May 2009 Archives

Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, has mandated that Arizona schools simplify the home-language survey that parents fill out when enrolling a child in school from three questions to one. The move is expected to reduce the numbers of students who are identified as needing extra help to learn English, according to an Arizona Republic article published today. Some say that Horne is trying to save money that would be used to provide that extra help, but the state schools chief says that isn't true. He contends the policy will reduce the numbers of students who are unnecessarily identified as English-language learners.

Typically in schools across the nation, if parents say they speak a language other than English at home, even if the child's primary language is English, the school tests that child in English proficiency. If the child isn't fluent, he or she is placed in programs to learn English.

Horne is saying that the form must have only one question: "What is the primary language of the student?" If the answer is "English," the child will not be tested for proficiency in the language, and thus will not be eligible for extra help in the language.

The article does a good job in covering the pros and cons of the new policy. It mentions that a complaint has been filed in the office for civil rights of the U.S. Department of Education contending that the policy is discriminatory and asking for an investigation.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:07 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

From Guest Blogger Sean Cavanagh

The state of Alaska has announced it will hire a new director of rural education, who will also be assigned to work with the state's native population, known as Alaska Natives. Those students make up more than 23 percent of the state's 128,000 students. Alaska faces major challenges in serving those students, partly because of the vast distances and rugged landscape that separates its schools. See Curriculum Matters for more.

One of new rural director's jobs will be to travel to its far-flung villages and build ties with native communities. Another task will be to oversee the implementation of the state's cultural standards, first adopted in 1998, which promote students' understanding of Alaska Native history and tradition. Students in the state's predominantly Alaska Native villages speak a number of languages, which vary by region of the state.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Corpus Christi, Galena Park, and Fort Bend are among several Texas school districts participating in a study that will look at the impact of "collaborative strategic reading" on reading comprehension for both English-language learners and fluent English speakers. Collaborative strategic reading is a teaching approach that includes both cooperative-learning techniques and reading-comprehension strategies, according to a press release I received from the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest at Edvance Research, a research laboratory of the U.S. Department of Education that is sponsoring the study.

In addition to Texas school districts, the Oklahoma City school district is taking part in the study.

The last in-depth article about reading and ELLs that I wrote for Education Week was about how many experts feel that Reading First, the federal flagship reading program under the No Child Left Behind Act, did not serve ELLs well overall. At the same time, I've visited a couple of school districts, including the Brownsville Independent School District in Texas, where I've met educators who said they were able to implement the program in a way that really helped ELLs.

The REL Southwest study will focus on 5th graders in schools with high numbers of ELLs.

The description of the research study doesn't say if or how native-language instruction will play a role. Texas elementary schools are required to provide bilingual education if they have a critical mass of students who speak the same language.

I look forward to seeing if the findings of this study will shed more light on how to help ELLs get past the sounding out of words to understanding what the text means.

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

President Obama's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, is someone with whom English-language learners may be able to identify in classroom discussions about current events.

Sotomayor spoke more Spanish than English while growing up, according to news coverage by WABC-TV New York. CNN says her father, who died when she was 9, worked in a factory and didn't speak English. Her parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York during World War II.

Politics K-12 reported today that Nancy Drew books helped her get hooked on reading and learning. School Law Blog provides information on her educational background and how she has ruled on education-related court cases.

Somewhere, New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent must be having a parade or party to celebrate the nomination. And I expect teachers in classrooms with a lot of Spanish speakers are also talking about the nomination.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:20 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Thanks to those of you who signed in to today's online chat about adolescent literacy after a long holiday weekend. The guest was Michael L. Kamil, a reading expert at Stanford University who also knows a lot about ELLs. I asked Kamil one question, the last question of the chat, about ELLs and literacy. He answered that "appropriate use of native language is most effective in acquiring literacy in a second language." The transcript is now online here.

By the way, a Webinar on adolescent literacy is scheduled for June 2, a week from today, noon to 1:30 p.m., Eastern time. It's called "Adolescent Literacy: State Efforts, Classroom Strategies" and it is being hosted by the Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

EdWeek will be hosting Michael L. Kamil, a prominent researcher on reading, for a live chat today focusing on adolescent literacy. I'll be the moderator and it will take place from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., Eastern time. Find more information here.

Kamil was a member of the National Literacy Panel for Language-Minority Children and Youth, so he has a lot of knowledge about literacy and English-language learners as well as adolescent literacy in general. I'm thinking that some of you who are working with ELLs with interrupted formal schooling, who have little or no literacy in their home languages, might want to toss him a question about ELLs.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:09 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

While Catherine Snow, an education professor and reading expert at Harvard University, has been developing Word Generation, a free Web resource to aid teachers in supporting students to learn "academic" language, Kenji Hakuta, an education professor and expert on English-language learners at Stanford University, and his doctoral students have been developing WordSift. School Library Journal recently featured the Web tool.

Try it out yourself and you can skip the rest of the explanation in this blog post.

The digital tool permits one to paste any text into a space and, with a click on "Sift," see which words are "academic" words, or school words. As you know, a huge focus in instruction for English-language learners—and all students, for that matter—is to support them in learning "academic English," the kinds of words they need to understand school lessons, in contrast with the more conversational language they use at recess or in the cafeteria with their friends.

What's more, WordSift also provides immediately sets of images that correspond to the words in the text. A student can click on that word and pull up images to get a better understanding of the word.

I pasted in the first few paragraphs of this CNN story about how some high school students in Elkhart, Ind., are struggling to pay for the costs of graduation activities. Wordsift told me that "economic," "principal," "required," and "traditional" are academic words.

What's key here for English-language learners, I believe, is that students can pull up images to illustrate a word, not definitions. The image may be easier to digest, I can imagine, than more words that explain the word the student is trying to understand.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:19 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

If you're applying for a job at Arizona's Department of Education, you might want to mention any skills you have in making videos.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne recently sent a staff member to collect "video evidence" (it takes a while to load) that the Omega Alpha Academy charter school in Douglas is educating students who live in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Horne doesn't believe that Arizona taxpayers should have to pay for the education of Mexican residents who cross the border to attend school. The video was posted today on the state education agency's Web site.

Apparently the charter school's executive director had contended that the school enrolls only students who show proof of residency in the United States.

In the nearly five-minute video, the camera zooms in on license plates of white vans and signs for the charter school and for the border crossing. First, the staffer films the vans from a vehicle and through a windshield that is being pummeled by raindrops. In other footage, the weather is clear, and students scurry into vans on the Mexican side of the border and scurry out in front of the charter school. In parts of the video, the staffer is riding in a vehicle that is following the vans.

It's a little hard to understand exactly what's happening with the vans and where they are, with all the fragmented scenes. It's my guess that the video-maker didn't go to film school.

But it sure seems that Horne has, indeed, in his possession a video of white vans moving from one side of the border to the other transporting kids with backpacks who attend the charter school.

In a press release I just got from Horne, he says, "The scheme is open and blatant."

Stay tuned for future episodes.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The top two reasons that immigrant women say they moved to the United States were to join family members already in the country and "to make a better life" for their children, according to a poll of a representative sample of such women by New America Media. The pollsters interviewed 1,002 immigrant women from Latin American, Asian, African, and Arab countries in August and September of 2008. The margin of error is 3 percent.

I'm thinking the findings might be helpful for educators of English-language learners who have a lot of interaction with parents. Many of these women, in helping their families adjust to the United States, are acquiring new skills and attitudes.

New America Media concludes from the poll's findings that immigrant women are "family stewards" in the United States. They are the main drivers in the family, for instance, in seeking U.S. citizenship. An overwhelming proportion of immigrant women said they decide about the finances of the family, how many children to have, and "very sensitive and personal family issues." Most immigrant women are married, and of those who are, almost all live with their husbands. Fifty-eight percent of Latin American immigrant women are married, while 85 percent of Korean women are. Seventy-three percent of all immigrant women say they've become more assertive at home and in public since coming to the United States.

Thirty percent of the women polled said they are undocumented. The pollsters asked an interesting question that I haven't seen anyone else ask: "If you were forced to return to your home country by the U.S. government, would you bring your children born in the U.S. with you or would you leave them in this country?"

More than half of all immigrant women in all but one of the groups said they would take their children back to their home country. Fifty-four percent of Chinese women, for instance, said they'd take their children back with them (29 percent said they "don't know"). Sixty-one percent of Latin American women said they'd take their children back with them (21 percent answered "don't know"). But only a small proportion of Vietnamese women—17 percent—said they'd take their children back to their native land. Forty-three percent of the Vietnamese women said they would "leave them in the U.S.," and 40 percent replied "don't know."

As the lives of English-language learners change because of attending U.S. schools and interacting with other children in this country, so, too, do the lives of their mothers change.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

CNN features today a Methodist preparatory school in El Paso, Texas, that enrolls a significant number of students who live in Juarez, Mexico, and walk across the border each day to go to school. The article says that 70 percent of the 459 students at the Methodist high school, the Lydia Patterson Institute, live in Juarez.

This caught my attention because I just wrote on this blog about how Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne wants the Arizona legislature to pass a law barring charter schools from enrolling students who live in Mexico and walk across the border to go to school.

The CNN article, of course, is about Texas, not Arizona. In addition, it's about a private school, which I presume can enroll whoever it wants. But it does make me wonder if U.S. schools near the border, whether private or public, are educating a significant number of students who actually live in Mexico. And I have another question: Do a lot of people really care?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:33 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The New York City-based Internationals Network for Public Schools is one of four organizations that will receive an "immigrant integration" award today from the Migration Policy Institute. The institute has established the new E Pluribus Unum prizes, a $50,000 award for each organization selected, to highlight organizations that are doing a good job in helping immigrants adjust to U.S. society.

Interestingly, the Internationals Network for Public Schools supports a group of high schools that enroll only immigrant newcomers, which are sometimes criticized for separating immigrant English-language learners out from native speakers of English. But when I asked a principal of one of these schools, Brooklyn International High School, during a visit in 2007 how she would respond to such criticism, she said the good results of the schools, better graduation rates for ELLs than in New York City's schools overall, speak to their success. The schools do provide students with internships in local businesses and organizations that give them exposure to the wider society.

In addition, I recall interviewing a couple of students at Brooklyn International who said the schools they had attended previously in New York City that had a mix of native speakers of English and ELLs were downright dangerous. They said they were more able to focus on learning in Brooklyn International High School, which was small and enrolled only immigrant students.

Another education group, ADVANCE-El Paso, which provides education for preschoolers and their immigrant parents, is also a recipient of one of the immigrant integration awards.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:04 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Tamar Levin of The New York Times visited the Nogales Unified School District in Arizona to write about Horne v. Flores, the case involving state funding for English-language learners that the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on soon.

The reporter visited the same schools in the district, and even one of the same classrooms, as I did a couple of months ago when I traveled to Nogales and reported on the same court case. I reported on the oral arguments on the case last month.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:41 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Read my recent story published in Education Week about how some school districts are planning to spend federal economic stimulus funds to support or improve programs for ELLs. I previously wrote on this blog about how the Seattle school district plans to use some stimulus funds to revamp its ELL programs.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'll be out of the office on a reporting trip until next Wednesday, May 20. Look for new posts on that day.

In the meantime, you might want to browse this week's Carnival of Education.

It includes a blog entry, Should children's books be more multicultural?, posted by Sarah Ebner at School Gate, which offers suggestions for books that feature characters from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

My favorite entry, which I admit doesn't have much to do with the subject of this blog, is 100 Amazing How-To Sites to Teach Yourself Anything, posted by Rated Colleges.

The video, "Following Through When Throwing a Football," at the Expert Village site caught my eye. It's never too late to learn, right?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:18 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Administrators in the Seattle public schools are apparently taking to heart findings in an audit last year that described the district's approach to serving English-language learners as "ad hoc, incoherent, and directionless."

Veronica Gallardo, who has been the manager of programs for ELLs in the 44,000-student district since July, says the district is planning a major revamping of those programs for next school year. And she said some of the expense is expected to be covered by Title I economic-stimulus funds, though the dollar amount allocated to the effort hasn't been decided yet. I've been working on a story, soon to be published by Education Week, that tells how some large urban districts plan to use money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to improve schooling for ELLs.

The audit by the Council of the Great City Schools gave the district 75 recommendations on how to improve services for the school system's 6,400 ELLs. "One of the biggest concerns was we weren't consistent with our services across the district," Gallardo told me in a telephone interview.

Interestingly, Seattle educators are adapting for their schools the approach used to teach ELLs in the St. Paul district, which is considered to have promising practices for these students by the Council of the Great City Schools. (See my 2006 story on St. Paul ELLs.)

At the elementary level, Seattle will replace English-as-a-second-language pull-out programs with a team-teaching approach. The ELL specialist and regular teacher provide instruction alongside each other. At the middle and high school levels, Seattle will use a "cluster" approach to teaching ELLs, which is also used in St. Paul. English-language learners will be clustered in classes according to their proficiency level. But that cluster will also be mixed in those classes with native-speakers of English. And an ELL teacher will be assigned to work in that classroom as well as the mainstream teacher. In addition, the ELLs will have a period each day of English-language-development instruction, separate from other students.

Gallardo said that while the Seattle district has provided training in ELL strategies for specialists, it hasn't trained mainstream teachers in those strategies. So getting those mainstream teachers up to snuff is a big part of the overhaul as well. And for the first time, the school system will implement a districtwide curriculum for English-language development.

Seattle district-level staff for ELLs spent four days in St. Paul studying how that district educates English-language learners. The Columbia Heights district in Minnesota has also replicated St. Paul's programs. The Council of the Great City Schools has selected the St. Paul district as one of four that have "best practices" for teaching ELLs for a study to be released next fall.

The St. Paul district has had success in dramatically narrowing the achievement gap between ELLs and native English speakers, but when I checked in with the district last fall, I found the gap had widened somewhat recently after the district changed some of its tests. The district receives a steady stream of refugee children, many of whom have had limited formal schooling before arriving in the United States.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama's administration has chosen Supreet Anand, who now directs ELL programs for the Maryland Department of Education, to be in charge of Title III programs for the U.S. Department of Education. Title III is the main conduit of funding for English-language-acquisition programs under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Update: The Education Department confirmed the appointment and characterized Anand's new job as being the "group leader" for Title III.

"It's an exciting opportunity, now that we have reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act right around the corner," she told me in a phone interview this afternoon.

Anand will be a "supervisory education program specialist" in the office of elementary and secondary education. She just told me she'll start her job on May 26 and report to Zollie Stevenson, who is the director of student achievement and school accountability programs for that office. He is not a political appointee.

Last fall, the Education Department moved the administration of Title III programs to the office of elementary and secondary education, the same office that administers Title I, which provides funds for disadvantaged students. Previously, staff from the office of English-language acquisition administered Title III.

This is the first person I've heard of who has been selected for an ELL post in the department. The Obama administration hasn't yet named anyone to head up the office of English-language acquisition.

Anand has been in her current post at the Maryland education department since January 2005. Before that, she supervised ELL programs for Prince George's County schools in Maryland. She's also been an English-as-a-second-language teacher at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Md.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 5:30 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

In her self-syndicated column, Esther J. Cepeda, a Latina, vents her frustration that more people in a graduate class she took on strategies for teaching English-language learners didn't share her distaste for bilingual education. Ms. Cepeda was a bilingual teacher in two Illinois school districts for a short stint and fought for Spanish-speaking students to be integrated into classes with native-English speakers and taught in English, according to a previous column she wrote. Illinois requires school districts to provide bilingual education when they have a critical mass of English-language learners who speak a language other than English.

Cepeda's take on bilingual education is that teachers end up teaching students only in Spanish. In yesterday's column, "Why 'English-Only' Laws Look So Good," she relays that she told her classmates in the graduate class that "segregating students into Spanish-speaking sheltered classes was a recipe for a permanent underclass."

Cepeda cites a federal report about adult literacy (that I recently mentioned on this blog) as evidence that many speakers of languages other than English in this country lack literacy in English. The report, by the way, does not examine what kinds of programs the adults in the study were enrolled in while in school.

Cepeda indicates that English-only legislation being proposed in New York looks like a good idea. It's a proposal that has drawn concern from advocates of bilingual education.

Cepeda's views seem to come mostly out of personal experience of having witnessed bilingual education programs. I've come across other folks in my reporting who have been turned off by bilingual education after seeing how some of those programs work on the ground.

Personally, I've observed both bilingual programs that are effective, as I reported in an article about Brownsville Independent School District, and ones that seemed to be ineffective. In Brownsville, teachers receive clear guidance on how much English and how much Spanish to use during instruction at each grade level. Most students who start kindergarten as English-language learners are transitioned to full English instruction by 4th grade.

In ineffective programs, I have observed teachers who constantly moved back and forth between two languages in their instruction, sometimes mid-sentence, which seemed very confusing. And in some of those ineffective programs, I seriously questioned if students were developing their English skills.

Reviews of research on English-language learners give a modest advantage to bilingual education programs over English-only methods in effectiveness. But all the researchers I've ever interviewed who have faith in these reviews tell me that effective bilingual programs must include a strong component of developing students' English skills while they are also receiving instruction in their native language.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:00 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, is asking the state legislature to require charter schools to adhere to the same law that public schools must follow: that they be prohibited from educating students who are residents in Mexico but cross the border just to attend school. Now, Horne said, charter schools are exempt from the requirement.

Horne says in a press release he put out today that he recently learned "taxpayers are paying a charter school for educating students who are residents of Mexico and who cross the border to attend." The schools chief notes that while Arizona is required to provide a free public education to undocumented students, it's not required to educate the residents of another country.

In my visits to a number of Arizona and Texas border towns over the years, I have found the notion of a Mexican "resident" a bit murky. I've interviewed quite a few students, for example, who live with relatives or siblings on the U.S. side of the border and attend U.S. public schools, but whose parents live on the Mexican side of the border.

I've also interviewed one youth who is likely the kind of person that Horne believes shouldn't be enrolled in U.S. schools. Because he was born in the United States, the young man was a U.S. citizen. But he lived in Mexico (with his girlfriend and child there) and walked across the border each day to attend school in the United States.

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

ELL teacher and blogger Larry Ferlazzo writes that many Hmong students, some of whom are English-language learners, at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., missed school yesterday to protest charges brought against General Vang Pao, who is Hmong, and 10 others. The general and the other 10 have been charged with trying to overthrow the communist government of Laos.

Ferlazzo has been tapping into his students' interest in the court case involving Gen. Pao, who is a leader of the Hmong community in the United States, by teaching civics lessons and developing exercises for language learning from newspaper coverage of the issue.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:35 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

In trying to counteract some of the negativism surrounding immigration issues, Inez Russell points out in a commentary published in the Santa Fe New Mexican, that enrollment of students in the Santa Fe school district would be in "serious decline" without English-language learners, many of whom are immigrants.

The editorial challenges readers to propose solutions to members of Congress or local politicians for addressing immigration issues rather than blaming immigrants.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:14 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Would you like to see California's home-language survey for identifying students who speak a language other than English? How about Arizona's waiver form for parents who want to request that their children be removed from "sheltered English immersion?" Anyone want to read New Jersey's bilingual education code?

I found each of these documents with a few quick searches using a database of the Language Portal, run by the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, which is an arm of the Migration Policy Institute.

According to a promotional e-mail I just got for Language Portal, the Web site has more than 1,000 resources for teachers or administrators who work with ELLs or their parents. It has school district plans for such students and sample translated report cards and parent-notification forms.

In my searches, I typed in the name of a state and selected the keyword of "English-language learner." I requested "all" documents in English.

I wasn't able to pull up any documents from Illinois with that search, and I pulled up only one for Texas. A message on the site says the database is dependent on the availability of documents from states. I'll have to see in the coming weeks how consistently I can pull up documents that I need for reporting. But it seems that at least for some states, it will be easier to use Language Portal rather than stepping out into the big wide world of the Internet to find them.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:00 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Dianne Piche, the executive director of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, has been selected for the number two post at the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education, reports Politics K-12. She'll be the deputy assistant secretary for the office.

She's paid close attention to the rights and educational needs of English-language learners over the years. She mentioned the needs of such students several times, for instance, during her testimony in 2007 at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing on supplemental services provided under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:26 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

People living in the United States who started school knowing only Spanish are more likely than those who started school knowing only English to struggle with reading as adults, according to a federal study released this week that explores why some adults in the United States are struggling readers. The study's findings are featured in an article, "Why Do Millions of Americans Struggle with Reading and Writing?," published this week in the Christian Science Monitor (Hat tip to This Week in Education).

The article says that the researchers moved into relatively new territory by interviewing adults whose first language is Spanish to get more insight into their English literacy. The interviewers were permitted to talk with the adults in Spanish. But they had to give answers in English.

One way that the study, released by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, examined whether participants were slow or fluent readers was by finding out how many words they could read correctly per minute. That was the basis for a "basic reading skills" score. Participants who had started school speaking only English scored 100 words per minute on average, while those who started school speaking only Spanish scored 66 words per minute (on Page 19 of the study). Thus, those adults who had started school in English were less likely to be slow readers than those who started school in Spanish.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:00 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

WestEd has published a guidebook, "Making Mathematics Accessible to English Learners," designed for teachers who don't have much training in how to teach math to English-language learners. The promotion for the book says it contains rubrics for helping teachers identify language skills at different proficiency levels, as well as sample lesson "scenarios."

Two years ago, WestEd published a guidebook for teaching science to ELLs.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:00 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The positive effects of lessons in academic English from Word Generation, which I introduced to you on this blog a couple of weeks ago, are strongest for English-language learners, according to an article published at edweek.org today by my colleague Debra Viadero. (By the way, check out Debbie's new blog at EdWeek, Inside School Research.)

After 12 weeks of lessons, students in Boston public schools who participated in the program scored as well on vocabulary tests as students who didn't participate who were 2 years older, according to the article. And the impact was strongest among ELLs.

What's interesting to me is that reading experts are viewing Word Generation as successful for both ELLs and all students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:51 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

An editorial published this week in New Jersey's Star-Ledger supports the move by a Newark social-service agency to offer testing for Latinos to get a General Educational Development certificate, known as a GED, in Spanish. (Hat tip to Colorin colorado.)

The editorial argues that getting a Spanish GED can be an important step for an immigrant toward educational or job improvement, such as being able to enroll in a community college to begin courses in English as a second language.

While I've reported research findings on this blog that show a GED isn't nearly as valuable as a regular high school diploma, I also have written for EdWeek about teenagers who got a GED in Spanish and then went on to attend community college. See "For Some Students, GED Test in Spanish Is Best Alternative."

The Star-Ledger also published a news article this week about the new testing center that is opening up for the Spanish GED. The article says that to pass the Spanish GED in New Jersey, you also have to pass a basic English-fluency test.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:50 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

This week's Carnival of Education has a post by ELL teacher and blogger Larry Ferlazzo on how he's recently tried writing personal letters to some of his students.

In the letter that he posts, which he says he handed to the student in a sealed envelope with his name on it, Ferlazzo tells the youth why he hopes he will stay in school. Ferlazzo says he'd be sorry if the young man wouldn't use all the "smarts" that he has. The letter contains some tough love.

This is such a simple way for teachers to establish a connection with their students, but I've actually never heard of any teacher doing it.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:11 PM | Permalink | 5 Comments | Recommend

Sarra Said, an English-language learner who arrived in Tucson, Ariz., two years ago from Tripoli, Libya, has risen to the "Million Word Challenge" designed by her school's English-language-development department. The 15-year-old student at Amphitheater High School, whose first language is Arabic, has read more than 1,500,000 words in English books, according to a story in the Arizona Daily Star. She's now in the middle of reading Gone with the Wind. (Hat tip to TESOL in the News.)

Said, who now reads "for fun," wasn't that interested in reading before the challenge, the article says.

The million-word challenge sparked me to remember the gist of the book I finished reading last night, Life List, by Olivia Gentile. The book tells the story of how the late Phoebe Snetsinger met her goal of seeing 8,000 bird species. The quest of meeting a numerical goal had more meaning for this woman than anything else in her life. I'm a birder (a new one) myself, but at this point I'm more motivated to learn a lot about a limited number of birds, those in my part of the country, rather than develop a long list of bird species that I've seen.

The connection between the million-word challenge and the challenge of seeing almost all the world's birds is that for some personalities, a numerical goal is extremely motivating.

Those of you who work at the classroom level, do you think this kind of numerical goal can be a motivator for most of the students in your classes or would it likely be motivating only for a few?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 1:50 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an analysis of the prospects of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, or "DREAM," Act, which was reintroduced in Congress this spring and would provide a path to legalization for undocumented students who graduate from U.S. high schools. ImmigrationProf Blog notes that the article will be free to nonsubscribers to the publication for a few days.

The article says there are "plenty of lawmakers who fiercely oppose the bill," but it "stands a good chance."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:59 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

About 8 percent of English-language learners in California, compared with 20 percent of students who aren't ELLs, finish high school having taken the required courses to be eligible to attend the California State University system, according to a study by WestEd released in a brief by the National High School Center.

This is just one more statistic indicating that ELLs are disproportionately closed out of a curriculum that prepares them for college. The research brief reports on the course-taking patterns of ELLs based on a study of student transcripts from 54 high schools in California.

A second brief released by the National High School Center urges schools and districts to develop a coherent approach to educating ELLs at the high school level. That brief also points to the lack of access to core curriculum for ELLs. It says that "language status hampers access to grade-level instruction in the core curriculum and may impede attainment of the academic English language and grade-level performance standards."

A third brief by a WestEd researcher describes efforts in California, Florida, New York, and Texas to support ELLs in high school. This brief doesn't move the discussion about ELLs in high school along much because it lacks models. The brief acknowledges that most reform efforts described are "in progress." It doesn't provide outcomes that indicate whether the states' policies for ELLs are effective or not. In fact, it notes that only two of the four states, California and Texas, met adequate yearly progress goals on average for ELLs in the 2006-07 school year. The last line of the brief says: "Sustained research is needed to better ascertain the impact that these initiatives and practices are having on the education of ELLs at the secondary school level.

In sum, read the briefs for more insight into the problem of how ELLs lack adequate services at the high school level and not for examples of proven approaches that work.

The National High School Center, by the way, is scheduled to host a webinar on best practices for educating high school ELLs on Thursday, May 14, from 2 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. Eastern time.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

At a session at the annual meeting of the Education Writers Association, Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust urged reporters to ask the following question about states' and school districts' plans for using federal stimulus funds: "Is it good for kids and why—and beyond that, which kids is it good for?"

What's more, she said, reporters ought to be asking how the stimulus funds will benefit low-income students, students of color, and English-language learners.

So during the Q&A time, I asked members of the panel—who included Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools and Scott Palmer of the EducationCounsel, as well as Wilkins—what evidence they'd seen that education for ELLs would be improved with stimulus funds.

Not much, they answered.

Wilkins said she hasn't been hearing "enough" about ELLs and stimulus funds and added, "I wish the stimulus package had been clear about how you could use Title I stimulus funds for ELLs." Title I is the section of the No Child Left Behind Act that authorizes money for disadvantaged students.

Casserly said that a document written by researchers with recommendations on how stimulus funds can and should be used for ELLs has been circulating among the urban districts that are members of his organization. But "unless there is explicit encouragement," many school districts may not direct funds toward programs for ELLs, he said.

Palmer called the lack of emphasis on ELLs in the stimulus package "a big gap." What's more, he said, the needs of ELLs "could be lost" in the debate over how to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, otherwise known as the No Child Left Behind Act.

At the same time, I have seen news stories that mention plans by two school districts to use stimulus funds for ELLs. Officials at Oregon's Salem-Keizer district are considering using the money for hiring English-language-acquisition specialists, who would work with teachers in schools with large numbers of ELLs. Similarly, Pennsylvania's York City district is expecting to hire 26 teacher aides with Title I stimulus funds and is considering assigning some of those aides to ELLs.

But two school districts seem like a rather measly amount. Readers, let me know if you know of other examples.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 4:35 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

The California Department of Education's press release about English-language learners' scores on the state's English-proficiency test reads about the same as the press releases on students' scores on this test for the last several years, as I recall. The percentage of ELLs who score "proficient" in the language keeps rising, but a gap still exists between the scores and the proportion of students who are reclassified as fluent in English, and thus, no longer in need of special programs.

A sizable gap exists as well between the scores of ELLs and native speakers of English, though the press release doesn't say if that gap has increased or decreased from last school year. Update: California Sen. Gloria Romero, a Democrat who is chair of the state's Senate Education Committee, says in a May 1 press release that the gap has increased slightly over the last six years.

In the 2007-08 school year, 32.8 percent of English-language learners met the bar on the California English Language Development Test set by the state that says they are eligible for possible reclassification. But, in fact, school districts reclassified only 9.6 percent of ELLs that school year as fluent in the language.

California, by the way, recommends several criteria, including particular scores on the test, for reclassification, but gives districts the final word on reclassification decisions. The policy contrasts with a state such as Arizona, where English-language learners must be reclassified and must leave special programs if they score proficient on that state's English-proficiency test.

The newly released scores from California for the 2008-09 school year show that 36.2 percent of ELLs met the test's criteria for possible reclassification, up from 32.8 percent the previous school year. The reclassification rate for 2008-09 hasn't yet been released.

(To score well enough to meet the state's bar for possible reclassification, students must score "early advanced" or "advanced" on the CELDT, plus they must score "intermediate" or higher for each of the four domains of English tested: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.)

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell notes in the press release that the increase of the reclassification rate from 9.2 percent of ELLs in the 2006-07 school year to 9.6 percent in the 2007-08 school year is a "positive sign." But he fails to note that the reclassification rate in the 2005-06 school year was also 9.6 percent. So the rate didn't budge overall for three years.

For whatever reason, most educators at the school district level in California continue not to view the state's cut-off point on the CELDT for possible reclassification as a high enough bar for deciding that students should leave ELL programs.

Anyone from California want to weigh in on why this is the case?

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Ann Harris, an elementary school librarian in Texas, posts a request in the comment section of my last blog entry: what resources are available to help school librarians find Spanish-language or bilingual books for children? After all, she writes, "I cannot talk students into a book that does not look interesting, no matter the quality."

She's found one good source, Isabel Schon's International San Diego Library site, but would like to know of more blogs or web sites that have reviews of Spanish-language books for children and youths.

Can anyone help her out? I'm curious, too, to know what advice is available, so offer your ideas here in the comment section.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:33 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend