Blog Goes on Holiday Break
My next post on Learning the Language will be early in the new year. Have a lovely holiday season and happy new year.
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My next post on Learning the Language will be early in the new year. Have a lovely holiday season and happy new year.
California will be the last state to fully comply with requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act that a state's English-language learners must be tested in English proficiency each year in grades K-12.
I reported recently that all states and the District of Columbia had cleared an initial hurdle in putting such tests in place. (A blog entry on the same subject is here.) But my article didn't mention one nuance.
California is still lacking one small piece of the English-language-proficiency testing system required by the federal government. The state is testing English-learners in kindergarten and 1st grade only in speaking and listening and not also in reading and writing, as required.
But Deb Sigman, the director of standards and assessment for the California Department of Education, told me in a telephone interview this week that the California legislature decided in August to allocate $1.4 million for the creation of a literacy test for ELLs in kindergarten and first grade. Field testing is expected to begin in 2008, and full implementation is scheduled for the 2009-10 school year. Ms. Sigman said the test will likely be administered individually and be given to about 416,000 ELLs.
California will be the last state to comply with the English-language-proficiency testing requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act, noted Millicent Bentley-Memon, a senior education program specialist for the office of English-language acquisition of the U.S. Department of Education, in an e-mail message to me. She said all other states are testing ELLs in grades K-12 in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
Ms. Sigman pointed out that children entering kindergarten aren't exactly expected to "read."
"There's some language [in the legislation authorizing the test] about making sure it is developmentally and age-appropriate," she said. "There's an attempt to keep the testing time down."
For more on how and why California legislators and education officials resisted measuring literacy for its youngest ELLs in the school system, see my earlier post, "California Isn't Testing Young ELLs in English Literacy."
About 2 million of the nation's 53.3 million school-age children, or 4 percent, are living in the country illegally, says a report released by the Congressional Budget Office this month. And an additional 3 million school-age children are U.S. citizens born to parents who are undocumented. Those figures were first reported by the Urban Institute.
The congressional report, "The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments," is the first national report I've seen in several years released by the U.S. government that gives some clues about how much it costs state and local governments to educate undocumented children. (The Government Accounting Office released "Illegal Alien Schoolchildren: Issues in Estimating State-by-State Costs" in 2004.)
But the report doesn't give an overall, national number—it merely cites figures for how much local and state governments in Minnesota (between $79 million and $118 million) and New Mexico (about $67 million) estimated it costs them to provide schooling for such children.
For estimates from other states, see my earlier posts, "Best Guess on the Cost of Educating the Undocumented in Texas," "Arkansas Lawmakers Want to Know Cost of Educating Undocumented Children," and "Utah Asks Feds to Pay for Educating Undocumented Children."
For further analysis, see the Director's Blog over at the Congressional Budget Office. The director notes that the tax revenue collected from undocumented immigrants doesn't offset the costs involved in providing services to them, although the costs make up a small share of overall spending by local and state governments.
For further blogging or reporting on the congressional report, see ImmigrationProf Blog, March on Politics , the Phoenix Business-Journal, and The Washington Times.
The winter 2008 issue of JSD, the journal of the National Staff Development Council, features stories of how several public school districts have trained mainstream teachers to work with ELLs. (The issue is free only to members of the organization and otherwise must be purchased.)
Freeport Public Schools, a school district on Long Island, for example, combined two professional development strategies—lesson study, which originates in Japan, and Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, which resulted from a research project of the Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence. In lesson study, teachers form teams, create lessons together, observe each other teaching the lesson, and reflect on what they observed. With SIOP, teachers use eight guidelines, such as providing visuals, to adapt their regular lessons so they are understandable for ELLS. I've written before about SIOP, but not about lesson study.
By contrast, the Burlington, Vt., school district developed its own districtwide professional-development program for mainstream teachers, which included bringing in guest speakers from the refugee and immigrant communities settling in Burlington, who helped the teachers learn more about the culture of those communities.
I'd like to write more in Education Week about districtwide efforts to improve the education of ELLs. I put out a call a couple of weeks ago in this blog asking for suggestions of districts that have successful programs for ELLs—and I'm still looking for candidates. I'd need to have evidence that the districtwide approach has improved achievement for ELLs.
For months, Florida educators have been debating what level of training should be required of reading teachers who work with English-language learners. In June, Florida Gov. Charlie Christ vetoed a bill that would have lessened the requirements in English-as-a-second-language training to 60 in-service hours for reading teachers who teach ELLs, down from 300 hours. This fall, a similar bill (Senate Bill 286) was introduced in the Florida legislature. An analysis of the bill is available here.
To get a sense for the passion of educators fighting for and against a reduction in training, read my earlier blog entries, here, and here.
Alberto M. Carvalho, the associate superintendent for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, argues against the bill pending in the Senate in a Dec. 14 commentary, "Don't Lower Teaching Standards," in the Miami Herald.
"Researchers will tell you that teaching children to read is rocket science," Mr. Carvalho writes, adding that teaching children to read while they are learning English is "a complex and challenging task."
If an English-language learner is moving into young adulthood and is short of a lot of credits to graduate from high school, he or she may decide to attend schools operated by the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation run by the New York City Department of Education, which aims to reach students at risk of dropping out.
Advocates for Children of New York, a local nonprofit organization, put out a policy brief this week that contends many of those alternative schools are violating state law because they aren't offering the minimum of services required for ELLs. The policy brief says, for instance, that 59 percent of the city's 22 full-time evening programs for students who have been in high school for four years and are older than 17 1/2 don't provide language services to ELLs that are required by state law.
The policy paper notes that during the 2005-2006 school year, the four-year graduation rate for ELL high school students in New York City was 26.2 percent. It says that 30 percent of ELLs in the class of 2006 dropped out. Practically any educator, I think, would call that graduation rate for ELLs pitiful.
I was struck by how the demographics for ELLs in New York City differ from those of ELLs in Los Angeles. Over half of New York City's 139,800 ELLs were born outside of the United States, according to the policy brief. Officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District recently told me that only 22 percent of ELLs in their school system were born outside of the United States.
So when comparing student achievement statistics among school districts, it's important to remember that, on average, the academic preparation and exposure to English for ELLs can differ greatly between school districts—even between large urban school districts like New York City and Los Angeles.
The Roswell Independent School District in New Mexico has a policy that school officials don't ascertain the immigration status of students, which complies with federal laws that entitle undocumented students to a free K-12 education. But that didn't stop a school resource police officer from discovering that Karina Acosta, a senior at Roswell High School, was undocumented, detaining her at school, and referring her to immigration authorities, according to news reports from Roswell and Albuquerque (here and here). She was deported to Mexico this month. (I learned about this story over at ImmigrationProf.blog).
School officials are protesting the students' arrest and, with the local police department, decided to remove all school resource officers from schools.
The school police officer pulled Ms. Acosta out of class after she was cited for a parking violation and driving without a license and had failed to provide proper identification, according to the Roswell Daily Record.
I've recently mentioned on this blog that a teenager and his family were deported from Tucson, Ariz., to Mexico after the boy was found by police to have marijuana in his backpack at school, and police called immigration authorities to the school. Tucson school officials were quoted in the newspapers afterward as saying they would not permit immigration authorities to step on campus. A couple of school districts have similar written policies in place.
But as these news reports show, undocumented students don't have a guarantee that their schools are safe havens from immigration authorities.
I may be out of touch, but a Dec. 7 article in The News & Observer is the first news coverage I've seen of a plan by a school district to intentionally spread out the number of English-language learners in its schools because of accountability provisions under the No Child Left Behind Act.
The article says that some board members of the Wake County, N.C., school district have argued that it's necessary to more evenly distribute the number of ELLs in schools so that individual schools are not overburdened with students who are struggling to pass standardized tests.
At a recent board meeting, the board approved a policy intended to create a better balance across schools of children from low-income families and children performing below grade level on state reading tests, as well as ELLs. At one elementary school in Wake County, ELLs make up 47 percent of student enrollment, the article says.
The board discussed a cap of 15 percent for ELLs per school but removed that provision before the policy was adopted so more research could be conducted to determine what would be an appropriate limit, according to Chuck Dulaney, the assistant superintendent for growth and planning for the Wake County district, who answered a few questions for me about the policy in an e-mail message. The approved policy, now in effect, says that every school should have less than 40 percent of its students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunches. It calls for a balance across schools for ELLs but doesn't contain a specific limit.
I'm wondering if other school districts have moved ELLs around in schools to lessen the impact of possible sanctions under NCLB or if they have plans to do so.
Is schooling in America entering a new era of busing ELLs?
Someone over at the language-education division of Caslon Publishing in Philadelphia sent me review copies of a couple of handbooks published in 2007 that I think could help school people who want to form districtwide teams to address needs of ELLs.
The first handbook, Special Education Considerations for English Language Learners: Delivering a Continuum of Services, which costs $34.95, advises educators on how to move beyond the question of "to refer or not to refer" an English-language learner to special education. It explains how schools can bring together a team of people with different kinds of expertise to address a significant learning problem rather than try to figure out right from the start if an ELL has a disability.
In browsing the handbook, I recalled how Missouri has tried to actively address a problem of underrepresentation in special education of ELLs, which I wrote about last school year. Missouri teachers were receiving training on how to better collaborate with other educators in their schools to take a series of steps, including trying various interventions and then documenting a child's progress or lack of progress, to decide if an ELL needed special education services.
The second handbook, Assessment & Accountability in Language Education Programs, also $34.95, tells how educators can collaborate to use test scores and other data to improve education for ELLs. For dual-language or transitional bilingual education programs, the handbook stresses the importance of school districts' paying attention to test scores in Spanish as well as in English when evaluating programs, if students are receiving instruction in Spanish.
One big change I've seen in the eight years I've been reporting on ELLs for Education Week is that educators are thinking more in terms of how to systematically improve instruction for ELLs. That means involving a wide range of educators in a school or district, rather than just leaving it up to the English-as-a-second-language teacher or bilingual education teacher to figure it out. The publication of these handbooks are a sign of that, I think.
Congressman Ron Paul thinks it is "good and proper" to have English as the only language used for all legal matters at the national level, but that bilingualism should be permissible in schools. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, noted that he and others "fought for English immersion" in Massachusetts, referring to how Massachusetts voters approved a ballot measure against bilingual education in 2002.
Those are a couple of examples of how Republican candidates for president touched on language issues during yesterday's debate in Miami, sponsored by Univision, a Spanish-language network. Click here for a transcript. As I noted earlier on this blog, Rep. Tom Tancredo, a congressman from Colorado, didn't participate in the debate because he wanted to make a point about language: He felt it was wrong to have his remarks in English translated into Spanish. (See "Tom Tancredo Takes a Stand on Spanish Translation.")
While Rep. Paul, from Texas, said in the debate it was practical for English to be the official language of the United States, Sen. John McCain, from Arizona, didn't go that far. "I think the most practical value is to make English used by all Americans and all citizens, and all who come here," he said. He noted that he will do everything he can to help immigrants learn English.
The debate touched on a number of issues concerning education in this country, which my colleague, Alyson Klein, has written about at Campaign K-12, an Education Week blog.
The debate included a rather extensive discussion about how to combat high dropout rates among Hispanics. Congressman Duncan Hunter, from California, recalled how Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian-born math teacher, taught calculus to students in California. (Mr. Escalante's story was told in a book, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America, written by prominent education journalist Jay Mathews and also through the 1988 film, Stand and Deliver.) Mr. Hunter said schools need people who can inspire kids at a young age to "reach for the stars."
No one brought up language issues while talking about the high dropout rate among Hispanics.
One Latina got most of her information about college on her own, by searching the Internet. Another Latino student learned about the college application process through participation in Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, a college-prep program. The personal stories of how those two students and some other Latino youths made it to college are included in a report, "Voces (Voices): A Profile of Today's Latino College Students," released by Excelencia in Education, a Washington-based nonprofit organization.
The report notes that despite increases in enrollment in higher education for Latinos, only 25 percent of college-age Latinos (ages 18 to 24) are enrolled in college, compared with about 42 percent of college-age whites, 32 percent of blacks, and 60 percent of Asians and Pacific Islanders. It says Latinos are as likely as all undergraduates to receive some form of aid to pay for college but they received the lowest average financial aid award of any racial/ethnic group. The average total aid award in the 2003-04 school year for all undergraduates was $6,890. Latinos received an average of $6,250, according to the report.
By the way, the report also notes that 98 percent of Latino students in 2003-04 were either U.S. citizens (86 percent) or legal residents (12 percent). Thus it doesn't look as if many undocumented Latinos are enrolled in college or getting a very large share of college aid. (See my post, "There's No 'DREAM Act,' But College Aid is Available.")
I make mention of the report here because I think it might be useful to teachers or high school guidance counselors who work with English-language learners to read how a number of Latino students got information about how to go to college.
It will soon be Christmas—a holiday celebrated by many Americans but not ALL Americans or students attending U.S. schools. The fact that Christmas is celebrated by many Americans gives teachers of English-language learners an opportunity to teach something about American culture, but the fact that it's not celebrated by everyone means they need to be sensitive in how they talk about it. The coming of Christmas can be a chance to talk about holidays in other countries as well as the United States.
Colorin Colorado has posted some advice on what to consider when celebrating holidays in classrooms with students from many religious and ethnic backgrounds. It includes some useful tips, such as don't expect one student to be an ambassador for a whole culture, and explore a holiday with something more than food, music, or popular icons.
I recently learned something new about Christmas. It is an official holiday in Jordan, whose citizens are predominantly Muslim. Click here or here to see Jordan's holidays. You can find a database for holidays worldwide here. The database could be a resource for a lesson about holidays.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congressman and Republican candidate for president, turned down a Spanish-television network's invitation to appear in a debate among Republican presidential candidates this Sunday because he's opposed to having his remarks translated into Spanish, according to a Dec. 5 article in the Washington Times.
Candidates will speak in English but their answers to questions will be translated into Spanish for broadcast on Univision, a Spanish-language network.
The other Republican candidates accepted the invitation to participate in the debate, according to the article. The Washington Times quotes Mr. Tancredo as saying, "What all my colleagues—what other candidates are doing—it's encouraging violation of the law because it's saying. 'Don't worry about the fact that you have to know English to earn citizenship.' "
I mention Mr. Tancredo's views on this blog to show how strongly some Americans feel that everyone who lives in this country should learn English. It looks as if some Latinos are taking note of his view. Hispanic Tips and ImmigrationProf Blog have linked to the same article that I have.
I wonder if Mr. Tancredo understands how long it takes for someone to reach a level of English competency that enables him or her to understand a debate over the pressing issues facing our nation.
Such language skill certainly doesn't happen overnight.
An on-going goal I have for reporting on English-language learners here at Education Week is to get into classrooms as often as possible. Though I work for a newspaper about education, you'd be surprised how many weeks can go by—while I'm writing about proposals for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act or explaining state policy changes concerning testing ELLs—that I don't set foot inside a classroom.
Thus it was a pleasure to spend a day at Brooklyn International High School this fall trying to understand how teachers there provide instruction to ELLs of all different proficiency levels in the same classroom. Other aspects of the instructional model for this small school for immigrant students is that lessons are activity-focused, and 9th and 10th graders take all classes together. The four-year graduation rate for the school is 80 percent, versus 60 percent for all students in New York City's public schools. The school is one of eight in New York City and one in Oakland, Calif., supported by the New York-based Internationals Network for Public Schools.
The classes at Brooklyn International were some of the most dynamic I've ever seen with English-language learners. Students seemed very accustomed to working in small interactive groups and staying on task. When in small groups, the more fluent speakers encouraged those who were less comfortable with the language to participate. If students working in a small group got stuck on something, it seemed that their teacher magically appeared at the right moment to help the students move to the next goal.
I realize that I only get a glimpse of what's going on at a school when I visit for a day, but I really liked the glimpse I got of Brooklyn International. If you think your school's program (or even better yet, your school district's program) for teaching ELLs is really dynamic and successful, I invite you to send me a pitch for why I should visit it.
I'll need the pitch for my editors. Include some kind of student achievement data.
An article published today in The Arizona Republic, "Money at heart of English-learning fight," gives an update to the long-standing controversy and court case in Arizona regarding how much the state must pay to educate its English-language learners.
Republican legislative leaders in the state have appealed a U.S. district judge's ruling in Flores v. Arizona that the state legislature's plan for funding programs for ELLs doesn't meet federal law. (You can find my most recent posts on the court case here and here.)
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is expected to begin a hearing on the case today.
Dec. 5 update: A Dec. 5 Arizona Republic article tells about what happened during the hearing. "It seems to me that if Israel and Palestine can agree to sit down, maybe you folks could, too," a senior judge from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals told the opposing parties in Flores v. Arizona, according to the article.
Whether Latinos in the United States are learning English quickly or not seems to be somewhat in the eye of the beholder.
The Pew Hispanic Center reported last week that 88 percent of second-generation Latinos surveyed report they speak English very well. In their executive summary of the report, "English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States," the authors translated the 88 percent statistic into the following statement: "Nearly all Hispanic adults born in the United States of immigrant parents report they are fluent in English."
But Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which aims to reduce immigration, didn't have a "nearly all" angle to his remarks about the finding when he was quoted in a Nov. 30 article in the Washington Post.
"The fact that 88 percent of American-born children speak English very well is not something to brag about," Mr. Krikorian said. "What that really means," he continues in the article, "is that 1 out of 8 American-born children of Hispanic immigrants does not speak English very well."
The report also stated that a "small minority" of first-generation immigrants who are Latinos describe themselves as skilled English speakers. One in four Latino immigrants says he or she is able to speak English very well.
I think educators agree that something is really wrong if the child of an immigrant, who is U.S.- born and attends U.S. schools his or her whole life, isn't fluent in English upon graduation from high school. But they differ in their thinking about what is a reasonable amount of time for it to take for a child to learn English.
Educators often say, too, that how fast someone learns English varies greatly from person to person. The Pew study notes that research shows that the age of arrival and education level of immigrants are some of the predictors of how quickly they acquire good English skills.
Some Arizona school district officials are trying to figure out how English-language learners can take in four hours of English instruction each day, as a new state law requires, while also making sure they receive instruction in core subjects, such as social studies and science, according to a Nov. 26 article in the East Valley Tribune.
The reporter who wrote the article, Andrea Natekar, stated simply: "A task force, consisting of university faculty, school administrators and others—the chair an economist—met for more than a year, and came up with a research-based approach to learning English."
When I read that statement, I remembered that several people have criticized the task force's claim that the approach is research-based. Stephen Krashen of the University of Southern California and others wrote that the task force's document that spells out the research backing the approach "neglects to reference significant research bearing on the questions raised, and frequently draws inappropriate conclusions from the research presented." The Washington-based Center on Education Policy also released a report that said, "The state's structured English-immersion models should be rethought to require school districts to implement instructional models that are truly research-based." (For more on this, see my earlier post, "Critiques of Arizona's Take on Research.")
I sent Ms. Natekar an e-mail message asking if she had meant to state as fact that the approach to teaching ELLs in Arizona is "research-based" and if she were aware of the critiques of that claim.
She wrote back: "As a journalist who covers this topic, it would be inappropriate for me to enter this debate. However, the main focus of the Nov. 26 article was not to question what was and was not a research-based approach to ELL instruction, but rather to inform our readers about how statewide changes will impact our local school district."
I understand her point about the purpose of the article, but I do believe readers should know that some educators and academics differ with the Arizona task force members on whether they, indeed, selected a research-based approach to teaching ELLs.
