Learning the Language

Maryland's governor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, has recently signed into law a bill that sets up a task force to preserve "heritage-language skills," or the language skills of people exposed to a language other than English at home, according to a June 23 commentary in the Baltimore Sun.

Catherine Ingold, the director of the University of Maryland's National Foreign Language Center and author of the piece, explains how this simple step by Maryland's governor is unusual. She contends that the No Child Left Behind Act is one policy that makes it harder to develop skills of heritage speakers because it reduces the amount of classroom time that might be used to develop language skills. (Let me note that there's nothing in NCLB that actually limits the time for the teaching of languages other than English, but I take her comment to mean that the emphasis on other skills such as reading and math in the act may leave less time for the teaching of heritage or foreign-language skills.)

"Calling a Rose by Its Other Names," an article in the 2007 annual report of Teachers College at Columbia University, which was published in May but just landed in my mailbox, also spells out the benefits of developing the language skills of children from immigrant families.

Meanwhile, supporters of the English-only movement have recently been busy circulating their arguments as well. See "The Case for English Only," a commentary sent to me from the GOPUSA.

All three of these pieces contain arguments based on the careful selection of statistics and examples. Which of the commentaries rings most true with your experience, and why?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

School officials in Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana are considering barring students from speaking a foreign language during commencement speeches, according to an Associated Press article published today in The New York Times.

The proposal came about after Cindy Vo, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants and a co-valedictorian at Ellender High School, recited a sentence in Vietnamese to honor her parents, who are not fluent in English. She translated the sentence into English during the speech, which was a command to always be your own person, the article says. (July 1 update: Here's a longer version of the AP story. Cindy Vo's cousin, Hue Vo, the co-valedictorian, also spoke briefly in Vietnamese during her speech, without providing English translation.)

I have to wonder if a white valedictorian had delivered a commencement speech at the same school and dropped a line in French, based on what he or she learned in a school foreign-language program, if school officials would have reacted the same way. So often, people's feelings about language in this country are connected to their feelings about immigration.

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

To read the bad news about the academic progress of ELLs in this country, you have to read beyond the executive summary of a two-year evaluation of ELL programs that the U.S. Department of Education sent to Congress yesterday. It's called "The Biennial Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Title III State Formula Grant Program: School Years 2004-06" and is supposed to be put online next Monday by the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. (June 30 update: Find the pdf here.) A brief article that I wrote today about the report was just posted at edweek.org.

First the good news: During the 2005-06 school year, 24 states met their targets for having ELLs make progress in English; 28 states met their targets for such students to attain proficiency in the language.

Also, the authors of the report included the following kernel of good news in the executive summary: Of 312,000 students who were formerly ELLs but who are being tracked by states for two years after becoming proficient in the language, 86 percent scored proficient or above in math and 99 percent scored at least proficient in reading during the 2005-06 school year. (I'm wondering, how much digging in the data they had to do to find that positive bit of news and what it really says about the estimated 5 million ELLs who are still in the category.)

Now for the bad news, which you can find on page 31—way past the two-page executive summary. Only one state, and the report doesn't name it, made adequate yearly progress in math for ELLs in 2005-06. No states made AYP in reading for such students that school year.

The bad news takes the wind out of my sails in anticipating writing any nuanced stories about how schools are trying to make AYP for ELLs. The matter isn't nuanced at all, I see. Hardly anyone is making AYP for these students.

See my earlier post, "The ELL Report Congress Hasn't Gotten."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Pew Hispanic Center today released a report by Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the center, showing that schools that report low achievement for ELLs also tend to have a set of characteristics associated with poor student performance on tests. Those characteristics include high student-teacher ratios, large student enrollments, and high levels of students eligible for free- and reduced-price lunches. The report says that when ELLs aren't isolated in such schools, they do considerably better on standardized tests. See my story published today at edweek.org, "Schools With Poor ELL Scores May Share Common Elements."

The report is consistent with the work of other researchers in showing that a high concentration of ELLs in schools is associated with low standardized test scores. But what I find interesting about Mr. Fry's report is that he uses a very small number of students as a threshold to examine the presence of ELLs, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanic whites in schools. He uses the thresholds that states set for schools to report test scores for student groups under the No Child Left Behind Act. In Arizona and Florida, for example, that number is 10 test-takers per grade for ELLs, whites, or other groups; in New York and Texas, the threshold is at least 5 test-takers per grade.

Essentially, Mr. Fry found out that ELLs that go to school with even a few white students do better on state math tests than students who have virtually no white students in their schools. And white and black students who go to school with even a few ELLs do worse on math tests than those who go to school with practically no ELLs.

Pew Hispanic Center researchers don't really speculate on what's behind their findings or make policy recommendations. Do any of you want to take a stab at making recommendations based on this information?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Not many Native American children have teachers who expose them to the traditional languages of Native communities in school, according to a study released today by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education called "National Indian Education Study 2007: Part II." For 87 percent of Native American 4th graders and 8th graders, reading and language arts are delivered entirely in English. I wrote about the study today for edweek.org.

It's well known that Native American communities in the United States have experienced tremendous loss of their traditional languages. The study indicates that not a lot is happening in schools to bring those languages back.

The study is based on a survey of American Indian and Alaska Native children who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2007. When it comes to language, some children don't get any exposure to Native languages at home either. Thirty-nine percent of 4th graders and 40 percent of 8th graders who identify themselves as Native Americans said they "never" have exposure to a Native American language at home. Three percent or less of participating 4th graders and 8th graders have teachers who "frequently" use a Native American language at school, according to teacher responses.

William G. Demmert Jr., a professor of education at Western Washington University and a member of the Oglala Sioux and Alaska Tlingit tribes, told me during my reporting that he'd like to see research on whether Native American children are learning standard English or a local dialect of English (he calls it a Creole or "village English") at home if they aren't first learning a Native American language. And he wondered: if Native languages are spoken in the home, are children first learning the Native language or English?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"The more words you know, the easier it is to acquire new words," said David J. Francis, a professor of quantitative methods in the psychology department of the University of Houston, while presenting a study about teaching vocabulary to English-language learners at a conference of the Institute of Education Sciences this month in Washington.

Mr. Francis argued at a June 11 session about ELLs that schools need to do a better job of infusing the teaching of vocabulary across a school's whole curricula. Mr. Francis noted that the Reading First Impact Study, released in May, shows that children in Reading First programs in 2nd grade spend an average of 12 minutes per day learning vocabulary (see page 45 of the study). "I mean, who are we kidding?" he said, implying that 12 minutes isn't nearly enough time for children to learn the academic vocabulary they need to succeed in school. (After the session, he told me that having the chance to learn vocabulary throughout the school day is particularly important for children from low-income families because they typically lack the general knowledge to easily learn new words.)

Mr. Francis and Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, presented findings from the first year of a two-year study paid for by the Institute of Education Sciences that examines interventions for improving the science knowledge and academic language (including vocabulary) of middle school students in Texas. The students in the study were from homes where a language other than English is spoken and included many English-language learners. For each teacher, two sections of science were randomly assigned to the treatment condition and two sections were randomly assigned to the control condition. With a sample of 1,000 6th graders at five middle schools, the researchers compared student outcomes for students in treatment sections where the teachers implemented the interventions developed by the researchers to control classrooms where teachers taught the science curriculum as they usually do. Strategies for teaching science and academic language included providing children with lots of hands-on science activities, such as looking at plant and animal cells under a microscope, as well as guided reading and writing that used new vocabulary.

"They don't just have to hear it, they have to see it," Ms. August said, in explaining how children learn new words. She reported that on tests designed by the researchers using items developed by Texas and the textbook publishers, students in the treatment group outperformed students in the control group. Students in the treatment group also did significantly better on measures of academic language.

Two decades ago the teaching of vocabulary was not a hot topic in education circles, said Judith Scott, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was invited to respond to presentations about teaching vocabulary to ELLs. "Now vocabulary is hot. People are starting to pay attention to it." She said the topic of how to teach vocabulary to ELLs in particular is prevalent in the research community. She summed up three studies at the conference session by saying: Students "need to have multiple opportunities to see, hear, and use words."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A comment by Zoe Ann about a recent blog entry on how some schools are moving toward a push-in model and away from a pull-out model for teaching English as a second language, sent me in pursuit of research on the effectiveness of either educational approach.

The answer so far (readers, tell me if I'm missing something): There's not much out there.

With the push-in approach, ESL teachers work with ELLs in their regular classrooms; with the pull-out approach, ESL teachers work with such students in separate classrooms, whether for one period a day or a much longer time.

Two recent reviews of research on ELLs say little or nothing about push-in versus pull-out. In one of them, Educating English Language Learners, I found the following paragraph on page 187:

Fulton-Scott and Calvin (1983) found that bilingual/bicultural and integrated ESL programs in which ELLs were integrated with English-proficient students yielded higher achievement test scores and GPAs than a segregated ESL program that provided limited opportunities for ELLs to interact with English-proficient students.

I interpret this summary of a single study to mean that push-in ESL could have some advantages over pull-out ESL. Donna Christian, the president of the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics and one of the authors of Educating English Language Learners, said she didn't know of any other studies that address the issue. And Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, said the review of research on ELLs by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth didn't find any research that directly addressed the effectiveness of push-in versus pull-out.

I then placed a call to Gary Lewis, the director of student services for the Northfield School District in Minnesota, which plans to implement, on a limited basis, a push-in approach to ESL next school year. I asked him why he felt that research supports such a move, which he is quoted as saying in his local newspaper. He said he couldn't lay his hand on a particular study that supports push-in ESL at the moment because he'd just boxed up all the documents used to support the plan for ELLs next school year and sent them to another office.

Some of the research supporting a more inclusive approach comes out of the field of special education, he noted. He said that the school district made the decision to move to a push-in approach for ELLs in the kindergarten and 1st grades and for some middle and high school ELLs (a more limited implementation than I understood initially from the Northfield News) after looking at research, reviewing handouts from conferences and workshops, reading educational journal articles, and visiting an elementary school in St. Paul, Minn., that has had success with a push-in model.

Mr. Lewis cited two books that he says have been helpful in understanding how teachers can work with ELLs in a regular classroom: One is Promoting Academic Success for E.S.L. Students: Understanding Second Language Acquisition for School, published in 1995 by Virginia P. Collier. The second one is Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom, published in 2002 by Pauline Gibbons.

In carrying out the push-in approach, Mr. Lewis said, "Everything we've learned is that you have to train people in co-teaching, and not everyone can co-teach."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has refiled a lawsuit in federal court that he had filed in July 2006 against the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. The lawsuit alleges that the federal education department reneged on an oral agreement it had made in 2003 with the Arizona Department of Education concerning the inclusion of test scores of English-language learners in the accountability system of the No Child Left Behind Act.

According to the lawsuit filed last Friday, Arizona education officials agreed back in 2003 to follow federal regulations to include ELLs in state mathematics and reading tests used to comply with Title I under the No Child Left Behind Act. But the lawsuit says that federal education officials also agreed to give Arizona officials the discretion to let school districts that weren't able to make adequate yearly progress for English-language learners under NCLB the chance to appeal to the state to drop the scores for ELLs "within the first three years of English instruction at the school solely for AYP calculation purposes."

Arizona officials took advantage of the agreement and granted such appeals, thus permitting school districts to exclude the test scores of some ELLs. In April 2005, the U.S. Department of Education audited Arizona's compliance with the federal education law and then said that state officials would have to stop the practice. Federal officials thus backed out on the 2003 agreement, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Horne put out a press release today saying that the July 2006 lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the complaint had to first be made to Ms. Spellings. Since she didn't change her mind on the matter, the press release says, he's refiling the complaint in federal court.

The complaint asks the court for various kinds of relief, including the reimbursement of federal and state money that has been spent by schools on school improvement because of test scores of ELLs with less than three years of English instruction. It asks that the U.S. Department of Education declare it breached its oral agreement.

June 24 Update: Here's The Arizona Republic's take on the story.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was only yesterday that FlashReport published a commentary by Lance Izumi, the senior director of education studies for the Pacific Research Institute, that praises Proposition 227, the ballot measure approved by California voters 10 years ago this month that greatly curtailed bilingual education in California. And already, Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, has posted an article on the ELL Advocates blog that he published in 2004 that he believes rebuts Mr. Izumi's premise. (The posting has a time of 1:48 a.m., which would mean that Mr. Krashen posted it yesterday Pacific Standard Time.)

Mr. Izumi wrote: "Despite the guerrilla warfare of opponents, 227 has proven to be a step forward for [English-learner] students." He cited the fact that a five-year study on the effects of Prop. 227 commissioned by the California Department of Education says that many educators interviewed concluded that the overall effect of the proposition on ELLs had been positive.

Mr. Krashen notes in his article that the same five-year study found that there was practically no difference in gains on test scores between schools that kept bilingual education after passage of Prop. 227 and those that dropped the method. (Though Mr. Krashen doesn't say this in his article, the researchers for that study said that the evidence was inconclusive that one method for teaching ELLs was more effective than another.)

Mr. Krashen's article, "Proposition 227 and Skyrocketing Test Scores: An Urban Legend from California," published in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Educational Leadership, aimed to poke holes in claims that Proposition 227 had improved test scores in California. Mr. Krashen wrote:

There is no question that test scores went up in California, but dropping bilingual education had nothing to do with the increase. Test score increases in California appear to be a result of the usual "test score inflation" that occurs when new tests are introduced. In California, inflation has been particularly strong because of intense pressure to raise scores.

You can be sure that if someone praises Proposition 227, the prolific Mr. Krashen stands ready to make public a counterargument based on research studies.

See an earlier post, "Ten-Year Anniversary of Proposition 227."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a June 18 press release, the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center accuses lawmakers of trying to " 'deport their way out' of a dysfunctional immigration system that has fueled a growing undocumented population." (Hat tip to ImmigrationProf Blog.) The press release gives an update on three youths whose education plans for the future have been interrupted because of their illegal status in the United States. See earlier posts, "Boy Scout to Be Deported," and "Valedictorian of California High School to Be Deported."

I have a depressing thought that I may need to start a not-very-occasional feature within this blog called Youth Deportation Watch or something like that. I've been writing about English-language learners for more than eight years and I've never seen so many incidents in the news of youths being scheduled for deportation.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Northfield School District in Minnesota is one more school district deciding to have English-as-a-second-language teachers work with English-learners in their regular classes rather than pulling them out of class for specialized instruction, according to a June 18 article in the community's local newspaper, Northfield News. (Hat tip to TESOL in the News.)

Gary Lewis, the school district's director of student services, pitched a plan to the Northfield school board to improve services to the district's 278 ELLs after the district went into "program improvement" under the No Child Left Behind Act. It had failed to make adequate yearly progress for the subgroup of ELLs, the article says. Under the plan, the school district has increased the number of full-time ESL teachers to three from one and decided to replace its practice at the elementary level of having teachers take ELLs out of class for special help with a "push-in" model, where ESL teachers go into regular classes to work with ELLs.

Mr. Lewis is quoted as saying that research supports a push-in model over a pull-out one. Frankly, I can see why ELLs weren't doing well if the school district had only one ESL teacher for 278 ELLs. That kind of teacher-student ratio didn't permit the teacher to give each child much help. (June 23 Update: I spoke with Gary Lewis today. I misunderstand what the article said about the number of ESL teachers in the school district. Mr. Lewis said the district has had nearly 7 full-time ESL teachers and is increasing that number by hiring two additional teachers for the coming school year.)

More school districts are replacing pull-out ESL with push-in ESL according to anecdotal evidence that crosses my desk. See my earlier post, "Wisconsin Schools: Moving Away from ESL Pull-Out Programs."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I'll pass on to you some tidbits of news about the money behind an initiative set to be put on the Oregon ballot in November that would limit English-as-a-second-language classes or native-language instruction for English-learners to two years. See my earlier post on the initiative.

Erik Sorensen, a spokesman for Causa, an Oregon immigrant-rights group opposed to the initiative, sent some links to help me find this information. Causa is calling the ballot initiative an "anti-ESL instruction initiative." The Statesman Journal, published in Salem, Ore., has characterized it as "an initiative to end bilingual education." The terminology used in the initiative is confusing, but it appears to be putting a cap of two years on all kinds of specialized instruction for ELLs.

The initiative has been backed with at least $123,000 from Loren Parks, a wealthy medical manufacturer, according to a Sept. 11, 2007 Oregonian article. Some other funders for the initiative are listed here. There are a number of contributions listed from Democracy Direct, which Mr. Sorensen says is a signature-gathering operation run by Bill Sizemore, who registered the ballot initiative with the state concerning ELL instruction.

Mr. Sizemore, who once lost a campaign to become Oregon's governor, has run into some legal problems in how he funds ballot initiatives, according to a May 27 Associated Press article posted on the Web site of an Oregon T.V. station. The article says a judge found Mr. Sizemore in contempt of court because he violated an injunction against moving money around to fund initiative campaigns. The Northwest Labor Press gives additional information about Mr. Sizemore's legal troubles.

I placed a telephone call yesterday to Mr. Sizemore and Russell Walker, another man who registered the initiative with the state, to ask why they've gotten involved in trying to change Oregon statutes concerning the education of ELLs, but I haven't heard back from either of them yet.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Though advocates of bilingual education still groan when they hear his name, it's been several years since Ron K. Unz, a California businessman, stepped away from the national debate on how best to educate English-language learners. Before Mr. Unz's withdrawal, he financed campaigns that succeeded in getting voters in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts to approve ballot initiatives to curtail bilingual education in those states. He financed a similar campaign in Colorado as well, but lost that one.

Now supporters of an initiative to curtail bilingual education in Oregon have succeeded in gathering enough signatures to have it put on the ballot in November, according to Oregon election officials (I just wrote a story for edweek.org about this). The initiative prohibits schools from providing instruction to a student in his or her native language for more than two years. It also limits the amount of time to two years that ELLs can spend in "English-immersion programs," but it doesn't define what it means by such programs. Children who enter school in kindergarten through 4th grade can be in English-immersion programs for only one year, according to the initiative.

Mr. Unz doesn't seem to be in the picture in Oregon. But someone named Bill Sizemore is very much in the picture. He, and two other men, registered the initiative for ELLs with the Oregon secretary of state's office. A June 18 Statesman Journal article calls Mr. Sizemore "a onetime-prolific petition writer" who ran for governor of Oregon in 1998 and lost to the Democratic candidate, John Kitzhaber. Russell Walker, another person who registered the initiative with the state, is the state director of Freedom Works.

A coalition of immigrant- and refugee-rights groups in Oregon have formed a coalition to fight the initiative. A group called Causa is part of that coalition.

This all brings back memories of the debates over the Unz initiatives from 1998 to 2002. The next task I've assigned to myself in covering this story? Follow the money.

Update: A June 18 Oregonian article tells about the initiative.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In California, most English-language learners are reclassified as fluent in the language in 4th through 6th grades, with another large group reclassified in 8th and 9th grades, according to a paper about California reclassification rates released this week by the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Arlington, Va. The paper, "The Education of Jaime Capellan: English Learner Success in California Schools," synthesizes information from various reports about the progress of California ELLs in learning English.

You may have noticed that the Lexington Institute keeps a close watch on reclassification rates of ELLs in California. In May 2007, the institute put out another report on the same topic, and implied that, on average, school districts should be reclassifying more students than they are. Don Soifer, the executive vice president for the institute, has told me he puts a lot of stock in reclassification rates and he'd like to see the rates for all 50 states readily accessible to the public. (For someone who believes that reclassification rates can easily be misunderstood by the public, see a comment by James Crawford, long-time writer about ELLs, published on an earlier blog post.)

The executive summary of the report released this week points out that while 29 percent of ELLs scored as proficient or above on California's English-language-proficiency test in 2007, only 9.2 percent were actually reclassified as fluent in the language—and thus considered ready to keep pace with regular students in regular classrooms without special help. The report points out that the English-learners in California who ARE reclassified as fluent in English do better than native-English speakers on a variety of standardized tests.

Both last year's and this year's reports by the Lexington Institute about reclassification rates were written by Joanne Jacobs, a former columnist for Knight Ridder who writes an education blog, JoanneJacobs.com, that gets a great deal of readership. In her take of the report, she laments that some English-learners become "lifers" in the category. For the record, I really hate to hear people apply that word to students. I want to see them get out of the category, too, but because the word usually refers to incarcerated criminals, it carries for me a connotation that the students themselves have done something wrong rather than that their schools might have failed them.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elise Martins, a teacher from Postville, Iowa, didn't expect her personal account of the immigration raid in her community on May 12 to spread widely over the Internet, according to ImmigrationProf Blog. But her account is so vivid, and points to what other educators in this country could face during immigration raids in their communities, that I can't help but spread the account farther.

At the time of the raid, the teacher was with a group of students in the community on a field trip. Here's an excerpt about the instructions she received on how to proceed:

I am told after a few hours that I can come back [to school] on the school bus, but to expect to be pulled over by the FBI, and I am not to, under any circumstances, let any officer onto the bus. I now have 12 students who are scared as to what will happen, with four students that could possibly be arrested.

Here's an excerpt from her reflections on what happened at the end of the day of the raid:

I guess, I don't really care how any of you feel about immigration, we all have our opinions. But I will say, that as a human being and as a parent, I find it disturbing to see little elementary kids crying for their parents and asking you to take them home, and all one can say is, I am sorry, or we are looking for them.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

State education officials received an e-mail message from the U.S. Department of Education last week announcing that the administration of Title III—the main conduit for the funding of ELL programs under the No Child Left Behind Act—will soon be carried out by the same office that administers Title I. Title III has been handled by the office of English-language acquisition, while Title I, which provides funds for disadvantaged students and also contains some provisions applying specifically to English-language learners, is administered by the office of elementary and secondary education.

Richard L. Smith, the acting director of the office of English-language acquisition, sent out an e-mail message on June 11 saying that administration of the Title III grant program will be moved from his office to the office of elementary and secondary education, which is headed up by Kerri Briggs, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.* Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education Raymond J. Simon oversees both offices.* The change is effective this fall.

Here's the rationale included in the e-mail:

This change will put the administrative duties, including the monitoring and enforcement responsibilities of the state formula grants under Title I and Title III, in the same office so that the staff can more easily and effectively work together, better coordinate their monitoring and enforcement efforts, and provide more consistent guidance to states regarding Title I and Title III programs for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students.

Mr. Simon has already weighed in heavily on some issues regarding enforcement of NCLB for English-language learners. In 2007, he required Virginia to stop using an English-language-proficiency test instead of the state's regular reading test to assess some ELLs for accountability purposes under Title I.

Kathleen Leos, who resigned as the director of the office of English-language acquisition in September 2007 and is now president and CEO of her own company, said the intent of the Education Department to better coordinate implementation of Title I and Title III could send an important message to states that they need to better align with each other the standards and assessments developed to comply with both sections of the law. But she cautioned that the reorganization will be effective only if it coordinates the policy-making process for the two sections of the law, along with administration.

Mr. Smith's e-mail said the office of English-language acquisition will continue "to focus on national policy and programmatic issues related to LEP students..." For example, the message says that the English-language-acquisition office will continue to handle professional development, discretionary grants, and technical assistance.

Along with Ms. Leos, I'm wondering how much say members of the staff at that office will have over policy decisions regarding ELLs. For example, who will take charge of considering input from the public and putting out a final version of the "interpretation" of Title III proposed May 2 by the Education Department?

Federal education officials have told me they expect to publish the final interpretation by the end of this summer.

*was updated from earlier version

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

North Carolina has become the 18th state to adopt an English-language-proficiency test for English-learners developed by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, or WIDA, consortium. Yet another state has also joined the WIDA consortium and thus adopted the test, but Timothy Boals, the executive director of WIDA, is not yet announcing which state that is.

Given the independence of states on education matters, it's quite remarkable that 19 states will soon be using the same test for English proficiency. While I respect the rights of states to choose their own test, it sure would make it easier to understand and compare states' data about ELLs if all states used the same English-language-proficiency test (and the same reading and math tests as well, for that matter).

After the No Child Left Behind Act required states to develop new comprehensive tests to assess how well ELLs in grades K-12 are progressing with English, four consortia of states formed to create such tests. WIDA seems to have the strongest management of the four and one by one, states are dropping the English-language-proficiency tests that they initially developed or selected—and are opting to use the one produced by WIDA. That test is called ACCESS for ELLs and is designed to comply with the NCLB Act by testing ELLs in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. When states adopt the test, they also adopt the WIDA standards for English-language development.

Helga K. Fasciano, who heads up programs for English-language learners for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, told me over the phone this week that it will cost North Carolina about the same amount of money to administer ACCESS for ELLs as it does to give the IPT, the English-language-proficiency test that the state has been using.

She said the state needed to revise its English-language-development standards to better align with academic content standards and decided at the same time to consider changing tests. A committee examined several English-proficiency tests, including the LAS Links and the English Language Development Assessment, created by a consortium formed by the Council of Chief State School Officers, before selecting ACCESS for ELLs.

"We liked the idea that with the consortium, we were working with other states. We had a say so with the development of the new items, which we didn't have with the current test," she said. In addition, she said, North Carolina officials liked how the placement test for ELLs created by WIDA is correlated with ACCESS for ELLs, which is used for annual testing of progress of ELLs for NCLB.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Jersey recently began providing some state tests for English-language learners in Spanish, and thus joined a dozen states that provide versions of their state tests in languages other than English. In addition, Washington state has set a tentative goal of translating state tests into 10 languages by 2009.

The 2008 Washington state legislature has approved $1.7 million for translating state tests and expanding forms designed for special education students. This year state officials conducted a pilot study on the use of test translations.

I got this information about New Jersey and Washington from communications staff for departments of education in those states after Charles W. Stansfield, the president and founder of Second Language Testing, Inc., told me that the group of states developing or providing native-language assessments is growing.

Mr. Stansfield just co-authored a paper documenting states' policies on native-language testing for accountability purposes under the No Child Left Behind Act through the 2006-2007 school year. The paper, "Standards-Based Assessment in the Native Language: A Practical Guide to the Issues," was financed by the U.S. Department of Education.

As it turns out, Delaware, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wisconsin all offer either translations or adaptations of their assessments in languages other than English.

Mr. Stansfield and co-author Melissa Bowles, an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discuss considerations for developing and using such tests. Here's an interesting tidbit: Back in 1996, Rhode Island education officials realized that the tests they had translated into Khmer and Lao weren't of much use because most students from Cambodia and Laos in Rhode Island schools weren't literate in their native languages.

The authors say that native-language assessments are popular with teachers and students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've seen news accounts recently that a teacher, a high school valedictorian, and a Boy Scout were all expecting to be deported this summer—as they'd exhausted legal options to stay in this country.

A June 10 story in the Loudoun Times-Mirror about the Boy Scout answers some of the lingering questions I've had since visiting an immigration detention center in Miami about what happens to some of the unaccompanied minors who get picked up by federal immigration authorities, held in detention, and then released to their parents in the United States.

In this case, the boy who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to find his mother in the United States and became a Boy Scout is being deported by federal officials to El Salvador. The 13-year-old is leaving his mother behind in this country and going back alone.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It may not be evident, if you live in a community that is a popular location for refugee resettlement, but compared with the 1980s and 1990s, the United States has not received a lot of refugees in the first decade of the 21st century. Admission rates to the United States decreased after stricter security measures were put in place in 2002, in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to Michael Fix, the vice president and director of studies at the Migration Policy Institute.

I asked Mr. Fix to analyze patterns in the numbers of refugees admitted each year since 1975, after I read a generalization about refugee resettlement over at Colorin Colorado. Kristina Robertson wrote in a primer on how to support refugees in classrooms of English-language learners that "since the 1990s, the United States has experienced another dramatic increase in refugee resettlement, and it has caused some strain in locations where people are not used to meeting the needs of such a diverse population."

There was a spike in the number of refugees received by the United States in the first half of the 1990s, but those higher levels of yearly admissions didn't hold true for the rest of the decade or in recent years.

The numbers of refugees received annually as reported by the U.S. Department of State show that from 1989 to 1994, the United States admitted more than 100,000 refugees each year. But the numbers decreased overall from 1994 to 2001 and then dropped dramatically to only 27,110 in 2002. The rate of admittance each year has climbed to 48,000 refugees in 2007. (You can find the statistics here. Click on the second to last link, "PRM admissions as of May 31, 2008." Update: Colorin Colorado updated its article after I sent over this link.)

Mr. Fix explains spikes in the rates of refugee admissions from 1979-1981 and from 1989-1994 as follows:

The mid-1970s marked the end of fighting in Southeast Asia, and the admission of several thousand refugees. The increase in admissions from 1979-1981 was driven in part by passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, which ushered in a new system of refugee processing, doing away with a preferential category for those fleeing Communism or a Middle Eastern country. Also, in 1980, the Cuban government announced that Cubans would be allowed to leave and many of these "Marielitos" fled and made it to the safety of Florida's coast. The spike in 1989-1993 can be explained in part by the Lautenburg Amendment. Enacted in 1989, the amendment welcomed religious minority refugees from the former Soviet Union. In 1992, the United States began admitting refugees from Bosnia.

The Cultural Orientation Resource Center of the Center for Applied Linguistics provides information about where refugees are arriving from who have been admitted to the United States this year.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I couldn't help noticing that the impact on children of a program in Spain that legalized 600,000 African, Latin American, and eastern European workers, which is the subject of an article published today in The New York Times, contrasts sharply with the effects on children in the United States of their parents' detention described in a June 8 article in the Los Angeles Times.

I'm wondering: Are policymakers in the United States thinking about what kind of society we want to be in the long run?

Enough said.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Research shows that bilingual reading instruction helps English-language learners to read in English, but it isn't conclusive in telling educators how long students should receive such instruction, according to Claude Goldenberg, an education professor at Stanford University, who has written an article about research on ELLs soon to be published in the American Educator. That's the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers.

In "Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does—and Does Not—Say," Mr. Goldenberg explains (for the most part, in plain English) what guidance can and can't be gleaned from research on ELLs. He bases his analysis on two research reviews, one by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, published in 2006 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; and another by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, or CREDE, published the same year by Cambridge University Press.

On this one point about the benefits of providing reading instruction in students' primary language, Mr. Goldenberg offers seven questions that haven't yet been answered by researchers with confidence. Among them:

Is primary language instruction more beneficial for some learners than for others? For example, those with weaker or stronger primary language skills? Weaker or stronger English skills? Is it more effective in some settings and with certain ELL populations than others? ... In an English immersion situation, what is the most effective way to use the primary language to support children's learning?

Mr. Goldenberg describes some kinds of instruction that research has shown to be promising in helping ELLs to improve their reading comprehension. They include cooperative learning and discussions to promote comprehension (which researchers call "instructional conversations").

But it seems to me that in many areas of literacy instruction, educators of ELLs will have to follow their instincts—because the research is not much help.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Dallas Morning News is running a thoughtful, five-part series based on observations by reporters of older immigrant teens at Adamson High School in Dallas. (The story I posted yesterday about the Mexico-U.S. connection was part of that same series.)

"Their first year is always the hardest," says one of the reporters in an overview video."They feel homesick and struggle with the allure to quit and go to work. Then there is the language barrier. ..."

Does this sound familiar? I'd like to hear from readers some of the ways that educators can convince immigrant students who arrive in the United States as teenagers that it's worthwhile to stick it out and continue their education rather than to drop out and get a job.

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

"Education a challenge in small Mexican community with strong ties to Dallas," an article that ran in The Dallas Morning News today, provides rich insight into the connections between the Mexican and U.S. education systems. The article tells how students literally move back and forth between the town of Ocampo in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and Dallas. Some of the Dallas teachers see the Mexican children as lagging behind their U.S. peers academically. The Mexican teachers see that some of the students who have been to school in Dallas and then moved back to Ocampo have picked up some bad attitudes.

The article made me nostalgic for the two-week trip that former Education Week director of photography Allison Shelley and I took in 2002 to report on schools in Oaxaca, Mexico. We enjoyed interacting with indigenous people, such as the Zapotec people.

I was really struck then by how the quality of public education available to students in Oaxaca varied tremendously. Students in the city seemed to receive a better education than in rural areas, but even in the city, the quality of education was much better at one school during the morning shift, when middle-class children attended, than in the afternoon shift, when children from low-income families used the building. During that afternoon shift, I observed the worst teacher I've seen in my life. She continually scolded a girl for not following an assignment correctly when it was obvious the girl—a 13-year-old who was attending second grade—couldn't read.

The Dallas article reports on a CONAFE (Consejo National de Fomento Educativo) school in Mexico as did we. It's a program that attracts teachers to rural areas with the promise that they'll receive funding to continue their education after a two-year stint of teaching.

The Dallas Morning News article notes that the variance in quality among Mexican schools is still a big problem. Of course, we also have equity problems in the United States, but it seemed that, in Mexico, people were more discouraged than were people in the United States that it was possible to remedy the inequity.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 5:00 PM |