined together to form a consortium, the English Language Proficiency Collaboration and Research Consortium. The six states are Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, and Nevada.

Beth Celva, the director of the unit of student assessment for the Colorado Department of Education, told me today in a phone interview that she's hoping the collaboration will help the six states share data about student achievement. She's particularly interested in information about ELLs in high school or ELLs who have disabilities, she said.

Marisol Enriquez, an assessment consultant for the same education department, noted that she's hoping to learn more from other states about how to train teachers to administer LAS Links.

And they're also interested in gaining more insight into the question that practically every state seems to be asking these days: What's the relationship between how well ELLs score on an English-proficiency test and how well they perform on other mandatory state assessments, such as for math or reading?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:52 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Five Democrats running for U.S. president back bilingual education, and two Republicans running for the position oppose it. That's what the Hispanic Link Weekly Report learned when it posed the following question to the staff of 17 politicians competing in the presidential primaries that begin Jan. 3: "What is your candidate's position, if any, on bilingual education?"

Hispanic Link Weekly Report, a national newsletter about Hispanic issues available only by subscription, published a summary of the views of the seven candidates who responded to the survey in its Nov. 26 issue. With permission from Hispanic Link, I post the summaries here, quoted word for word:

Democrats:

Hillary Clinton: "Senator Clinton supports the notion that children will learn more efficiently by being taught in their native language while learning English at the same time." —Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli, the Clinton campaign's Hispanic communications director.

Bill Richardson: "Bilingual education is a part of guaranteeing equal education for all American students." —deputy communication director Katie Roberts, quoting the candidate.

Chris Dodd: "As a bilingual Spanish speaker himself, Sen. Dodd has long been very supportive of bilingual education." —campaign spokesperson Colleen Flanagan.

John Edwards: "We're for bilingual education." —political director David Medina.

Barack Obama: Obama believes the federal government should be doing more to encourage transitional bilingual education." —e-mail reply from his campaign.

Republicans:

Mitt Romney: "He believes immersion is the best method for learning the English language." —spokesman Alex Burgos.

Tom Tancredo: "He thinks that classes should be in English only. He thinks English should be the official language in the U.S. and everything should be printed in English." —press secretary Alan Moore.

The article notes that the staff of the other 10 presidential candidates didn't provide responses before the newsletter went to press. It also reports that while a spokesman for Mr. Romney didn't tell Hispanic Link specifically that the former governor of Massachusetts opposes bilingual education, Mr.Romney has told his supporters in speeches that he fought for the end of bilingual education in Massachusetts, so Hispanic Link concludes he opposes the educational method.

The fact that Hispanic Link conducted a survey of presidential candidates' views on bilingual education indicates that some Latino voters out there care what methods are available to schools for teaching English to ELLs.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:37 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I don't keep up well on technical products for English-language learners, but Lingro, an "open dictionary" created by a new company—also called Lingro—seems useful for ELLs. The online dictionary was released Nov. 17.

The site, lingro.com, which is also the dictionary, lets anyone read a Web page in English and click on a word on that page to get a translation. You enter the Web address for a Web page in a box on lingro.com and the words on the page become clickable. Unlike many online dictionaries, Lingro doesn't translate the entire text. So a student can read the Web page in English and click only on the individual words that give him or her problems. The computer also helps the student keep his or her own word list. Translations are available from English to French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish—and for all of those languages back to English.

I had an e-mail conversation about Lingro with Paul Kastner, a co-founder of the Worcester, Mass.-based company. He and the company's other founder, he said, want to make Internet tools free for individuals and also create paid custom tools for institutions. Lingro is free and will stay free, the Web site says. Mr. Kastner told me in his e-mail message: "We'd love to see open dictionaries gain more acceptance and compete with traditional copyrighted sources, the way Wikipedia has done with encyclopedias."

Mr. Kastner asked me the following question, which I'll pass on to you: What other types of tools or games do you think would be helpful for English-language learners?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In my job of covering news about the education of English-language learners, my first preference is to get out into classrooms and observe students and teachers. My second preference is to attend a conference featuring educators and researchers who are talking about what's new in the field. That's how I get ideas on what classrooms I should visit.

My last preference, I decided today, is to try to figure out what happened at a conference about ELLs by browsing the Power Point slides of the presenters. But if you'd like to give it a try, check out the presentations from "Academic Language and Content: A Focus on English Language Learners in Middle School," put on Oct. 1 and 2 by the Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners, or CREATE.

The conference had a great line-up of speakers—and some of them produced some dazzling graphics on their slide shows (is that even the right word with Power Point?) Wish I could have been there. But I wasn't.

The Web site promises that transcripts of the presentations will eventually be posted. But I don't think I'll sign back on for them. Reading about a conference rather than participating in it has its limitations.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over at the Migration Policy Institute, some researchers have been examining how other countries are educating children from immigrant families. I'm not familiar with the work of the researchers who produced these studies, and I learned about the studies a couple of months after they were released. (Find the press release here.) But I didn't want to miss the chance to report a bit on what's happening with second-language learners outside of the United States.

The findings of a survey of school language policies and practices in 14 immigrant-receiving countries, not including the United States, are particularly interesting. Gayle Christensen, a research associate at the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center, and Petra Stanat, a professor for educational research at the Free University of Berlin, the researchers who conducted the survey, conclude that regions or countries that have the most success in teaching students who are 1st- or 2nd-generation immigrants have several factors in common.

They have systematic programs with explicit standards and requirements. They have curricula that may be created at the local level but adhere to language development frameworks and progress benchmarks determined by a central office. The programs are time-intensive, and offer support at both the primary and lower secondary levels. Teachers who instruct second-language learners have received specialized training. Second-language teachers tend to work closely with mainstream teachers.

The researchers found that bilingual programs played a very minor role in most country's school systems. In almost all the countries studied, more than half of children in primary schools who weren't fluent in the host country's language attended regular classes and received supplemental support either within regular classes or through additional periods of instruction focused on second-language learning.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:35 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

California is poised to be the first state to adopt a set of standards, which state officials call "learning foundations," for English-language development devoted to preschool ELLs, according to officials of the California Department of Education. The California standards spell out what preschool ELLs should know at the "beginning," "middle," and "later" stages of learning English for the areas of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Find a link to them here.

In trying to figure out what kind of ground California is breaking, I found out that Maryland is set to adopt standards for English-language development that include the prekindergarten level. The proposed standards are grouped for grades prekindergarten-5 and 6-12. Check them out here.

Also, World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, a consortium of 15 states housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has included prekindergarten in its 2007 edition of standards for English-language development. WIDA has created a separate set of English-language-development standards for prekindergarten and kindergarten together. Previously, it had K-2 grouped together, Tim Boals, the executive director of WIDA, told me in a telephone interview this week.

States are required by the No Child Left Behind Act to have English-language proficiency standards for ELLs in grades K-12—not for preschoolers. But Mr. Boals said the consortium added the prekindergarten level this year because "a lot of schools now include prekindergarten, and it's beneficial for the teachers to have standards."

Norman Yee, the vice president of the school board of the San Francisco Unified School District, said he is concerned about what he views as a trend of the K-12 philosophy of education moving "downward" to reach younger children. He believes California's proposed "learning foundations" are evidence of that trend. Mr. Yee, who used to head an organization that ran several preschools in California, would rather see the philosophy of preschool moving "upward" into K-12.

In a good preschool program, said Mr. Yee, "we consider a child individually, where they are at. We try to develop their interests in a very holistic way. We will provide activities and less focus on only a few items, such as the ABCs. Yes, we want them to do [the ABCs], but we want them to love education and love reading."

(Nov. 27 Update: My article about this topic in Education Week, "California Weighs Preschool ELL Standards," has been posted.)

What do you think? Does your state need a set of comprehensive standards for English-language development in preschool?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:00 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

What's really unusual about Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, a book based on a five-year study of several hundred immigrant students, is the in-depth profiles of 16* immigrants in U.S. schools.

Anyone with any heart reading those portraits of foreign-born students, I believe, will likely conclude that it isn't easy being an immigrant. The authors categorize the participants in their study as "declining achievers," "low achievers," "improvers," or "high achievers." Even the profiles of high achievers have an underlying sense of loss as some students become distant from their parents in pursuing their American dream. For example, the researchers write about Li, a high achiever from China: “For Li, his enviable academic success comes at a cost: Li’s father no longer recognizes this successful young man. Li has become a stranger—an immigrant—in his own family.”

The book is based on a study of immigrant students in the Boston and San Francisco areas conducted by researchers Carola and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, joined by Irina Todorova, who worked on the project as a postdoctoral scholar. The study began as part of Harvard Immigration Projects at Harvard University, which, in 2004, became Immigration Studies at New York University.

Harvard University Press will release the book in February. My article in Education Week about it was posted online today.

*I wrote 21 previously.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:14 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I've been reading so many stories lately in my morning newspaper, The Washington Post, about people who would like to stop the flow of immigrants—undocumented immigrants in particular— to their communities that I was surprised to see a front-page article in today's Post with this headline: "Immigrants Haven't Worn Out The Welcome Mat in Arlington."

The article tells how educators in Arlington, Va., have really tried to figure out how to best teach immigrant students English and academic content over the years, and how the public schools are doing well. The article also notes that Arlington County received a more gradual influx of immigrants than has occurred in some other counties near the nation's capital, such as Prince William and Loudoun, where some county leaders have tried to curb illegal immigration.

Here's an excerpt from the Post article featuring an Arlington County board member that is worth pondering:

"The attitude has always been: They're here. They're part of the community. Let's help them succeed," said Chris Zimmerman, a longtime County Board member. He said his children attended schools with classmates from dozens of countries. "They got something from those relationships that you can't teach in a curriculum or show in test scores," he said, "something that will benefit them their entire lives."

For an account of what happened in a community that seemed to have an opposite approach to immigration than that of Arlington, Va., read "English Language Learners Feel Effects of Battle Over Illegal Immigration" from the ELL Outlook newsletter, published by Course Crafters Inc., a company that sells materials to schools for ELLs.

The article tells about the repercussions in schools of the passage of an ordinance by the city of Farmers Branch, Texas, to make it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants. The ordinance was struck down by the federal courts. But apparently some immigrants got the message they weren't welcome in that community. This school year, according to the article, enrollment of English-language learners in the Carrollton Farmers Branch Independent School District, in Texas, which has more than 26,000 students, dropped by 12 percent, or 824 students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:21 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

The Institute for Language and Education Policy—which says its mission is to educate the public on research-based strategies for English-language learners—has posted a 10-page critique of a 13-page document that an Arizona task force is using to justify changes in programs for ELLs.

Also, the Washington-based Center on Education Policy released a report, "Caught in the Middle: Arizona's English Language Learners and the High School Exit Exam," today that includes the following recommendation: "The state's structured English-immersion models should be rethought to require school districts to implement instructional models that are truly research-based." That report quotes a task force member anonymously as admitting that Arizona's new requirements for ELLs aren't informed by research.

School districts in Arizona are being required to teach specific English skills to ELLs for four hours a day. Students at beginning levels of English proficiency, for example, must receive 45 minutes of instruction in oral English, an hour in grammar, an hour in reading, and 15 minutes in pre-writing, according to a state document on models for instruction. (See "Arizona Spells Out 'Research-Based' Models for English Immersion.")

In their critique, posted by the Institute for Language and Education Policy, Stephen Krashen of the University of Southern California, Jeff MacSwan of Arizona State University, and Kellie Rolstad of Arizona State University conclude that Arizona's review of the research "neglects to reference significant research bearing on the questions raised, and frequently draws inappropriate conclusions from the research presented."

One of their complaints is that the Arizona document fails to cite research studies that have concluded that structured English immersion is an inferior approach for ELLs in comparison with programs that teach such students in both English and in their native language. Mr. Krashen and Mr. MacSwan have been vocal supporters of bilingual education.

The three researchers say they concur with Arizona's task force that research supports the idea that ELLs benefit from discrete blocks of instructional time devoted to English language and literacy instruction. However, they say that it can't be further concluded that fixed amounts of times should be given to the instruction of discreet skills. Mr. MacSwan clarified to me in an e-mail message that this refers to the fact, for example, that Arizona is requiring one hour of grammar each day for beginning ELLs. He and the other two researchers are interpreting Arizona's requirements to mean that grammar would be taught outside of its "ordinary context," he said.

They caution against the adoption of a curriculum that separates academic subject matter from language teaching, arguing that students need a meaningful context to learn language in school.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Students in about 35 school districts in North Carolina have the option of taking a course called Spanish for Native Speakers, according to an article published yesterday in the Winston-Salem Journal. The students who enroll in the classes have been speaking Spanish all their lives, but many of them don't know the proper grammar for the language, according to the article. Many also have been speaking English all their lives, and one point of the classes is to help them become truly bilingual.

These kinds of courses have been around for a long time, but there's been surprisingly little support for them at the local, state, and federal levels, given the huge growth of the number of Hispanic students in the United States. I visited such classes in a New York City high school in 2003. What I learned by reading the Winston-Salem Journal article is that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction received a federal grant in 2002 to develop a curriculum for Spanish for Native Speakers.

I just did a search on the North Carolina department's Web site and found a brochure offering a rationale for the courses and documents spelling out the "curriculum" for two different levels of Spanish for native speakers. Scroll down to the heading "Spanish for Native Speakers" at this link to find them.

I believe this statewide "curriculum" is very unusual. Some schools teach courses for native Spanish speakers using the Advanced Placement Spanish curriculum and tests, but those materials and tests are not created especially for native speakers. Since native speakers of Spanish in U.S. schools often are fluent speakers but don't know how to read and write well in the language, the AP materials may not stress the skills that they need the most help with.

The North Carolina curriculum reads to me more like a set of academic standards than a curriculum. It lists various "competencies" and ways to teach them rather than providing specific teaching materials or lesson plans. Still I think the documents would be helpful in providing a framework for the classes in any state. Visit the Center for Applied Linguistics Web site to learn more about materials available for native speakers of Spanish.

In this blog item, by the way, I'm trying to honor my promise to readers to write about "learning innovations" as well as educational policy. From where I sit, I seem to learn more about policy news than learning innovations.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:06 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

The Urban Institute followed up the release of its report, "Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America's Children," commissioned by the National Council of La Raza, with a panel discussion on the topic of how children have been affected by workplace immigration raids.

You can listen to the two-hour discussion held Nov. 8, co-sponsored by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, online.

I dipped in and out of the audio recordings of the panel presentations and didn't hear anything pertaining particularly to schools. The report, however, recommends that schools create plans to respond to immigration raids in their communities (See earlier blog entry, "Report: Immigration Raids Affect Children").

Randy Capps, one of the authors of the report and a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, mentions in his presentation that more than 500 children had at least one parent arrested in raids occurring in the three communities studied—Greeley, Colo.; Grand Island, Neb.; and New Bedford, Mass. Many were young children, he noted. In New Bedford, Mass., for example, half of the children who had at least one parent arrested were age 5 or younger. Two-thirds of the children who had a parent arrested in all three communities were U.S. citizens, he said.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:14 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

If a child has the name Juan Carlos Hernandez Gonzalez, how should a school record that student's name in its databases? What if the name is Abdul Rahman bin Tariq bin Khalid Al-Alawi? A report prepared by the Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia for the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences gives some answers to these questions. It's called "Registering Students From Language Backgrounds Other than English."

The report makes a point that I had never thought of, that if schools don't develop consistent rules for how students' names from various cultures are recorded, a child's academic history can easily be lost. Establishing those rules requires some knowledge of naming customs in different cultures. The report gives insight into names from eight cultures: Arabic, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Spanish, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

It's useful to know, for example, that in the name Juan Carlos Hernandez Gonzalez the name Hernandez is the family name of the child's father and Gonzalez is the family name of the child's mother. And in the case of Abdul Rahman bin Tariq bin Khalid Al-Alawi, it's helpful for a school to know that bin translates to English as "son of."

Getting the names right for people of cultures other than my own has been a big challenge for me at times. For a story about Mexican schools, I debated whether to include people's double last names. I ended up doing so the first time I mentioned someone in an article, but dropped the second last name on second reference. When writing about the growth of Muslim schools in the United States, I learned about different ways that Mohammed can be spelled: Mohammed, Mohamed, Muhamed, Muhammad, and Imhemed.

Frankly, I'm glad I don't have to develop rules for a database that includes English-language learners because it sounds like a tedious task. But if it's your job to do so, the Institute of Education Sciences report might be a big help.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As a follow-up to a couple of blog entries I've written lately (here and here) about how schools have gotten caught up in law-enforcement actions by federal immigration authorities, I'll point you to an article in November's issue of The School Administrator, published by the American Association of School Administrators.

In "Fighting for Immigrant Children's Rights," several school superintendents recall how they responded to immigration raids in their communities to make sure children were safe and cared for. (I wrote about this topic for Education Week in September).

New to me was an anecdote about how educators at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Nassau County, N.Y., which serves 56 local school districts on Long Island, joined with people from various community institutions to address immigration issues in their area. According to the article, people from the educational agency worked with others from law enforcement agencies, health care providers, the court system, and local school districts to "weave a new social safety net" for immigrants, including undocumented immigrants. As a result, immigrant families were able to get legal services and banking services. An exchange program with some states in Mexico was created. Postsecondary institutions started offering scholarships to immigrants.

By contrast, the article quotes the superintendent of a school district in Orange County, N.Y., who says that school leaders should let politicians address immigration issues and stick to their role of educating students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:19 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

I mention in this week's Education Week how bilingual education got a lot of attention at last week's summit on English-language learners, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, in Washington. The educational method received very little attention at the previous five annual conferences on this group of students.

I worry a bit about sounding like a broken record in continually reporting on whether the various entities of the federal government are giving credence to bilingual education, but the debate over whether it's better to teach English-language learners through bilingual education or English-only methods is highly political, and I'll continue to keep track of it.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:49 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

With some communities seemingly making up immigration policy as they go these days, I've been reading more news stories about how schools are involved in actions by immigration authorities. I recently tried to answer the question in Education Week: What is a school to do in such situations?

The latest incident involves a mother and two sons in Tucson, Ariz., who were deported (technically, they were "voluntarily returned") to their native Mexico after police found one of the sons to possess marijuana at school, according to an Associated Press story published today. The article said the boy's father was being held for formal deportation because he had been apprehended previously by Border Patrol.

A follow-up article by the Associated Press filed this afternoon gives a few more details. It says that school officials called police after discovering what they suspected to be marijuana in the 17-year-old's backpack on the campus of Catalina High School. When the parents arrived, police asked them to show drivers' licenses, and the parents acknowledged that they, their teenage son, and a 6th-grade son were undocumented. Police then notified U.S. Border Patrol officials, who took the parents and two sons into custody. The second article also notes that about a hundred students from Catalina High School demonstrated today to protest the removal of their classmate and his family to Mexico.

Should the police have asked to see drivers' licenses and called in Border Patrol officials?

I put this question to Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston and a board member of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"As best I can tell," he said in an e-mail message, "there is no memorandum of understanding in place that would have allowed [police] to do this, nor was it necessary in the short fact pattern here, to do so. The drugs are a problem, of course, but this seems overly aggressive and unnecessary. They are sacrificing their community policing responsibilities and trust-building with that community, which has larger consequences, for a single arrest and removal."

He pointed me to a list of communities that have memorandums of agreement between police and immigration authorities.

In reporting my earlier story, I learned that the Border Patrol has a policy saying that Border Patrol agents, who work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, must have written approval from a supervisor before conducting any enforcement-related activity at schools or places of worship. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which falls under a different branch of the U.S. Homeland Security Department than Border Patrol—has a policy that "arresting fugitives at schools, hospitals, or places of worship is strongly discouraged, unless the alien poses an immediate threat to national security or the community."

Nevertheless, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of these kinds of incidents.

Nov. 7 update: The Associated Press reports today that Arizona Border Patrol agents will no longer be called to campuses of Tucson Unified School District. The article says the policy change came out of a meeting yesterday between the Tucson police department and school district officials, who requested the meeting.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This is a story about how states have been required to do something under federal law, and only NOW are getting a handbook from the federal government on how to do it.

The No Child Left Behind Act required states, for the first time, to develop English-proficiency standards and tests and assess English-language learners every year in grades K-12. The English-proficiency testing is an extra layer on top of the requirement that all students, including ELLs, must take mathematics and reading tests in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. (ELLs are exempted from taking the reading test for one year after they arrive in the country.)

By the end of the 2005-06 school year, 44 states and the District of Columbia had implemented new and comprehensive English-proficiency tests to comply with the law. And the rest of the states have also gotten on board by administering English-proficiency tests since then, the U.S. Department of Education confirmed today.

Apparently, it wasn't an easy task. Through the LEP Partnership, an effort by the federal government to help states with testing ELLs, states asked the Education Department for more guidance.

At a Oct. 28 meeting of the LEP Partnership, the Education Department released a draft of a "framework" for creating English-proficiency standards and tests.

The wording in the draft of the framework seems intended to send the message that the Education Department is not telling states what to do, but rather trying to give them help. Many of the recommendations, for instance, are characterized as "possible considerations" for states. One possible consideration, for example, is that states will involve people knowledgeable about ELLs with disabilities in creating English-proficiency tests.

The deadline for comments on the draft is Dec. 15.

Margarita Pinkos, the acting director of the office of English-language acquisition, noted to me in an e-mail message that the Education Department "is inviting states to use the framework document as a tool to examine the quality of their English-language-proficiency assessments and standards."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

English-language learners are the subject of the first entries on a Web site, Doing What Works, launched by the U.S. Department of Education today. I've been browsing the site to see what the Education Department, in this case, relying on research from the Institute of Education Sciences, considers to be best practices for teaching ELLs. The entries focus on how to teach ELLs to read, a subject that I learned a bit more about recently in writing about how the Reading First program of the No Child Left Behind Act is working for this group of students.

I didn't, by the way, find any direct mention of Reading First or the No Child Left Behind Act in the text of the Web site that I read, though the federal education law's goal of having all students reach proficiency by 2014 is mentioned.

A number of the entries are spin-offs of the "practice guide" for teaching ELLs released this year by IES, which is available on the site. The guide, you may remember, didn't address the debate about whether it's better to teach ELLs to read with English-only methods or with bilingual education. Instead, it described strategies, such as providing intensive small-group reading interventions, that could be used in any reading classroom.

The section of the Doing What Works Web site on ELLs focuses on examples of teachers working only in English, but it does acknowledge that some schools also use students' native languages in teaching reading to ELLs. The text of a very elaborate visual on recommended reading practices says: "English-learners can learn to read in English at a rate comparable to native English-speakers when they are taught to read in English from their first day of school (with or without reading instruction in their native language)."

The site uses various kinds of multimedia, such as slide shows of teachers in action and audio, to get information about best practices out to teachers and administrators.

What do you think? Is such a Web site a good use of federal education dollars?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Illinois has stopped using an alternative mathematics and reading test for English-language learners because state officials haven’t been able to persuade the U.S. Department of Education that the test is comparable to the state’s regular tests.

The Illinois Measure of Annual Growth in English, or IMAGE, uses simplified English to test ELLs in math and reading. Illinois developed the language arts part of the test in 1996 and several years later added the math part.

Matthew Vanover, a spokesman for the Illinois board of education, said the state will eventually develop another alternative test for Illinois’ 36,000 English-learners but, in the meantime, they will take regular state tests with accommodations.

Several other states—including Arkansas and Wisconsin—stopped using their alternative tests for ELLs after they ran into issues in showing the federal government that the tests were comparable to regular tests. At the same time, the Education Department has approved such tests in North Carolina and Virginia.

Click here for a message from Illinois Superintendent Christopher A. Koch, on the fate of the IMAGE test, that he sent to educators in his state.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:47 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

It's less than two days old, so it's difficult to tell yet what a new blog by the Hispanic CREO advocacy group is all about, but I like the title, "Daily Grito." In Spanish, the word "grito" means cry or call to action, and the blog is the organization's "daily call to action on the Latino education crisis," according to the blog's first entry.

I wrote about the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, or Hispanic CREO, and its mission to press for school choice for Hispanics when the organization was first launched in October 2003. Education Week also reported several years ago on how the organization was using a federal grant to reach out to Hispanic families with information about the No Child Left Behind Act.

While cyberspace has a lot of education blogs, I haven't seen one focusing on Latino education, so I'll keep an eye on this one.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Whenever I write about immigration issues on this blog I get comments from people who feel very strongly about this country's immigration policy—or lack of policy.

I read all of your comments and appreciate that so many people are weighing in on these issues. But a couple of the comments—both from people sympathetic to undocumented people and those who feel the federal government should crack down on illegal immigration—have not been civil.

Education Week has a policy that we will remove comments that include abusive language or personal attacks. You can click on the policy posted right above the comment box. But there is some disagreement around here on what is considered a personal attack.

We don't want to take comments down and haven't at this point from this blog.

I urge you to use a constructive tone when commenting on controversial issues—and avoid nastiness. Using a mean tone with people you disagree with isn't going to help the immigration debate to move forward.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:35 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I learned this week that the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp this fall commemorating a 1947 federal court case that gave Mexican-American children in some California school districts the right to attend regular public schools rather than segregated schools. The court case was a precursor to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, which mandated the integration of U.S. schools.

Peter Zamora, the regional counsel for the Washington office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who seems to appear on panels everywhere these days, mentioned this bit of news at the U.S. Department of Education's summit on ELLs this week. He noted that the federal court case, Mendez v. Westminster School District, commemorated by the stamp usually doesn't get much attention.

My editors here at Education Week knew about Mendez v. Westminster because when the newspaper profiled 100 people who had been important to education in the 20th century at the end of that century (yes, I've been working here that long), I was asked to write about Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, who were plaintiffs in the case. I learned how the farming couple fought for their children to get a solid education regardless of their Mexican heritage. I wrote about the case a second time for an article in 2004 about how the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education was eventually applied to Latino children.

I was struck by how the Westminster school district officials had argued that they segregated Latino children because of language issues, but the judge pointed out that the school district didn't even test children on their language ability.

It seems to me that the Mendez parents provide an early example in the history of this country of "parental involvement" in education by Latinos.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As a journalist specializing in the education of children from immigrant families, I've come to appreciate any chances I have to learn about the history of education for these children because that history influences what happens today. Thus I paid close attention to a presentation about the long-term impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1974 ruling in Lau v. Nichols, at the annual summit on ELLs sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education this week.

The highest court in the land ruled in that civil rights court case that San Francisco schools had to provide Chinese children with a bridge to the curriculum that took their inability to speak and understand English into consideration. The case greatly expanded the rights of all children with limited English skills to receive special help to learn English. The ruling doesn't specify what kind of approach schools should use to help such students.

The panelists were Patricia Gandara, a professor of education and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles; Ed Steinman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law; and Peter Zamora, the regional counsel for the Washington office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They said the court case was important in furthering the country's recognition of the civil rights of English-language learners, but they emphasized that it's up to educators to ensure that schools put the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling into practice.

"The Lau case has been around forever, but court cases are just a piece of paper. They're not self-executing," said Mr. Steinman, the lawyer who defended the plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court. "Even 30 something years after Lau, we still have millions of students who—because of no fault of their own—languish in classrooms where content may be incomprensible."

Ms. Gandara contended that students' rights under Lau have eroded as "language policy for ELLs has become irrational, fueled by anti-immigration sentiment and American jingoism." She observed that as was true when Lau v. Nichols was decided, schools have an inadequate supply of bilingual educators, inadequate assessments, a lack of appropriate textbooks for ELLs, and teachers who are not prepared to teach such students. She lamented the decline of bilingual education in the country.

Lastly, Mr. Zamora said federal courts are now reluctant to call for federal intervention in education. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he said, is putting its efforts into seeing that English-language learners' rights are upheld in education legislation, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, rather than spending a lot of time on court cases.

Nov. 2 update: Peter Zamora contacted me to clarify that MALDEF is still extensively litigating cases concerning English-language learners in the courts, while the organization has at the same time expanded its attention to education legislation. See his comment on this blog entry.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:23 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Schools and social service agencies in communities with a lot of immigrants should create plans for how to respond if federal immigration authorities conduct workplace raids, according to a study by the Urban Institute that was commissioned by the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group.

Researchers studied three communities that experienced work site immigration raids in the last year to see what impact the raids had on children. I interviewed Steve Joel, the superintendent of the public school district in Grand Island, Neb., one of the communities featured in the report, for an immigration article published in September. He's also quoted in an Associated Press story about the report published yesterday.

The Urban Institute researchers found that many parents who were arrested were afraid to divulge they had children because they thought their children would be detained as well. Thus churches, social service agencies, schools, and other organizations were left to ensure that some children were cared for. The researchers note that five million children in the United States have at least one parent who is undocumented. Many of those children are U.S. citizens.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:00 AM | Permalink | 8 Comments | Recommend