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Read "Struggling Asians go unnoticed," published today in the Chicago Tribune, to learn more about how and why educators may not give as much attention to Asian students who struggle with English or other subjects than students from other regions of the world.
For more on this topic, see "The 'Other' Gap," which my colleague Lesli Maxwell wrote for Education Week in February 2007.
Immigration is changing urban libraries in this country as well as public schools.
"Welcome, Stranger: Public Libraries Build The Global Village," a report published by the Chicago-based Urban Libraries Council, tells how libraries are reaching out to immigrants by providing computer and English classes, integrating books written in foreign languages into their collections, and hiring bilingual staff members. (It takes a couple of minutes to download the 20-page report.)
This report is a reminder that it's a good idea for educators to be aware of resources offered to immigrant families through their local public libraries. In Oakland, Calif., for example, the public library offers bilingual computer classes in Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. In Detroit, the library reaches out to immigrant mothers by providing both English and life skills classes for them.
I've been part of the effort of urban libraries to serve immigrants. For two years, through a local literacy council, I tutored three immigrant woman in English once a week at the Bethesda, Md., public library, a few blocks from my workplace. The library provided a free space for us to meet, and we relied on books and tapes from its collection to support the classes.
One of my students had school-age children, and she tapped into her developing English-language skills to support her children's education, such as in figuring out how to sign her son up for SAT-prep classes. She showed me how an immigrant parent can make a little English go a long way in helping her children.
It's Friday, my supervisor is on spring break, and I don't have a deadline for Education Week until next Wednesday. It's a good day for me to play around with a database tool that provides state-by-state information about immigrants. The Washington-based Migration Policy Institute announced this week it had updated one of the databases in its immigration data hub with 2006 data.
What I imagine is most relevant to readers of Learning the Language is the "language and education" fact sheet available from the 2006 American Community Survey/Census Data tool on the Migration Policy Institute's Web site.
I found out, for example, that in 2006, Tennessee had 19,000 school-age children with limited proficiency in English, or 1.8 percent of the school-age population. In Nevada, that figure during the same year was 31,000, or 6.8 percent of school-age children. It takes a few seconds to find the same figure for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
According to the institute, 52 percent of the 37 million foreign-born people age 5 and older living in the United States have limited proficiency in English. Two-thirds of those folks live in California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois.
I've certainly written my share of stories about children from immigrant families in those states. But I also like to write about what's happening in other states with a growing number of ELLs. The institute says that in Alabama, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Delaware, the number of foreign-born people (age 5 and older) with limited English skills grew by more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2006. Nationwide, the growth during the same time period was 25 percent on average.
I'm wondering how schools in those states are faring in serving newcomers who don't speak much English.
The editors of Education Week got an e-mail message this week from Yvonne Watterson, an Arizona principal who was recently featured in the New York Times for becoming an advocate for her undocumented high school students. She raised funds to pay for some of her students to take college courses, given that Arizona has a new law that denies undocumented students the opportunity to pay in-state tuition rates at colleges and universities. (See "Arizona Principal Goes into 'Advocacy Mode.' ")
In her e-mail, Ms. Watterson let us know she's edited a book, Documented Dreams, containing thank you letters her students wrote to donors that also tell about their hopes to get a college education in this country. Find it at Amazon for $25.
Here's a principal who has decided to extend the work she does within the walls of her school, GateWay Early College High School in Phoenix, beyond those walls.
Breakthrough, an international human rights organization, put out a curriculum guide this week to correspond with its free video game: "ICED: I Can End Deportation." In the game, players take on the role of one of five immigrant teens—and see what they encounter in day-to-day life.
The 115-page curriculum guide, which Breakthrough says it has aligned with New York State and New York City social studies and English-language-arts standards, takes the position that current U.S. immigration laws deny due process for immigrants. The guide suggests that teachers can use the game and curriculum to teach a 10-day unit on "Fair Immigration Laws and Human Rights."
If I were a teacher, I wouldn't use the "I Can End Deportation" game and curriculum as the only sources for a unit on immigration because of their strong point of view that immigration laws are unfair (I'd also make students aware of organizations that back current immigration laws). But I would draw from the curriculum for some questions and themes that might engage high school students. (The guide can be downloaded free here.)
Here's one question for students to ponder: "How are immigrants vulnerable to human rights violations?"
See my earlier post about the game.
A number of states have created policies that tell school districts how to apply test scores from English-language-proficiency tests when deciding if English-language learners should leave special programs. States developed new English-proficiency tests, which measure students' progress in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act. The tests are also intended to assess students' knowledge of "academic English"—the language of school.
Read about the new wave of state policies in "States Seeking Proper Balance in Use of ELL Test Scores," which I wrote for this week's issue of Education Week.
The Orlando Sentinel ran an article this week, "Immigrants want to blend in, keep mother tongue," that touches on some big-picture issues concerning language policy in this country. The United States has never made English its official language, although 30 states have, it says. It tells some personal stories of immigrants or children of immigrants who want to blend in with U.S. society by speaking English yet also want to keep their language and culture.
I'm always interested in how speakers of languages other than English are keeping those languages alive, since the pressure to use English in this country often overshadows efforts to help people maintain their native languages.
The Minnesota Humanities Center, which receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is one source of funding for projects to revitalize indigenous languages and culture in Minnesota. The center recently announced $5,000 grants to six different educational projects.
The projects are expected to produce an illustrated alphabet book in Dakota, a children's book written in Ojibwe and Dakota featuring an elder who is fluent in Ojibwe, publications of several volumes of an academic journal in the Ojibwe language, Ojibwe family language kits, and 10 early-reader books in Ojibwe.
I'm glad someone is looking out for the revitalization of these less-commonly-spoken languages. What a boring world it would be if everyone spoke only English.
"How serious are you about leaving your beautiful Puerto Rico and moving to the U.S.?" a recruiter from the Boston public school system asks a Puerto Rican teacher being wooed to work in Boston, according to a March 18 Boston Globe article.
"Don't do it," I protested internally, as I read this article about how Nydia Mendez, director of programs for English-language learners for the Boston school system, and others recently visited Puerto Rico to recruit bilingual teachers. I was thinking of a moment when I visited Boston and stood on an elevated platform in winter, waiting for a train, chilled to the bone. I contrasted that with a time I took a vacation to Puerto Rico and snorkeled in warm waters under a bright sun.
On this cloudy March day, I wish I were in Puerto Rico.
But Ms. Mendez, who grew up in Puerto Rico, obviously has found reason to live and work in Boston, and maybe she'll succeed in getting some of those teachers she spoke with on her recent recruiting trip to do the same. About 40 percent of Boston's 56,000 students are English-language learners, the article says. A third of the school system's students are Latinos. The recruiters believe that the schools could offer a better education to Spanish-speaking students if they had more bilingual teachers.
Over at the ELL Advocates blog, Stephen Krashen tried to poke a hole in claims reported in an article in the Oregonian that new methods for teaching English-language learners in Oregon resulted in higher test scores on the state's English-language-proficiency test last school year than in the previous school year. Mr. Krashen is a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, who frequently comments publicly on shortcomings he perceives in journalists' reporting on ELLs.
Mr. Krashen read on the Oregon department of education Web site that the state had recently standardized its testing of English proficiency, so he suspected that ELLs' test scores had improved because the school districts had changed their tests. But Betsy Hammond, the author of the March 6 Oregonian article, wrote him back that the claims had been based on a randomly selected group of ELLs who took the same test both years in a row.
Then Mr. Krashen responded by pointing out other reasons that he contends the claims are "unscientific."
Ms. Hammond's article explained that Oregon's schools have started to teach ELLs grammar in an orderly way to ensure they don't miss learning how verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, and sentences are constructed.
After reading the article, I wanted to know more about how instruction was delivered in the past and how any changes had been implemented (teachers don't change their methods overnight). The Oregon educators' explanation that a more deliberate focus on grammar raised test scores didn't seem adequate.
The comments to Mr. Krashen's blog entry further pique my interest about what's going on with ELLs in Oregon. Doug Shivers, an ESL teacher in Oregon and a blogger, notes that many ESL teachers in Oregon are frustrated with ready-made lesson plans for teaching grammar.
Here's another story idea to put on my list for exploration. Is something working in Oregon with ELLs that other educators in the country should learn about, or do educators there just hope that what they are doing is working?
South Dakota has become the 17th state to decide to adopt ACCESS for ELLs, which is being used by more states than any other English-language-proficiency test to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act's requirement that schools test ELLs every year in their progress in English. The test is designed to assess ELLs in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and was created by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, or WIDA, consortium. WIDA was formed for the purpose of developing English-language-development standards and a test aligned with them.
The previous generation of English-language-proficiency tests typically only assessed listening and speaking—and didn't give a good indication of how well children were learning "academic English," the language of school. (See "States Clear Initial Hurdle on ELL Tests" in the Dec. 5, 2007 issue of Education Week.)
Sara A. Waring, the director of English-language-acquisition programs for South Dakota, told me in a phone interview yesterday that South Dakota is replacing use of an augmented version of the Stanford English Language Proficiency Test with the ACCESS for ELLs next school year.
"As a small state, we were struggling with aligning the [Stanford] test" with our standards, she said. In addition, she said, state officials concluded South Dakota could save $250,000 per year by switching to ACCESS for ELLs, and get more support for carrying out the test, such as four days of professional development each year. Ms. Waring said it costs $23 per student to administer ACCESS for ELLs. The state has about 5,000 English-learners in its schools.
She noted that WIDA also provides a separate placement test for ELLs at no extra cost to states, while currently South Dakota school districts are paying to use additional tests for placement purposes. Given the relatively small number of English-learners among the state's total student enrollment of 120,300, South Dakota needed to stop going it alone and join a consortium where it could benefit from the "knowledge base" of other states, Ms. Waring noted.
A Spanish-speaking student or parent in Springdale, Ark., might tune into a local Spanish radio station or watch a local program on Univision these days and hear a public service announcement emphasizing the importance of state standardized tests. The 16,500-student Springdale school district has created such a public service announcement to try to motivate Spanish-speaking students to do better on state tests, according to a March 13 article in the Arkanas Democrat.
The article tells how 17 out of 22 Springdale schools failed to meet federal testing standards (otherwise known as "adequate yearly progress" goals) last spring on state tests. The reason, according to Jim Rollins, the superindentent for the Springdale school district, is that state policy changed so that all English-language learners who had been in U.S. schools for at least a year had to take the regular state tests. Previously, the superintendent said, they completed projects to document their learning.
I believe the superintendent is referring to the fact that Arkansas was required by the U.S. Department of Education to stop using portfolio tests instead of regular state tests for some English-language learners, which I wrote about in Education Week in November 2006.
I suppose a public service announcement broadcast through local Spanish media won't hurt, but I'm suspecting it will take something more—perhaps another change in testing policy that gives a break to ELLs who are new to English, or a change in the delivery of instruction—for all Springdale schools to meet adequate yearly progress goals.
See my earlier post, "Demographic Tidbit," on how the region surrounding Springdale, Ark., and the neighboring cities of Fayetteville and Rogers has the country's fastest-growing Hispanic student enrollment.
Yvonne Watterson, a principal of an early-college high school in Phoenix, fought for her students who lacked residency and citizenship papers in the United States to continue to take college classes. The Arizona statute, Proposition 300, discontinued the opportunity for undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. And some of the high school students in Ms. Watterson's school who were taking college courses fell into that category as well.
Read more in the story that Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has written about Ms. Watterson that was published March 12 in the New York Times.
I've noticed that Mr. Freedman has featured immigrant students, including English-language learners, in his education column before. See "English Language Learners as Pawns in the School System's Overhaul," published May 9, 2007, and "It's Latino Parents Speaking Out on Bilingual Education Failures," published on July 14, 2004.
I know at least one person here in the nation's capital who follows issues concerning English-language learners and at times has been as persistent as I have been in bugging the U.S. Department of Education for information: Don Soifer, the executive vice president for the Lexington Institute, in Arlington, Va., a conservative think tank.
Both Mr. Soifer and I have noticed that the Education Department has so far taken one extra year to prepare a two-year evaluation of programs for English-language learners than it took to prepare its previous evaluation on such programs. The two-year report to the U.S. Congress is required by the No Child Left Behind Act. Congress received the first two-year evaluation in March 2005. (See my March 23, 2005, article in Education Week)
Chad Colby, a spokesman for the Education Department, told me in an e-mail message yesterday, "The biennial report is being edited and should be ready by the end of the month. There were quality issues, as it related to the writing of the report, and editing priorities, which led to delays."
It seems to me the information in this second report, based on data from the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years, will be rather out-of-date if and when this report is released.
Mr. Soifer, who is participating in an Education Department advisory group on ELLs, said he's heard from department officials that some states had a lot of gaps in the data they submitted for the report. He said he's gotten the impression the report won't be released any time soon.
Mr. Soifer says he is dismayed to have learned that some states didn't report a reliable statistic for the percentage of students they reclassify as fluent in English each year. "There's this big question about how Congress could go about the business of reauthorizing this law when data that is so important is unknown," he said to me in a telephone interview yesterday.
If reclassification rates for English-learners were 25-30 percent each year, he said, the lack of data wouldn't be such a big deal, but since the rates tend to be less than 10 percent in many states, which he considers to be low, he said it's important that such rates are reported to the public.
Back in August, Mr. Colby of the Education Department noted that release of the report was delayed because "there were submission issues from some states." See "Where's the Ed Department's Evaluation of NCLB's Title III?"
An author of a letter to the editor of the Daily Herald published today contends that some school districts in Illinois are fulfilling the state's mandate to provide bilingual education by hiring Spanish-speaking teachers who aren't fluent in English nor certified to teach. She says Illinois should provide flexibility for schools to choose the method to teach English-language learners. I came across the letter over at TESOL in the News Blog. Someone called VLN, who apparently favors the mandate, writes in the comment section below the letter: "It's not just about learning English. It's about preserving their native language and culture. We don't want to be conquering colonists, do we?"
See my earlier post about this issue, "Illinois School District Runs Up Against Bilingual Mandate."
In trying to help English-language learners to feel more welcome, officials of the Phoenix-Talent School District in Phoenix, Ore., are starting with school buses, according to a March 10 article in the Mail Tribune.
At a recent training, 15 bus drivers were told that it's important for them to greet students warmly, learn their names, and keep them engaged by delegating responsibilities. (Sounds like a good policy for interacting with people in general.) A high school student is quoted in the article as saying that some bus drivers often act irritated and she wishes that they were friendlier.
I couldn't help comparing this article about an effort to welcome English-language learners with a story published in The Washington Examiner yesterday that tells how approval of a policy by the Prince William County board of supervisors to crack down on illegal immigration has affected enrollment of English-language learners in the local school district.
Prince William County's school board members say they've lost 630 of the school district's 13,393 English-language learners since county officials approved the crackdown policy on Oct. 17, according to the article.
I'm not trying to imply here that the Prince William County School District itself isn't welcoming English-language learners. It wasn't the school board that approved the policy to combat illegal immigration.
But the two stories show a rift in attitudes of people in this country on whether to go out of one's way to be welcoming or to go out of one's way to do the opposite.
For at least a decade, one-fourth of California's primary and secondary school students have, on average, been English-language learners. So educators in states that are the "new kids on the block" in teaching such students might want to spend some time with EdSource's report, "English Learners in California: What the Numbers Say." (The 16-page report costs $5.)
The report gives some answers to important questions about student achievement, and poses some additional questions that need to be answered. Those answers will carry weight because California enrolls one-third of the nation's ELLs.
It's interesting, for example, that the EdSource researchers found that more time spent in U.S. schools by English-learners leads to higher pass rates on the English section of California's high school exit exam (with the exception of English-learners who repeated a grade) but not on the math section of the exit exam.
Given that finding, the EdSource researchers ask: "Why do the English-language arts results follow a pattern that is different from the math results? If these students are truly English learners, how are they able to pass the exam at all? What are the appropriate criteria for labeling students as English-learners? Should students not be reclassified because of difficulty with academic English as opposed to a lack of English fluency?"
Hmm...It's something to think about. If schools are calling students English-language learners, how is it that they can pass a regular English test at all? And I hear lots of educators out there asking yet another question: Should they be expected to pass such tests?
If signed into law, a bill passed in the Utah legislature last week would help create 15 dual-language programs at elementary schools, according to a March 7 article in the Salt Lake Tribune. The programs would teach Chinese, Spanish, French, and Navajo, along with English.
Last summer, the legislature in Texas passed a bill to create a six-year pilot project for dual-language programs in 10 Texas school districts. See "School Districts That Offer Dual-Language Classes Through High School."
In dual-language programs, children who are native speakers of English and children who are native speakers of another language, such as Spanish, learn both languages in the same classes.
Several of Education Week's blogs, including Learning the Language, have received "excellent" ratings from a company called Blogged.com. I received an e-mail message from a marketing person from the company saying my blog had been given a 9.5 score out of 10 by editors who evaluated my blog according to frequency of updates, relevance of content, site design, and writing style.
According to Webware: Cool Web 2.0 Apps for Everyone, Blogged.com is a blog rating service that launched on Feb. 25. The "About Us" section of blogged.com says it has a database of more than 200,000 blogs. You can check out Blogged.com's directory for education blogs here.
I guess I just fell for the company's strategy for marketing itself by putting its badge of excellence on this blog entry.
Over the weekend, I traveled to Memphis to give a speech about trends in the education of English-language learners. I spoke during a luncheon at the annual conference of the Tennessee Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Here are the trends that I talked about:
--More immigrant families are moving to small-town or rural communities that haven't received many immigrants for at least a century. (I noted that some school districts in those small towns and rural areas do a good job of quickly putting programs in place to serve English-language learners while others don't.)
--The federal No Child Left Behind Act has brought increased testing for English-language learners. (I talked about how the federal law tightened up exemptions for ELLs from taking state tests. I also talked about how states were required by the law to create new English-language-proficiency tests for ELLs. See "States Clear Initial Hurdle on ELL Tests.")
--"Academic English" has become a buzz word in the field. (Academic English is the language that students need to understand school subjects rather than the social English that they speak on the playground. I noted how a presenter at the Tennessee conference defined academic English as "the words students will see on a state test that really mess them up.")
--Team teaching between English-as-a-second-language teachers and mainstream teachers is becoming more common. (I gave the example of how St. Paul schools in Minnesota have adopted team teaching in the elementary grades. See "Team-Teaching Helps Close Language Gap.")
--School districts are increasingly trying to figure out how to better serve ELLs with disabilities. (I noted that Tennessee has done some work in this area. See "Special Education and ESL: Myths and Facts," a document posted on the Tennessee Department of Education's Web site.)
--More school districts and states are standardizing the definition of English proficiency for ELLs for placement and exiting programs based on students' scores on the new generation of English-language proficiency tests. (Here, I gave the example of Waukegan, Ill. See "Test Scores and Exiting Programs in Waukegan, Ill.")
--Some school districts have written policies clarifying the relationship between school officials and immigration authorities. (This was the one trend I spoke about concerning how immigration is handled in the United States, which sometimes involves English-language learners in a school setting. See "With Immigrants, Districts Balance Safety, Legalities.").
I told the teachers of English-language learners in Tennessee that I respect the fact that they give special help to students, and thus provide a bridge to the curriculum for students with limited proficiency in English.
I'm particularly feeling respect for teachers of ELLs after visiting Amman, Jordan, to write about Iraqi refugee children in the schools there. I noticed that Jordanian teachers, in a school system that is already stretched, are not in a good position to give special help to Iraqi children who have missed several years of school and need to catch up.
My heart went out to those Iraqi children who have missed school and lag behind their peers. And I have a new appreciation for the laws in this country that require school districts to give special help to children with learning gaps.
I draw your attention to the reporting project that took me to Amman, Jordan, for 10 days: "The Lost Years: Iraqi Students in Jordan," a collection of photos, videos, and an in-depth article about Iraqi refugees. It was published this week by Education Week. The project isn't, of course, about English-language learners in the United States—the subject of this blog—but many of the nation's ELLs are refugees and the piece might give you some insight into issues affecting displaced people in general.
What was most surprising to me in reporting for this project was that so many Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria had missed so much school, often as many as four years, and that many Iraqi refugees are still not enrolled in school.
The children we interviewed who had fled their homeland because of the war often seemed to have lost track of time. For instance, 16-year-old Mohammed Faris, who is from Fallujah, Iraq, and is now a 5th grader in a public school in Jordan, couldn't tell me exactly how many years of school he had missed, though it must have been at least four. He kept saying, "All I know is that when I left school in Iraq, I was in the 4th grade." Fourth grade was one of his few reference points.
I imagine that it's common for refugee children to lack points of reference when they are on the move and they are out of school.
Geraldo Rivera, the T.V. star who hosts a show on Fox News, has written a book, His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S. He argues that the U.S. Congress should provide a path to legalization for the 12 million people in this country lacking residency or citizenship papers.
He writes: "Who but the most eager and hardy can walk across forty or fifty miles of parched desert, dodge dopers, coyotes, and the feds, endure hardship and risk life and limb just to get a job at the other end of a gauntlet of discomfort and anxiety? Don't you want these tough sons of guns on our team?"
Passion this man does not lack. In April 2007, Geraldo (it doesn't seem right to call him Mr. Rivera, as is my usual style in this blog) got into a shouting match over the issue of illegal immigration with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on T.V.
"You want anarchy—open-borders anarchy," shouted Bill O'Reilly.
"I want fairness," Geraldo shouted back.
Geraldo, whose father is Puerto Rican and whose mother is Jewish, touches on education in his book, noting that "one of the historic obstacles of the linguistic assimilation of immigrant children has been the traditional reluctance of Hispanic parents to become involved in their children's education."
He adds: "Whether because of the more authoritative educational model in Latin countries or just immigrant shyness, many parents expect schools to assume complete responsibility for their children's education." He tells about a school district in Surry County, N.C., that has set up Hispanic Parent Teacher Organization meetings to get parents more engaged.
To read an excerpt of the book and learn more about Geraldo's views on immigration, listen to National Public Radio's interview with him from this week. Blogger Literanista says that His Panic is the first in a series of books about Hispanic personalities that Penguin Group plans to publish under its new imprint, Celebra.
Radio Arte, a public radio station in the Pilson neighborhood of Chicago, is putting young Latinos' voices on the air. Martin Macias, who is 18, broadcast a commentary, "How to Get My Vote," on Radio Arte that was picked up last month by National Public Radio.
"In Chicago, immigration reform is the hottest issue," Martin says in his radio commentary. "My people want to know if mass deportation is the kind of radical change that comes with a new president. We don't support it." He also informs the radio audience that candidates better not assume any more that Latinos don't have access to the Internet. He's been following the campaign mostly through the Internet, he says.
A Feb. 27 article, "Voices for the voiceless: Young Latinos are speaking on the air," in Northwestern University's Medill Reports, says that most of the Latinos who broadcast their views on Radio Arte are first- or second-generation immigrants ages 15 to 21. Those who speak English well report for First Voice, which airs for one hour twice a week. Those who are more comfortable speaking in Spanish report for Primera Voz, which is also broadcast twice a week for one hour.
This sounds to me like an innovative way for Latino youths to develop their critical thinking and language skills.
Some teachers at Roswell High School and members of the Roswell, N.M., community are still upset over how a high school senior was sent back to Mexico three months ago after a local policeman assigned to the school ticketed her for driving without a license.
A March 4 article published by the Associated Press provides details not reported earlier about the debate in that community over whether it was appropriate for a police officer to call immigration authorities to a school campus. See "New Mexico Teen Detained at School and Deported." For an Education Week article on the subject of school authorities' responsibilities in relating to immigration authorities, see "With Immigrants, Districts Balance Safety, Legalities."
Some researchers have tried to figure out how much one can increase one's salary by mastering a foreign language, according to a Feb. 28 article posted at ABC News.
The article, "Learn a Language, Get a Raise," cites research by Aimee Chin, an associate professor in the economics department at the University of Houston, that found immigrants to the U.S. who transition from speaking English "well" to "very well" increase their wages by 30 percent. (That's a statistic some of you teachers might want to show your English-language learners who are trying to move to an advanced level of language proficiency.)
I find it interesting that the article says the income gains for native English speakers, like me, from learning a foreign language are small compared with the gains for non-English-speaking immigrants who learn English.
Personally, I have to say that I don't think my years of studying Spanish on the side, so that I could manage to interview parents of school children in Spanish, resulted in a higher salary for me here at Education Week. But it definitely did help me to land what I consider to be a very interesting beat at the newspaper, reporting on English-language learners.
Even so, those Spanish skills that I acquired always seem to be deteriorating rather than improving, as I don't use them frequently. It's time for me to find a Spanish tutor again or start tuning regularly into BBC Mundo to sharpen those skills.
Let me point you to a couple of reports released this winter that synthesize some of the research out there on English-learners. I had hoped to go back to some of the original research to further investigate some of those conclusions. But the morning hours are slipping away, so I'll leave that for another day.
"Challenging Common Myths About Young English Language Learners," by Linda M. Espinosa, is a policy brief of the New York City-based Foundation for Child Development. Here's one of the myths stated in the paper: "Latino English-language learners are less likely to be enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs, because of their families' cultural values." The policy brief says that recent research suggests that Latino children attend center-based programs at lower rates than other racial or ethnic groups because of financial constraints and lack of access, not because of any hesitancy for cultural reasons.
"From English Language Learners to Emergent Bilinguals," by Ofelia Garcia, Jo Anne Kleifgen, and Lorraine Falchi, is a paper produced by a research initiative of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University. The authors, who gave a presentation at the end of January at Teachers College on their paper, argue that the term "English-language learners" tends to ignore the bilingualism of children from immigrant families. They prefer the term "emergent bilinguals" and cite research that suggests policymakers and researchers need to give more emphasis to children's home language and culture. Interestingly, one of the report's recommendations is for policymakers to develop a definition of an English-language learner that is consistent across state and federal lines. A report from last fall by the National Association of State Boards of Education made that same point. See "Recommendations for State Boards of Education."
The administrators of the Diamond Lake School District 76 in Mundelein, Ill., don't want to have to provide bilingual education, even though Illinois requires it when a school district has at least 20 students who speak a language other than English, according to a Feb. 27 article in the Chicago Tribune.
In "Mundelein District Challenges State Over Bilingual Education," the administrators of Diamond Lake contend that a decision to provide instruction almost entirely in English in 2003 has led to improved test scores. The state just learned in a review last spring that the school district had made the switch away from bilingual education. Now it's uncertain if the district will continue to be able to receive special state funds for English-language learners, since it's not complying with the mandate to offer bilingual education.
Advocates of bilingual education are often upset about how voters in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts approved laws that greatly curtailed bilingual education in those states. In Arizona, the changes made it almost impossible for school districts to offer bilingual instruction.
I can see how educators in school districts that prefer to teach English-language learners in English also seek flexibility—in states that require bilingual education—to be able to choose what method they think makes the most sense for their community.
For more about states that require bilingual education, see "NCLB Seen a Damper on Bilingual Programs."
Do you think states should mandate a particular kind of instruction for English-language learners?
Update: A March 2 article from the Daily Herald, "Bilingual teaching methods at issue," gives additional details.
