Learning the Language

Arizona legislators filed papers in U.S. District Court in Tucson yesterday asking the court to give them more time to come up with a way to adequately pay for the education of English-language learners, according to a Feb. 28 article by the East Valley Tribune and an article published today in the Arizona Republic. The court had given the Arizona legislature a March 4 deadline in the long-running Flores v. Arizona case.

Timothy Hogan, the attorney for the plaintiffs, is quoted in the articles as saying he's willing to give the legislature an extra two weeks, but not more than that. See "March 4 Deadline on ELLs Looms Over Arizona Legislature."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The administrators for the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a privately run prison in Texas where some immigrant parents and children are detained after entering the country illegally, never let Margaret Talbot tour the facility.

Neither did they grant a request by Jorge Bustamante, a sociologist and former Nobel Peace Prize nominee--and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants--to visit the facility in Taylor, Texas, last May.

But by interviewing immigrant parents and children who were detained in the past at Hutto and got out, Ms. Talbot has pieced together a picture of a facility that is, in fact, a prison and a really bad place for children. See "The Lost Children" in the March 3 issue of the New Yorker.

Here's an excerpt: "Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells."

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court against the federal government in March 2007 regarding the conditions at the center. The organization settled with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August.

One stipulation of the settlement agreement was that children at the facility would receive at least five hours of education per day based on Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards. Before the lawsuit had been settled, the administrators of Hutto had already made some changes, including increasing the amount of time for education to four hours per day from one hour, and eventually to seven hours a day, according to the New Yorker article.

Because Ms. Talbot didn't get to visit the facility, it's hard to know if the kind of incidents described by families whom she interviewed, which happened before the settlement, are still occurring.

Ms. Talbot asks some hard-hitting questions at the end of her piece, which I think Americans need to take seriously.

"When we place families in a facility like Hutto, are we punishing them for coming to America? Or are we just keeping them somewhere safe, so that they don't get separated or disappear while we figure out what to do with them? Or, rather, is our policy to try somehow to combine the practical and the punitive? After all, if the goal was simply to keep track of immigrants, in most cases an electronic monitoring bracelet would suffice. And if the goal was simply to keep families together, we could surely house them in something other than a former prison..."

I think these questions can be applied as well to the government's practice of detaining unaccompanied minors who have been picked up by immigration authorities. I wrote about an immigration detention center for such children in Miami in November 2006.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've gotten my quota of laughter for the day.

Someone, and I don't know who, sent me a video from YouTube of a guy strumming a guitar and singing a love song in very rudimentary Spanish. He runs into a few problems, such as counting roses past the 10th rose.

It's a very funny take on how hard it can be to make a second language work.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Tom Hutton, a lawyer for the National School Boards Association, made an interesting point in an interview with me this morning about a federal appeals court ruling last Friday in the 15-year-old Flores v. Arizona case. My colleague Mark Walsh and I have already blogged about this ruling from the U.S. Circuit of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, regarding English-language learners in Arizona.

The appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling that a law passed by the Arizona legislature in 2006 does not satisfy a previous ruling of the lower court from 2000 that the state must provide adequate funding for English-language learners. One reason the law isn't sufficient, the appeals court judges say, is that it contains a limit of two years on the amount of time that an ELL is eligible to benefit from funding for specialized instruction.

The appeals court ruling says on page 83: "There is absolutely no evidence in the record to support the proposition that a student's need for ELL programs invariably vanishes after two years of instruction: instead the evidence is squarely to the contrary, as all witnesses testified that some students would certainly take longer than two years to become proficient in English."

I assume some of you have been in the field long enough to remember that lots of people were at one point going around saying that English-language learners ought to be able to learn English in a year.

Arizona, California, and Massachusetts passed laws based on that premise.

Those same people who promoted those laws aren't coming forward these days to say that, in fact, it has been possible for children to learn English in a year.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The one-year anniversary for my blog, Learning the Language, came and went while I was reporting on Iraqi refugee children in Jordan (the story will be out in Education Week next week).

But let me take this opportunity to thank all of you for being part of this effort to have a space on the Web for up-to-date news about English-language learners. I like the immediacy of the Web—how I don't have to wait until the newspaper goes to press to report about something that comes across my desk. And let's face it, some of my blog entries are so nerdy—so focused on issues familiar only to educators who work regularly with English-language learners—that it would be hard to pitch them for the print version.

I was encouraged to see that Learning the Language was recommended in a recent post on the community blog, In Service, of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. See "EdBLog Watch: ELLs in Widescreen."

You've helped to make the blog worth reading. In a year, Learning the Language has had 225 blog entries—and 361 comments.

I do wish that some of you who regularly left comments on the blog before I set off for my monthlong journey in the Middle East (for both work and vacation) would participate in discussions on the blog again. I miss you.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's more common for schools to group English-language learners into classes according to their level of English proficiency than to mix students with a wide range of fluency levels in the same class, particularly for English class.

But an article in the March/April issue of the Harvard Education Letter tells how three high schools are taking the less-common approach of using heterogeneous groupings.

And if you want to read more about the same topic, see a Dec. 5 article I wrote for Education Week about Brooklyn International High School. That school teaches English-language learners with different levels of fluency in the same classroom, and takes that instruction to a level that I'd never observed before at any other school.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Waukegan, Ill., educators have created criteria for when English-language learners should move to mainstream classes that are linked to how well such students score on the state's English-language-proficiency test. The Waukegan school board approved a new policy this month that says students who score 4.5 out of 6 possible levels on the state's English-language proficiency test—called ACCESS for ELLs—should be moved to regular classes.

I draw attention to this because many school districts and states are trying to figure out how to draw similar linkages, now that all states have comprehensive tests that measure students' reading, writing, listening, and speaking in English. Such tests were required for the first time under the No Child Left Behind Act.

But at the same time, I recall remarks that Jamal Abedi, an expert on testing and ELLs at the University of California, Davis, made in January when I interviewed him about the new generation of tests. "We see systematic improvement," he said, "But we don't know how they actually translate into performance of English-language learners."

In other words, he was saying, don't read too much into them yet.

Marilyn Krajenta, the director for programs for English-language learners in the Waukegan district, said to me over the telephone last week that some ELLs have stayed in special programs for up to eight years in her district. Sometimes students who scored a 6 on ACCESS stayed in special programs. "We needed to fix that," she said. A quarter of the district's 16,000 students are ELLs.

A committee of educators recommended the cutoff score of 4.5. "Around the area of 4 to 5 is where students have a good amount of English skill and academic English language, where they are considered to be able to benefit from an all-English program," Ms.Krajenta said. The new policy also stipulates that children who score less than 3 on ACCESS will be placed in classes where 80 percent of instruction is in Spanish and 20 percent is in English. Those who score from 3 to 4.5 are placed in transitional programs where English is the language of instruction but is modified for ELLs.

I don't question that it's a good idea for the Waukegan district to get some criteria down on paper that can be used for its ELLs in 20 schools regarding placement in and exiting of programs. But school districts also need to remember Mr. Abedi's caution that little research has been done at this point regarding what the scores on English-language-proficiency tests mean.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Friday, a federal appeals panel upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Raner Collins of Tucson, Ariz., that the Arizona legislature must come up with a workable plan to pay for the education of English-language learners by March 4.

The Arizona Republic reports in a Feb. 23 article that the panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco agreed that a 2006 law doesn't comply with previous U.S. District Court rulings that require adequate funds for Arizona's English-language learners.

Judge Marsha S. Berzon, one of the three judges on the court of appeals panel, noted in the panel's ruling that the case has been in the courts "longer than it takes a student to go from kindergarten to college."

This isn't the first wry comment a judge who reviewed this court case has made. At a Dec. 5 hearing, Judge Betty Binns Fletcher, an appeals court judge, suggested that if Israel and Palestine can agree to sit down and talk, maybe the parties involved in the ELL case can do the same. See "Arizona Case Moves to Federal Appeals Court."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, On Point, a morning news program in Boston, hosted Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, professors at New York University, as guests. They are authors of the book, Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, published recently by Harvard University Press.

Yesterday's program focused on the challenges that immigrant children face in American society. "Some thrive, some drop out of school, some end up in jail," said Jane Clayson, the host, while introducing the segment. It aired on Boston's WBUR, an affiliate of National Public Radio.

What's unusual about Learning a New Land is that it carefully describes the psychological and social difficulties that immigrant children experience while adjusting to U.S. schools and society. On the radio program, Carola Suarez-Orozco presented a nuanced profile of one struggling immigrant student, who she calls Lotus. School initially provides a "refuge" for the girl after she moves from China to a coastal city in the United States. At first Lotus gets good grades. But the girl doesn't fare well socially after she is admitted to a competitive high school. Her academic performance declines dramatically. "She becomes a bundle of anxiety," Ms. Suarez-Orozco says on the program.

Ms. Suarez-Orozco also stresses that many Americans don't understand how long it takes for immigrant youngsters to learn enough English to understand the nuances of a multiple-choice test or to write a solid essay. She says it can take seven years.

I wrote about Learning a New Land in a Nov. 28 article for Education Week and in a blog entry. I think that profiles of students in the book or parts of the program yesterday could provide a tool for discussion in a high school English-as-a-second-language class about students' lives.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The superintendent of Esmeralda County School District in Goldfield, Nev., sent a letter to parents recently clarifying that "there is no general rule prohibiting Spanish on any of our buses." According to news reports, a previous note Superintendent Robert Aumaugher sent to parents in October created some confusion about whether Hispanic students were permitted to speak Spanish on the bus—enough confusion that the American Civil Liberties Union got involved in the matter.

For the superintendent's take on the issue, see the Feb. 12 letter he sent to parents. For the ACLU's interpretation of what happened, read the organization's Feb. 21 press release.

An earlier post, "English-Only on School Bus," points to news coverage of the reaction the superintendent's note about what language should be spoken on the bus drew several weeks ago.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Larry Ferlazzo, who teaches English-language learners at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., testified on his blog this week that it's possible for a high school with LOTS of English-language learners to make it out of "program improvement" status under the No Child Left Behind Act.

His school did—after carrying the label for several years. (Mr. Ferlazzo indicates it was five years, but Ted Appel, the school's principal, clarified over the telephone this afternoon that it was four years).

The teachers and staff at Luther Burbank learned of the milestone this week. And, according to Principal Appel, the school did it "absolutely" by not teaching to the test, a point that Mr. Ferlazzo also made on his blog.

"We really focus on instructional strategies and doing as much as we can to develop a rich curriculum," Mr. Appel said.

More than half of the 1,970 students at Luther Burbank are English-language learners. About a third of the school's students are Hmong, a third are African-American, and a third are Latino. The school sometimes missed adequate yearly progress goals because of low test scores among English-language learners, particularly after it received 200 Hmong refugees from Thailand a couple of years ago, Mr. Appel said.

But, get this: Mr. Appel believes that the presence of so many ELLs at Luther Burbank actually had a positive influence on the school's improvement plan. Teachers had to learn how to teach in ways that engaged students and how not to assume students had background knowledge that they didn't have, he said. He said that such a shift was beneficial to "any kind of struggling student."

Mr. Ferlazzo and Mr. Appel also credit a strategy of creating "small learning communities" of teachers and students as one factor that contributed to the school's success.

If Luther Burbank had stayed in "program improvement" for a fifth year, it would have had to move into "restructuring," Mr. Appel noted.

For insight on how hard it is for schools to get out of "program improvement" status or "restructuring," see a Feb. 14 Education Week article by my colleague Linda Jacobson and a Feb. 11 blog entry by David Hoff about a Center on Education Policy report released this month.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at The School Law Blog my colleague Mark Walsh has an interesting post about how the U.S. Supreme Court declined this week to consider an appeal concerning whether a high school student's "immigration" editorial in a school newspaper is protected by free speech rights. A California appellate court decided the editorial was protected speech; a state trial court had ruled otherwise.

Update: Also see the story, "High Court Declines to Hear Student Free-Speech Case," by Mark Walsh, published today online at Education Week.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't yet played the video game, "ICED: I Can End Deportation," launched yesterday, but I've read enough about it that I can tell it's not promoting the official line from U.S. immigration authorities. It seems to me like a game that would motivate a lot of American teenagers to learn more about immigration, but it has the kind of content that some school officials might be skittish about. The game is produced by Breakthrough, an international human rights organization that has offices in both New York City and New Delhi, India.

In the game, players take on the role of one of five different immigrant teens—and see what they encounter in navigating the immigration system.

Here's a description from the game itself: "The object of the game is to become a citizen of the United States. Game Play: As an immigrant teen you are avoiding [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers, choosing right from wrong and answering questions on immigration. But if you answer questions incorrectly, or make poor decisions, you will be detained with no respect for your human rights."

Paula Gottlob, a communications consultant for Breakthrough, told me over the telephone today that I'm correct to conclude that Breakthrough intends the game to be an advocacy tool for immigrants. But she says, "It doesn't take a position except for the position of due process."

Last summer, a preview of the game was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

The game, which I learned about on ImmigrationProf Blog, is accompanied with a curriculum, which Breakthrough says is aligned with New York State and New York City social studies and English-language-arts standards.

Educators: Could any of you use such an advocacy tool with your students in public schools, without encountering resistance from administrators? Should you be able to use such a game in your schools?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having just returned from reporting in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan for Education Week and exploring Egypt (on vacation), I'm particularly interested in an article just published in Childhood Education that guides teachers in selecting children's literature about the Arab world. The authors of the article, "Celebrating diversity through explorations of Arab children's literature," are Tami Al-Hazza, an assistant professor, and Bob Lucking, a professor at the Darden College of Education at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.

The authors observe that these days, "Arab extremists or Muslim fundamentalists bent on destroying the world populate contemporary films," and Arabs have become a "minority of suspicion" in the United States. To counteract negative stereotypes of Arabs, they say, teachers can expose their students to good-quality Arab children's literature that describes everyday events and the thoughts and feelings of Arab children.

One children's book recommended in the article that I'd like to go out and buy right now is The Day of Ahmed's Secret, published in 1995 by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland. The cover illustration has a scene much like those my husband and I saw while riding a local mini-bus through Cairo to the Pyramids. We passed boys and men riding on donkey carts piled high with vegetables and fruits. Ahmed's donkey cart, in the story, is carrying tanks of butane gas for delivery to customers in Cairo. A couple of values of Arab culture emphasized in the book, according to the Old Dominion University professors, are the importance of family and fulfilling one's role in society.

It seems that teachers of diverse groups of children have caught on to using various stories in their classrooms about Latin American culture. But the teaching of Arab children's literature is less prevalent. The Childhood Education article gives teachers an opportunity to expand their repertoire of children's literature in that regard.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mexico and Illinois are working out details for a new program intended to take much of the burden of recruiting international teachers who are bilingual in Spanish and English off of individual school districts. The program was announced this week during Mexican President Felipe Calderon's visit to Chicago, according to "Mexico, Illinois join to supply bilingual teachers," which was published yesterday in the Daily Herald.

See "New Mexico Joins California in Looking South for Teachers," an article I wrote for Education Week in November 2004 about how New Mexico and California had signed agreements with Mexico to encourage teachers from that country to work in those states for up to three years. I mentioned in that article that 23 states and four individual school districts then had formal arrangements with Spain to bring teachers to the United States for three-year stints.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is my first day back in the office after spending one month in the Middle East. My visit included 10 days of reporting in Jordan on the schooling opportunities for Iraqi refugee children in that country. There's a possibility that some of the children I interviewed—or children with similar stories—could end up in your school systems.

With the reporting and Arabic-English interpreting assistance of Yasmine Mousa, I've already filed several dispatches from Amman for the Web about Iraqis' interrupted schooling. See "Jordan Opens Schools to Iraqis, But Not All Come," "Leaving Violence Behind, 5th Grader Returns to School," and "Iraqi Family Found Education Deteriorating." (Update: "Back in School, Iraqi Teen Lacks Motivation to Study," was posted Feb. 14.)

The U.S. Department of State has set a goal of receiving 12,000 Iraqi children and adults in 2008, according to a Nov. 30 article that ran in the Washington Post. That's 12,000 out of an estimated 2.4 million Iraqis who are living outside of Iraq, in countries such as Syria and Jordan.

So far, the processing by U.S. officials of Iraqis who want to come to the United States has been slow. CBS News reported earlier this month that the Bush administration conceded it's behind schedule in meeting the goal of receiving 12,000 in 2008. See "U.S. May Not Meet Iraqi Refugee Pledge," published Feb. 4. The Washington Post reported in November that, as of that month, 2,350 Iraqis had arrived in the United States in 2007.

Some of the children I met in Jordan attended school only sporadically back in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, because of a lack of security. Parents increasingly kept their children home because of frequent kidnappings of children for ransom. But many Iraqi children also missed several years of school after moving to Jordan. Most of the estimated half-million displaced Iraqis in Jordan don't have legal residency in that country, and only this school year did the Jordanian government decide to open up public schools to Iraqis regardless of their legal status.

So if your school community receives any Iraqis this school year, it's likely those children will have a lot of catching up to do academically, besides having to acquire English.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Utah's state board of education is asking for funding to strengthen the teaching of indigenous languages in schools serving Native American children, according to this Deseret News article. Proponents of the plan, which would affect the San Juan and Uintah school districts, say that helping students become proficient in their native languages would help to improve their English reading achievement as well.

The article points to data from a pilot program in the San Juan district.

There are some interesting comments from readers weighing in on whether the plan would be a good use of scarce education dollars.

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, edweek.org at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. A new book, published by the National Science Teachers Association Press, uses a combination of research, classroom case studies, and teacher perspectives to explore teaching science to English-language learners. The book focuses on several key questions, including whether students can learn science before they are proficient in English, if and how a student’s cultural background can support and extend science learning, and how to support the development of scientific vocabulary. Teaching Science to English Language Learners: Building on Students’ Strengths focuses on elementary- and middle school-level instruction.

NSTA makes a sample chapter available on its website.

2. At the end of January, Larry Ferlazzo created his list of Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers, aimed at English-language learners. Check it out.

Posted by Rachael Holovach at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Students are being asked not to speak Spanish on their bus ride in the 68-student Esmeralda County School District in Nevada--and decision has prompted an outcry and concern about its legality.

A letter from superintendent Robert Aumaugher specifically targets a small group of about a dozen Hispanic students who are bused to the neighboring Nye County. In an article in the Pahrump Valley Times, Aumaugher said "I see no reason why the Hispanic population can't be doctors and lawyers and everything else. But to do that they're going to need to make sacrifices." According to the article, Aumaugher was motivated to make the request after hearing data on the differences between the graduation rates of white and Hispanic students.

The ACLU has responded by requesting Esmeralda County to immediately rescind the ban on Spanish. In a letter to the superintendent, the ACLU states that by prohibiting the use of a specific language the school district is a violation of free speech rights and sends an incorrect message that Spanish-speakers are inferior.

Posted by Rachael Holovach at 1:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)