August 2008 Archives

There's a good reason why a couple of Korean-American organizations have put out a guide to K-12 and post-secondary education in California for Asian immigrants: a rather large number of Asian immigrants are undocumented. The guide spells out what opportunities undocumented immigrants have for an education in this country. As most readers of this blog probably know, they are entitled to a free education in grades K-12, but whether they have the opportunity to go to college depends on their financial resources and whether their states have policies that permit them to enroll.

Here are some statistics cited in the guide that I found surprising:

--About 1.5 million of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in this country are Asian or Pacific Islanders.

--One out of five Koreans living in the United States is undocumented.

--Asians or Pacific Islanders make up 40-44 percent of the undocumented students enrolled by the University of California system.

The most common way that Asians or Pacific Islanders become undocumented is by overstaying visas, the guide says. The publication was released by the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium and the Korean Resource Center. An August 18 article in AsianWeek talks about undocumented Asians as well.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:12 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Sharp Brains posted today the 186th edition of the Carnival of Education. The Q&A format is very readable.

Let me note that Sharp Brains incorrectly quotes my blog item about graduation rates for ELLs in New York City in saying that 45.5 percent of ELLs are newcomers. In fact, the blog entry says it's 45.5 percent of ELLs in grades 8-12 who are newcomers. (Aug. 28 Update: Sharp Brains has now corrected this.)

But I have asked the city's Department of Education to provide the data for K-7 ELL students as well so we have a fuller picture.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:01 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

At least one educator, Ted Hirsch, thinks New York City's new $2.4 million, three-year early literacy program could really help English-language learners. Mr. Hirsch, the principal for K-6 students at South Shore Charter School in Norwell, Mass., made this claim in an interview with a television station after the program was announced this week by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. The reading program was created by the Core Knowledge Foundation and is being implemented in 10 high-needs schools, according to an Aug. 26 New York Times article. The founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation is E.D. Hirsch Jr., an emeritus English professor from the University of Virginia who has written widely about cultural literacy. Ted Hirsch is his son and a vice-chairman of the foundation.

I talked with Ted Hirsch today by telephone, and he said he doesn't have any "scientific proof" that the program will help ELLs. He bases his view that it works well for them on the fact that eight or so ELLs were among the 49 kindergartners who used the program at his school last year in its pilot phase, and all of the ELLs learned to read. He notes that the ELLs also received additional help to learn English, so it's not clear how much impact the early reading program alone had on their success. The program has qualities that seem suited to ELLs, he added. "The reason it would work well is that there are illustrations that go along with everything, and you stay on a topic for a long time," he said.

For more about the early literacy program, see the New York City Department of Education press release and an entry over at the Core Knowledge Blog.

It's no easy task for schools to make reading lessons work for ELLs because they often lack the background knowledge or vocabulary to understand what they are reading even if they can sound out words. I'm reminded that the federal Reading First program under the No Child Left Behind Act hasn't been very successful with ELLs in the view of many experts on ELLs, according to my reporting on that program last fall.

Meanwhile, over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli has been tangling with Mr. Klein over whether New York City's "balanced literacy" program has merit. Mr. Petrilli said balanced literacy was "hogwash" when he wrote a post that applauded the city's decision to launch the Core Knowledge early literacy program.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A 10-year study by professors at Harvard University and City of University of New York shows that most of the second-generation immigrants to that city are fluent in English and working in the mainstream economy, according to a description of its findings at National Public Radio. The authors of the study, Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age, found the following differences between groups, the NPR summary says:

When they looked at economic and educational achievement, [the researchers] found that West Indians were doing better, in general, than African-Americans; Dominicans were doing better than Puerto Ricans; and the Chinese and the Russians were doing as well as or better than native-born whites.

The NPR summary also makes the following point:

Because this is New York City and most study participants are the children of people who came to the United States 20 to 30 years ago, their parents either entered legally or found it relatively easy to obtain legal status even if they came illegally.

I'm intrigued about the differences in educational attainment between groups and also curious about what impact it makes on second-generation immigrants that their parents gain legal status. The professors studied 3,000 youths, most of them in their 20s. And given that I've been blogging lately about criticism of how New York City serves English-language learners, I'm curious to see what the book has to say about schooling in New York City.

I hope to read the book soon and tell you what I find. Review copies have apparently been available since May, since I see the New York Times published a story about the study then, and the study also is featured today over at Immigration Prof Blog.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In case there was ever any question, a Pew Hispanic Center report released today confirms that some states are more likely than others to receive Hispanic students who have been born outside of the United States rather than on U.S. soil. This has implications for schools because the Pew report on demographics of Hispanic students also shows that U.S.-born Hispanic students are much more likely to report they speak English "very well" than are foreign-born Hispanic students. Thus the schools receiving Hispanics born in other countries have a larger English-language gap to fill to help them catch up with their native-English-speaking peers than do schools enrolling U.S.-born Hispanics.

Forty-four percent of first-generation Hispanic students—those who were immigrants themselves—say they speak English with difficulty while 20 percent of those who were born in the United States to immigrant parents characterize their English skills in that same way. About 30 percent of all Hispanic public school students say they speak only English at home, the report says.

About three-fourths of all Hispanic students live in nine states that have traditionally been home to Hispanics: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The report also breaks out a group of states that are "new" states for Hispanics—Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington—and an additional set of states that it calls "emerging" Hispanic states. That last set are Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Foreign-born Hispanic students are more likely to live in the "new" or "emerging" states than are their U.S.-born Hispanic peers.

That's something to keep in mind in looking at what kind of progress schools are making with teaching ELLs. In some states, students start out on average at a different point in the language-learning continuum than in other states.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A blog reader points out that I can add Elgin Area School District to my list of large school systems or states that have come under fire this summer for how they serve English-language learners. This month a federal judge granted class-action status to a racial bias lawsuit filed in February 2005 against Elgin Area School District U-46, which is Illinois' second-largest school system and is located in a Chicago suburb, according to the Daily Herald. (Click here for the Chicago Tribune's coverage.) An article published on Aug. 21 gives details about how, along with making complaints that Hispanics and African-Americans attend crowded schools and are unfairly subjected to busing, the lawsuit claims the 42,000-student Elgin district is not adequately educating English-language learners. The article says that if the allegations in the lawsuit are proven, Hispanic students who have received services for being ELLs in the last four years, or who are entitled to receive such services and didn't get them, could receive "remedies." Those remedies could include monetary compensation, according to the article.

One of the complaints in the lawsuit is that some ELLs didn't receive services at all. That complaint has also surfaced in a federal lawsuit concerning programs in Texas for ELLs and also in an audit of programs for ELLs in Seattle Public Schools.

Let me note that the article refers to English-language learners as "bilingual students" and calls the programs offered to them "bilingual programs." But, in fact, "bilingual programs" is an overall term used in the article for a variety of services offered to ELLs, including classes where students' native languages are used for instruction and classes in which students are taught only in English.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Eduwonkette has been having a field day blogging about graduation rate data in the Big Apple. But she hasn't yet delved into why the city's graduation rate for ELLs is so low. The four-year graduation rate for ELLs is 23.5 percent, compared with 55.8 percent for all students.

For the 2007-08 school year, New York City public schools enrolled 138,500 ELLs.

I took a tip from eduwonkette (update: she revealed her true identity yesterday) and asked for some additional data from the New York City Department of Education that might indicate whether the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, knew what he was talking about when he implied, according to the New York Times, that the graduation rate for ELLs is low because the city receives so many newcomers in the upper grades. Here's the quote from the Times.

“The later you join the school system, the more difficult the situation is,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “If you have a kid who joins the school in the 10th grade, particularly if you go home and don’t learn English, it is going to be very hard to learn.”

I suspected that actually only a small number of ELLs in the city's middle and high schools are newcomers. But, in fact, the data shows I was wrong. In 2007, of the 49,318 ELLs in grades 8-12, 22,454—or 45.5 percent—were newcomers, defined as students who have been receiving ELL services for less than three years. That's a huge proportion of ELLs in those grades.

Here's the break down of ELL newcomers by grade:

Grade 8
3,804 newcomers
46.1% of 8,257 ELLs in that grade

Grade 9
6,372 newcomers
46.1% of 13,824 ELLs

Grade 10
6,820 newcomers
51.1% of 13,345 ELLs

Grade 11
3,506 newcomers
46.9% of 7,481 ELLs

Grade 12
1,952 newcomers
30.4% of 6,411 ELLs

Nevertheless, advocates of ELLs think the city should be doing a much better job of helping ELLs reach graduation, which would include helping newcomers to catch up with their peers. "English Learners Left Behind," published this month in the Gotham Gazette, spells out some areas of weakness in the services for such students. The Gazette is supported by the Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York.

Schools such as Brooklyn International High School, a public school in New York City geared toward ELLs who are newcomers, doesn't make any excuses for the fact that its students are new to the country. In 2007, it had a four-year graduation rate of 65 percent for students who were ELLs at graduation.

I wrote last week about a memo ELL advocates sent to state education officials, asking them to remedy the problems in programs for ELLs in New York City. One of the statistics they used to back their argument that schools are failing ELLs is the low graduation rate for such students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:30 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Remember the media circus surrounding Lewiston, Maine, where in 2002, then-Mayor Larry Raymond sent a letter asking Somalis to stop moving to the town because it didn't have a social service infrastructure that could adequately meet their needs? An article in the September American School Board Journal brings us up to date with how educators in Lewiston public schools worked before and after that infamous letter to help Somalis integrate into the community. Today, Lewiston has nearly 3,500 Somalis among its 36,000 residents. At one elementary school featured in the article, the Somalis receive math and English in separate classes and attend regular classes for their other subjects. I think it's worth paying attention to how Lewiston is educating Somali students, in part, because of the following bit of information from the article:

The U.S. Department of Justice monitored the district’s ELL program for five years to ensure that language instruction was provided to the Somalis under the federal Equal Opportunities Act. The district passed its review last year with flying colors—no small feat during a time when its community was changing so rapidly.

The article about Lewiston is one of three articles in the journal's current issue about how schools are serving English-language learners.

More recently, a number of school districts across the country have received students from Burundi as part of a resettlement of thousands of refugees from that country who have lived since 1972 in Tanzanian refugee camps (see the Burundian backgrounder put out by the Center for Applied Linguistics). Upon their arrival at an elementary school in Knoxville, Tenn., five Burundians, who had little formal schooling, were taught for a year in a separate classroom before being transferred to regular classrooms this school year. "School Helps Refugees Transition," published Aug. 20 in the Knoxville News Sentinel, tells the story (hat tip to TESOL in the News).

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

For the first time, a federal education law requires colleges and universities to do SOMETHING in regard to preparing teachers to work with English-language learners.

The bill, signed into law on Aug. 14 by President Bush, requires colleges and universities to set annual goals for increasing the number of teachers for instruction of ELLs and other areas where there are teacher shortages.

Here's what the new higher education law (search for the enrolled version of H.R. 4137 on Thomas) says under Title II, Section 206:

Each institution of higher education that conducts a traditional teacher preparation program (including programs that offer any ongoing professional development programs) or alternative routes to state certification or licensure program, and that enrolls students receiving federal assistance under this act, shall set annual quantifiable goals for increasing the number of prospective teachers trained in teacher shortage areas designated by the Secretary or by the state educational agency, including mathematics, science, special education, and instruction of limited English proficient students.

The law also requires that each institution provide an assurance that "general education teachers receive training in providing instruction to diverse populations, including children with disabilities, limited English proficient students, and children from low-income families."

The provision doesn't contain any penalties for institutions if they don't reach their goals, though they must report how they are meeting them to the public, according to an Aug. 13 article about the bill written by my colleagues Stephen Sawchuk and Alyson Klein for Education Week.

I confirmed with Jane E. West, the vice president for governmental relations at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, that for the first time the nation has a statutory requirement for colleges and universities to set goals related to teacher shortage areas, including ELLs. She said the recommendation for such a requirement was included in the report put out by the Commission on No Child Left Behind run by the Aspen Institute. I scanned the report and found that it names teachers of English-language learners as a shortage area. It also includes a recommendation on page 52 that colleges and universities should be required to set goals to increase the number of graduates qualified to teach in shortage areas, though it doesn't name teachers of ELLs at that same point in the report.

It's a softball provision in the new law but indicates, I think, that the needs of English-learners are getting more consideration by lawmakers than previously.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:32 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Don't miss the New York Times story about Henry Cejudo, who won the 121-pound freestyle wrestling final yesterday in the Olympics (hat tip to ImmigrationProf Blog). His mom entered the United States illegally from Mexico and struggled over the years to put food on the table for her seven children.

Take note of how, like with Lopez Lomong, the Sudanese refugee who competed for the United States in the 1,500-meter race at the Olympics, educators played a role in helping Mr. Cejudo to become a star.

Frank Saenz, Cejudo’s coach at Maryvale High School, was the one who raised money for him to enter tournaments by knocking on doors and pleading for donations.

Tracy Greiff, another wrestling coach from the Phoenix area, was the one who had told Cejudo in seventh grade that he would win an Olympic gold. Greiff said he sold hundreds of tickets to travel here and sit in the rowdiest section this venue has seen.

As for Lopez Lomong, he made it to the semifinals in the 1,500-meter event at the Olympics before being eliminated. A column published today in the Los Angeles Times tells about his relationship with his track coach at Tully High School in Tully, N.Y.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:15 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

An administrator for Tucson Unified School District defends the Raza studies program in the school district by quoting students who say the program helped save their lives. Augustine F. Romero, the senior director of the district's Mexican American/Raza Studies Department, says in his remarks to the press that the program has helped many students to "transcend the nihilistic state of hopelessness." He mentions that students are taught lessons from history, such as about the role of Emiliano Zapata in the Mexican Revolution, and comparative politics. Excerpts of an interview with Mr. Romero are published today in The Arizona Republic.

Liam Julian, who believes the program is unnecessary, writes over at Flypaper that he finds Mr. Romero's defense unconvincing.

Let me note that if the students in Tucson are learning something about Emiliano Zapata, they are learning something in school that I didn't. I just had to look the guy up on Wikipedia. So what does that say about my education in public schools?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:00 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I've been keeping track of state or city school systems that have been criticized publicly this summer for giving English-language learners short shrift. On the list are Texas, Massachusetts, and Seattle. Today I add New York City.

Luis O. Reyes, a former school board member in New York City, forwarded a memo to me that was sent to New York State Education Commissioner Richard Mills by the Coalition for Educational Excellence for English Language Learners, a group of organizations and educators who keep an eye on services for ELLs in New York City. People who signed the memo include Maria Neira, the vice president of New York State United Teachers, and Chung Wha Hong, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. (Update: click here for the memo.)

The gist of the memo is that state officials should address what is characterized as the "systematic crisis" of the education of ELLs in New York City. The memo lists 13 statistics selected to show how the city's schools are failing ELLs. Twenty-three percent of ELLs graduate from high school in four years, for example. The memo claims that nearly one-third of high school ELLs in the city don't receive any ELL instruction. ELLs also don't have good access to small schools or charter schools, the memo says.

The memo makes seven recommendations for how to improve services for ELLs in New York City and statewide.

Among them: ensure that policies and programs are based on the latest research on ELL instruction (the memo implies that English-only methods are less effective than bilingual ones), improve monitoring of programs and enforcement of court mandates, and appoint a high-level person in the state education department to assess the conditions of services for ELLs and recommend appropriate statewide actions to remedy problems.

Update: GothamSchools makes mention today of a New York Post article that summarizes the coalition's arguments as well.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:50 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Over at Campaign K-12, my colleague Michele McNeil notes that the Democratic National Committee has posted its education policy positions online.

The 94-page document contains the following sentences about English-language learners and language learning in general:

We will also meet our commitment to special education and to students who are English Language Learners. We support full funding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. We also support transitional bilingual education and will help limited English proficient students get ahead by supporting and funding English Language Learner classes. We support teaching students second languages, as well as contributing through education to the revitalization of American Indian languages.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:53 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

While I was taking a short break from e-mail and work in general, Joanne Jacobs posted the latest education blog carnival. She included a recent blog entry from Learning the Language, "Immigrant Integration, or Assimilation?," which includes several comments from all of you. Thanks for making the entry richer with your remarks.

Joanne Jacobs was a pioneer in the education blogging world and is quick to post education news before many other folks—even sometimes in the area of my specialty, English-language learners, which doesn't seem to be on the radar screen of some education bloggers.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

North Carolina education officials have decided to continue a policy they put in place in May that bans undocumented students from community colleges in the state. The officials, however, indicated they plan to study the issue and could, once again, change their minds, according to an Associated Press story published on Friday.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:12 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I'm taking next week off. I'll be back to blogging again on Aug. 18 and to work on the first issue of Education Week for the new school year. If you've noticed some aspect of educating ELLs that I've overlooked and I really ought to write about this coming school year, drop me a line at mzehr@epe.org.

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

Seattle Public Schools' program for English-language learners is in bad shape, according to an audit by the Council of the Great City Schools released this week. The voluntary audit says the program is "highly fragmented, weakly defined, poorly monitored, and producing very unsatisfactory academic results." See the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Aug. 7 article, which contains a link to the report. The audit was requested by school board members and the system's new superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, and it gives them credit for wanting to improve the program for ELLs.

The Seattle district doesn't track ELLs well, and many ELLs aren't getting any services, the auditors found. The district doesn't have data that says how long students spend in ELL programs. It relies heavily on instructional aides to support ELLs. The district's approach to teaching ELLs is "ad hoc, incoherent, and directionless," the report continues.

I think you get the picture. Henry Duvall, the communications director for the Council of the Great City Schools, acknowledges that audits conducted by the Council, carried out by specialists from large city districts that are its members, can be scathing. But it's the honesty of the audits that can be so helpful in spurring districts to improve, he noted. The 96-page report on Seattle ELLs, who make up nearly a quarter of the district's 46,000 students, contains detailed recommendations. A major one is for Seattle to get rid of pull-out programs, where ELLs are taken out of class for 45 minutes each day for English instruction, and replace them with a "sheltered English" approach, where ELLs are taught in self-contained classes by teachers who use "sheltered English" methods. The auditors are recommending that English instruction be infused into the core curriculum and delivered by teachers who have been well trained to work with ELLs.

Mr. Duvall said the Council conducts such audits in a variety of areas, including curriculum and instruction and financial management, for any of its 66 members, which are all large urban districts. The Seattle audit is the third one by the Council to focus only on programs for ELLs. The Council produced a similar audit for Guilford County schools in Greensboro, N.C., in 2002 and one for Denver Public Schools in 2006. But Mr. Duvall said those audits didn't become public.

My intent in writing this blog entry isn't to dwell on what the audit shows about Seattle; frankly, reading the report makes me feel sad because I suspect that the faults of the Seattle program are present in a lot of other school districts in this country as well. I recommend that you print out a copy of the report as soon as possible (while we know it's still online) and use some of the issues posed by the auditors to critique your own school district's services. Can your district say how long ELLs have been in a special program? Are you serving all of your ELLs, or just leaving them to fare the best they can in regular classes? Are your teachers adequately prepared to work with ELLs?

In sum: Learn from the Seattle example so we don't have to keep revisiting this issue of how poorly school districts are serving this group of students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:21 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Remember Arthur Mkoyan, the valedictorian at Bullard High School in Fresno, Calif., who was scheduled to be deported after commencement? Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, introduced a private bill in the U.S. Congress that postpones deportation and could lead to permanent residency for the youth and his family.

While the bill is pending, a stranger has stepped forward and committed to pay for the 17-year-old's education at the University of California, Davis. She has pledged to pay for tuition and expenses for all four years. (Of course, if he were in living in South Carolina, he wouldn't be able to attend a state school, even if he could pay for it, because of his undocumented status.) An Aug. 6 article, "Tuition Paid for Valedictorian in Legal Limbo," in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the whole story. Sherry Heacox, the donor, is quoted as saying: "We're all immigrants. Some of us just got here earlier than others."

Meanwhile, in Maricopa County, Ariz., a 12-year-old boy's family is facing deportation after the boy took a loaded pistol to his middle school, and deputies from the local sheriff's office were called to the school to handle the incident, according to an Aug. 6 article in The Arizona Republic. Here's where these things get complicated. Through the incident, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office determined that the boy and two of his three siblings are U.S. citizens, but his parents and a 10-year-old sibling are not. So it's the undocumented members of the family who now face deportation. The boy is in U.S. custody.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I find it moving that the U.S. Olympic team has chosen Lopez Lomong, a Sudanese refugee and 1,500-meter track runner, to lead the team in the procession during the Olympics' opening ceremony in Beijing on Friday. (Hat tip to ImmigrationProf Blog.) He's one of the thousands of "Lost Boys" from Sudan—who had been separated from their parents or orphaned in war—and were resettled in the United States starting in 2001. (At the time, I wrote about several Sudanese resettled in Philadelphia). It's amazing that he's become a national star in the United States after having suffered so much as a child. His biography says he was abducted to be a child soldier at age 6, escaped, and spent a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya.

I imagine some U.S. educators along the way had something to do with Mr. Lomong's success in the United States. (Update: I just came across this USA Today article from a year ago in which he thanks his high school cross-country and track coach Jim Paccia for his support.) He attended Tully High School in Tully, N.Y., where he excelled in cross-country and track, and then competed at Northern Arizona University, according to his biography, written by Joey Cheek, former Olympic speed skater and president of Team Darfur, who was just denied a visa by the Chinese to attend the games. (More on Lopez Lomong and the Olympics here and here.)

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:20 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I hope you've gotten the message already that although I recognize the benefits for anyone living in this country to learn English, I don't believe English should be valued over anyone's native language or the language of one's heritage.

Unfortunately, this country has a history of official discrimination against American Indian languages that contributed greatly to their decline. One of the most damaging policies in this regard was that the federal government forced many Native Americans to attend boarding schools, starting in the 1870s, where they were prohibited from speaking their native languages. Most off-reservation boarding schools were closed in the 1930s, but many Native Americans still attended such schools on reservations after that.

At the Heard Museum in Phoenix a few years ago, I heard sad, recorded testimonies from Native Americans about how they were punished if they spoke their mother tongues at boarding school. Also, when I visited a Navajo reservation in Arizona a couple of years ago for Education Week, I met elderly people who explained that the boarding-school era had a lasting effect in conditioning people not to use their native languages. After boarding school, many spoke mostly English in their own households, and thus didn't pass the language on to their children.

Still some Native American communities are persisting in fighting the dominance of English through programs that engage children in learning indigenous languages. One organization supporting such initiatives is the Indigenous Language Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. You can read recent stories about efforts to revitalize indigenous languages that have been selected by the Web team of edweek.org, and are posted here.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:15 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I'd been planning to recommend Three Cups of Tea, about Greg Mortenson's adventures in building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to you for summer reading, but eduwonk beat me to it. Not very wonkish of them, is it, to get into the business of recommending books for summer free time?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:50 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Students in the United States have a reputation for lacking knowledge in geography compared with their peers around the world. What about the readers of this blog? Many readers are academics or educators who work with English-language learners in the United States and have more interaction with people born in other countries than do many people in the U.S.

You can get a sense for your own skills in geography through the Web site, freepoverty.com. The computer feeds you the names of cities and other places from around the world and it's your job to put each one on a world map that shows boundaries between countries but isn't labeled. The site gives you some credit if you are close to correct. It's similar to the vocabulary quiz site, freerice.com, where rice is donated for every correct answer. With freepoverty.com, it's cups of water that are donated. The levels of "easy," "medium," and "hard" seem to be built upon the creators' perceptions of the places that a Westerner is familiar with (questions about places in Italy and France frequently pop up at the easy level, for instance), but because I've traveled widely in Latin America and Asia, but not much in Europe, some of the "hard" questions were easier for me than the "easy" ones.

I first saw freepoverty.com mentioned on The English blog. The site's biggest sponsor is Mobatar, an advertising company based in Rome that was co-founded by the two creators of freepoverty.com. I can't vouch for where the donated "cups of water" end up, but the geography game is still challenging and fun.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'll give you one reason why Massachusetts legislators and educators might want to pay careful attention to an editorial about English-language learners in their state published this morning in the Boston Globe: the lawyers who wrote it were key players in convincing a federal judge to rule last month that Texas has violated federal law by not adequately serving ELLs at the secondary level.

The editorial's authors are Roger Rice and Jane Lopez, lawyers for Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy, or META, in Somerville, Mass. Along with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, META represented plaintiffs in the Texas case who felt ELLs were getting short shrift.

Mr. Rice and Ms. Lopez argue that low high school graduation rates for ELLs (53 percent graduate) and high drop-out rates (nearly a quarter drop out) show that Massachusetts needs to improve how it educates such students. They also point out that test scores show a large achievement gap between ELLs and non-ELLs.

In Texas, the lawyers similarly used the state's own data to make the case that ELLs weren't being served well.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:25 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The topic of "immigrant integration" has become a buzz phrase here in the nation's capital, but some continue to prefer to use the word "assimilation" instead.

Two years ago, President Bush weighed in on the issue of how to help immigrants find a place in American society, putting out an executive order to form a "Task Force on New Americans" within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The goal of establishing such a task force was "to help legal immigrants embrace the common core of American civic culture, learn our common language, and fully become Americans." The task force says on its Web site that one of its objectives is "gathering input on successful immigrant integration practices."

Lawmakers recently introduced a bill in Congress intended to support immigrants in learning English and civics. It calls for an "office of citizenship and immigrant integration" to be established in the Department of Homeland Security. The bill, H.R. 6617, is called "Strengthening Communities Through Education and Integration Act."

The Migration Policy Institute is offering a training institute on "immigration and integration" in September. There's that word "integration" again.

But Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which works to curtail immigration to the United States, uses the term "assimilation". I skimmed his chapter, "Assimilation: The Cracked Melting Pot," and sections about education in his book, The New Case Against Immigration. He criticizes government for being unwilling "to insist on the primacy of English in the public sphere." He claims that because of multiculturalism, "schools today are failing utterly to pass on the history and heroes and legends of our past." (The American Enterprise Institute hosted him last month to talk about his book.)

The Bradley Foundation also chose to use the term assimilation in a report it released this summer that contends immigrants in the past assimilated into American society faster than they do now. (Flypaper picked up on David Broder's commentary about the report.)

I see a difference between the two terms. Integration, to me, means that immigrants find a role in this society regardless of whether they adopt the culture of the United States; assimilation implies that, in fact, they do adopt U.S. culture. Assimilation may happen along the way, but should it be a goal that educators have who are supporting English-language learners? Do you see a distinction between the two words?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 7:30 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

Everyone else has a blogging carnival, why shouldn't we who write about English-language learners? EFL Classroom 2.0 has hosted this one. One of my blog entries, discussing "push-in" versus "pull-out" ESL, was selected. Thanks to all of you who made that entry much more interesting with your comments.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:00 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Texas State Rep. Roberto Alonzo's call for the legislature to form a task force to respond to U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice's July 25 ruling on programs for English-language learners seems wise, though let me be clear that I'm not taking a stand in this blog on the ruling itself. Mr. Alonzo wrote yesterday in the Rio Grande Guardian (hat tip to Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas) that members of the Texas legislature must "be well-prepared, educated on the issue, and well-versed on the statistical data to help support and keep Judge Justice's decision intact."

Being educated on issues concerning ELLs and well-versed on the statistical data about their achievement is important for any legislator these days, given how the presence of such students in schools continues to grow.

Some observers of the Texas situation, who it seems to me DIDN'T closely look at data, recommended proposals this week for how Texas should improve its programs for English-language learners. Stafford Palmieri over at Flypaper was one of them. He wrote:

Here’s the problem, Texas: you let your students languish in bilingual classes until sixth grade. Only then, in seventh grade, do you re-label them ELL, test them in English, and then wonder why they all drop out and/or fail their tests. This is not an occasion for just instituting more monitoring programs. This calls for a serious overhaul of bilingual education. Why don’t you try instituting more support systems for students, transitioning them from bilingual to ELL starting in fourth or fifth grade, mixing English immersion with bilingual classes at younger ages, or even ending bilingual education in fourth grade or before. I can only hope Texas takes this golden court-ordered opportunity.

Data from the Texas Education Agency show that it's not exactly on target to say that "only then, in 7th grade" are ELLs being tested in English. While the state makes tests available in Spanish for grades 3-6, most ELLs by far take state tests in English in 5th and 6th grades. Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the TEA, tells me the reason the number of ELLs being tested in Spanish tapers off is that "our students typically exit bilingual programs after three years." (I'm still waiting for statistics from her that will verify that statement.)

Anyway, here are the numbers for ELLs who took Texas' reading test this last school year, broken out for whether they took it in English or Spanish. (The number of ELLs taking the math test in Spanish similarly drops off in the higher elementary school grades.)

ELLs who took reading test in English:
Grade 3—53,963
Grade 4—45,572
Grade 5—35,552
Grade 6—30,654

ELLs who took reading test in Spanish
Grade 3—29,972
Grade 4—17,026
Grade 5—7,517
Grade 6—878

I'm glad that a legislator who may be involved in responding to the ruling by the judge, which TEA officials have said the state is likely to appeal, is suggesting that lawmakers should examine data about ELLs in making decisions about their education.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend