March 2010 Archives

Each month more educators and researchers are coming forward to talk at conferences or during webinars about how to apply "response to intervention" to English-language learners. The educational approach is a way of identifying struggling learners and trying to give them the help they need so they aren't erroneously referred to special education.

The National Center for Response to Intervention is scheduled to host a free Webinar April 29 on the topic from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time.

I've written here at EdWeek about the work of researchers Douglas Fisher and Jana Echevarria on RTI and ELLs. Echevarria was the co-author of a research brief on the subject last year. Fisher has consulted with the Chula Vista Elementary School District in California on RTI and ELLs, which I wrote about in a story in January.

The TESOL conference held in Boston last weekend also had RTI and ELLs on the program for a couple of sessions, according to the program for the meeting. Scheduled to make presentations at a session called "Promises and Challenges of RTI for ELLs" were Alfredo J. Artiles, Nancy Cloud, Catherine Collier, and Alba A. Ortiz.

EdWeek is planning a live chat with experts on the subject as well in May.

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First Los Angeles and now Boston. The federal government has started a civil rights review of programs for English-language learners in Boston, according to an article published in the Boston Globe over the weekend. An editorial in the same newspaper backs the review. The investigation in Boston follows a similar review of ELL programs in Los Angeles schools launched earlier this month. A story published in the Contra Costa Times today says that African-American leaders in the L.A. area are calling for the treatment of black students to be included in the probe as well.

The U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights is aware that a state audit of Boston's programs for ELLs conducted two years ago found serious problems, according to the Globe article. The U.S. Department of Justice began investigating some of the alleged problems last spring.

In the Globe article, Russlynn Ali, the Education Department's assistant secretary for civil rights, says the department has never withheld federal money for civil rights violations.

Recently, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced stepped-up enforcement of civil rights laws in schools. We may learn more from the results of reviews in Los Angeles and Boston if stepped-up enforcement means a greater willingness to dish out penalties.

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Requirements for English-language learners in the next Elementary and Secondary Education Act will look a lot different from what they do in the current one, if members of Congress listen to a group of nationally known researchers on English-language learners.

The next ESEA should make the category of English-learners stable so that students stay in it for accountability purposes even after they leave special programs to learn the language, says the group. States should adopt criteria for identifying and classifying ELLs that are the same for all districts within a state, the group says. (That would be a big change for California, which gives school districts discretion in classifying and reclassifying ELLs.)

Another big change proposed by the researchers is that the ESEA should consider English as a second language a core academic subject and thus require that ESL teachers be "highly qualified" in the subject.

Called the Working Group on ELL Policy, the group of researchers includes big names in the field such as Kenji Hakuta, Diane August, and Donna Christian. Previously, the group put out a paper urging states and districts to use federal stimulus funds for economic recovery to benefit ELLs.

Now, the group has released recommendations with detailed supporting arguments in five areas of education or accountability that affect ELLs. A couple of themes running through the recommendations are that the next ESEA should better back schools' efforts to teach bilingual education, and it should take into account the amount of time it takes ELLs to learn English and how both their English-proficiency levels and time affect their academic progress.

The paper doesn't comment directly on provisions for ELLs proposed in the Obama administration's blueprint for reauthorization of the ESEA that was released March 13, though it was officially submitted to the federal government as a response to that blueprint.

One of the biggest changes for ELLs in the administration's plan is that states would be required to implement a system to evaluate the effectiveness of ELL programs. Don Soifer of the conservative Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., thinks that's a bad idea. See what my colleague Dakarai Aarons wrote about ELLs and the Obama administration's proposal in this week's issue of EdWeek.

The Obama administration's plan also calls for states to establish new criteria to ensure consistent statewide identification of students as ELLs and duration of services for them, which sounds to me very similar to one of the recommendations also made by the Working Group on ELLs.

Readers, I invite you to weigh in on any of the recommendations from the Obama administration or the researchers.

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As part of a call to middle and high school students in the United States and other countries to help Haitians rebuild schools, Global Nomads Group, an organization that creates interactive educational programs on global issues, is hosting a Webcast today from Port-au-Prince. Join the live event on UStream through this link (Note: If you click on this link, you can't automatically return to this post).

The hour-long Webcast is scheduled to start at noon, Eastern time, and will feature Haitian youths and relief workers working to rebuild schools that were destroyed by the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti. Students can submit questions to be answered during the event.

This may be too short of notice for educators to weave the Webcast into their lesson plans for today, but there is plenty of time to get students involved in Students Rebuild, an effort to bring together students around the world to support Haitians. Students Rebuild is sponsored by the Bezos Family Foundation and Architecture for Humanity, according to a press release that just arrived in my e-mail in-box.

The Webcast will be archived for later viewing as well.

(Information about photo: A girl watches a group of children as they line up to participate in entertainment activities at a school in the La Saline slum of Port-au-Prince on March 17. The children were attending a program set up by the Haitian Ministry of Sports, which aims to both prepare them for the upcoming opening of schools, and to recover from the emotional distraught left by the powerful Jan. 12 earthquake. Ramon Espinosa/AP)

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To say that the rates for excluding English-language learners and students with disabilities from the National Assessment of Educational Process "vary a bit from state to state would be, um, an understatement," writes my colleague Catherine Gewertz over at Curriculum Matters.

It will be interesting to see what the exclusion rates look like under the new policy to address the issue just approved by the board that governs the test.

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This just in: A federal appeals court has reversed a July 2008 ruling by a U.S district court that Texas must revamp its programs for secondary English-language learners because they violate federal law. The appeals court disagreed with lawyers of the G.I. Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens that the Texas Education Agency had failed to take what federal law calls "appropriate action" to overcome language barriers of students learning English. It also disputed the plaintiffs' claim that the TEA had not been responsible in monitoring programs for such students. (I last blogged about this court case about a year ago.)

At the same time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit encouraged the G.I. Forum and LULAC to add several individual school districts to the case so it can proceed. "By adding individual districts, the court can better examine the circumstances of specific students, schools, and districts, which will be invaluable evidence for determining the cause of [limited-English-proficient] student failure and how best to remedy it," the appeals court decision says. The decision also says that the court doesn't dispute the fact that secondary ELL student performance data is "alarming." It says the data shows an achievement gap of 35 to 45 percent in comparison with other students, and little evidence shows that the gap is decreasing.

Much of the appeals court ruling discusses the challenge of effectively measuring whether an ELL program works or not.

Before the July district court ruling, the plaintiffs in the case had criticized the state's system for monitoring the progress of ELLs, saying, for example, that aggregation of data at the school district level prevents intervention in schools that aren't performing as well as their districts overall. The appeals court points out that it's the job of schools to educate ELLs and the TEA is responsible for intervening in failing districts, not schools. On remand, says the federal appeals court ruling, the district court should reconsider the evidence in the case to properly determine if the state's data system and other sources of information are effective in monitoring ELL programs and thus protecting the civil rights of English-language learners.

Judge William Wayne Justice, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, whose 2008 ruling said that the inadequacy of Texas secondary ELL programs violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, died in October. He was the same judge who had ruled decades earlier that undocumented students are entitled to a free K-12 education in this country, which led to the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe.

Roger Rice, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the recent Texas case, said he and the other lawyers involved are seriously looking at the appeals court's encouragement to bring individual school districts into the case. "TEA doesn't teach kids," he said. But he added, "If the design of the secondary program, which is statewide, is failing, it seems to me to be a statewide question."

He said that because of Judge Justice's death, Rice and his colleagues will likely have to start from square one in educating the district court about the education of ELLs. "The first day, we'll talk about what does bilingual education mean, what does ELL mean. There will be a getting up to speed."

Rice also noted that the lawyers for the plaintiffs will have five years' worth of state data, rather than just the two years' worth that they presented back in 2006, to make the case that ELL programs need to be overhauled.

Update: Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the TEA, said in an e-mail: "We are pleased with the court's ruling, which affirmed many of the points we had argued in court. Texas has a very successful bilingual program at the early grades. Like other states, the track record is more mixed with older students who come into Texas classrooms later in their school career. These students are not only trying to learn English but the language used in complex science and math courses."

She added: "We believe our monitoring system, which was in its infancy at the time of the court trial, will prove effective."

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The World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, or WIDA, consortium is taking a step to have more say over how materials for the classroom are designed to align with its English-proficiency standards. This week, WIDA announced that it is offering a certification course for publishers or education consultants on how to follow the WIDA protocol in aligning curricular materials with the consortium's standards. The course lasts two and a half days and costs $2,250. Publishers can then use people within their own ranks who have been trained or hire others who have attended the training to offer the stamp of approval that the alignment protocol has been followed. That stamp of approval, which WIDA must sign off on, will cost an additional fee.

With 21 states plus the District of Columbia as members, WIDA can pull some weight in the field of educating English-language learners. The nonprofit consortium started with a handful of states that joined together to create standards and an assessment for English-language proficiency to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, about 740,000 ELLs take WIDA's test each year for English proficiency, called ACCESS for ELLs.

The aim of the new process for certifying materials, said Jesse Markow, a spokesman for WIDA, is to cut through some of the confusion that publishers seem to have on how to align curricular materials with English-proficiency standards. Publishers have figured out how to align materials with state's content standards, but they've been less successful with aligning them with the English-proficiency standards, Markow said. "We're trying to make it easier for them to do the language part," he said.

Another development at WIDA, which shows it's becoming more of a one-stop shop for states on issues regarding ELLs, is that it has acquired a database called STELLA that can help educators decide which accommodations English-language learners should receive on state tests. The project was created by Rebecca Kopriva, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I wrote about STELLA, which stands for the Selection Taxonomy for English Language Learner Accommodations, back in 2007 when the system was first being piloted.

Markow says WIDA plans to "scale up" the project and make it available to all states, not just consortium members. With STELLA, states plug their guidelines for testing accommodations into the system, and it provides guidance on how the accommodations should apply to individual students. Markow said STELLA was "looking for a home."

Another state is poised to soon join WIDA, says Markow, but he wouldn't yet tell me which one it is.

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The U.S. Department of Education has announced that for the 2009-10 school year, school districts will have to collect data in a number of new categories that relate to students' civil rights. What's more, the data for many of the new categories must be disaggregated to show how it applies to students of different races and ethnic backgrounds, students with disabilities, male and female students, and English-language learners.

The Education Department revised its standard survey for civil rights data collection "to include additional important indicators of whether students are receiving equal educational opportunities," Sunil Mansukhani, the deputy assistant secretary for the office for civil rights, wrote to me in an e-mail message. Among the categories that are new, and which also must include data reported in a disaggregated manner, are student participation in Advanced Placement courses, ACT/SAT tests, math and science courses, International Baccalaureate programs, and General Educational Development (GED) programs. Other new categories where the data must also be disaggregated are statistics for student retention, harassment and bullying, and restraint and seclusion.

School districts are required to start collecting data for the first part of the new survey at the end of this month.

School districts will have the option of using either the five traditional race or ethnicity categories for the disaggregation or using the seven new race or ethnicity categories, which include the option of selecting two or more races. I imagine that option will be a relief to some school district officials, who feel the new categories are confusing.

The Education Department has also launched a new Web site that aims to make civil rights data from schools more accessible.

The new survey has the potential to provide a lot more information about whether school districts are giving English-language learners access to an adequate education. But I do wonder how long it will take for the data for all these new categories, disaggregated for ELLs, to be reliable.

After all, some school districts and states have failed to report some very basic information about English-language learners that is already required under the No Child Left Behind Act. For example, last time I checked, 13 states had not reported a graduation rate for ELLs to the Education Department, which is required under the federal law.

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While in many states, schools can technically permit students to attend high school until they are 21, I find it the exception rather than the rule that school districts welcome older youths in their regular high schools. More often, it seems, they encourage them to enroll in adult education classes if the students haven't earned a high school diploma by age 18. This issue comes up with immigrant students who arrive in U.S. high schools in their teens without any high school credits.

An opinion published in The Washington Post this weekend touched on the issue. Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., noted that his high school likely would fare better in the accountability system of the No Child Left Behind Act if it didn't enroll immigrants who arrived in the United States at age 18 or older. Here's an excerpt from his commentary:

And we are outraged that the school system enrolls newly arrived 18- to 20-year-old immigrants in the general student population, where they aren't in programs tailored to their particular needs. Had we done as Arlington and Fairfax counties [in Virginia] do and offered them enrollment in an adult education program, their Standards of Learning scores would not have counted, and it's very unlikely that T.C. would have gotten the "persistently low achieving" label. We would also be serving those students better.

How to address the needs of older immigrant students is also an issue in El Cajon, Calif., which I recently visited to write about Iraqi refugees being resettled there. Some Iraqi parents said that the community doesn't have a good solution for meeting the needs of refugees who are 18 or 19 and have gaps in their education. El Cajon Valley High School administrators tell them to enroll in adult school, but Iraqi parents say adult classes, which are full of middle-aged adults, aren't a good fit for them. Even if a refugee hasn't yet turned 18, the high school will enroll him or her only on a case-by-case basis. The parents wish the school district provided a special class or school for the young adults.

Readers, please share with us the policies of your schools and the educational institutions in your community concerning older immigrant or refugee students. Do you let English-language learners stick around in a regular high school until they are 21 to finish a high school diploma? Does your community have a special school for older youths, and if so, is it effective?

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The United States has received 35,000 of the estimated 2 million refugees who fled Iraq since this country went to war there seven years ago. The top resettlement city has been El Cajon, Calif., a suburb of San Diego, so I traveled there this month to see how the Iraqi refugees were faring in the schools there. My story was published today at edweek.org.

The Iraqi parents I interviewed were generally happy about their children's experience in U.S. schools. Some Iraqi students were thrilled for the chance to attend a regular public school. Rani, a 16-year-old Iraqi boy who had come to the United States via Syria told me he had missed 4 1/2 years of school in that country. "In Syria, no school for Iraqi people," he said. There, he had worked, serving coffee and tea at a tattoo shop. (See the article I wrote for Education Week in 2008, "The Lost Years," about Iraqi refugee students in Jordan.)

The two school districts in El Cajon have made a lot of changes in a short amount of time to accommodate the refugees. For example, the Cajon Valley Union School District created newcomer centers, or separate classes, for refugees. Grossmont Union High School District has expanded classes for English-language learners who are teenagers. The district is enrolling a steady stream of 16- and 17-year-olds who don't have any high school credits, which is a challenge.

I heard some grumbling from a representative of a local social-service organization that the schools weren't doing their job in helping Iraqi parents navigate the school registration process because they didn't translate the forms in the registration packet into Arabic. An official from the K-8 district told me that district has translated registration forms into Arabic. The high school district hasn't translated the forms, but a district official told me it plans to do so by next fall. The district just hired a full-time Arabic-English translator. In the meantime, at least one high school has a bilingual Iraqi who works part time as a parent liaison and one of her jobs is to help Iraqi parents register their children for school.

What really struck me, though, during my visit was how most of the Iraqi refugees are living in poverty and, after their eight months' worth of federal benefits for refugees run out, find themselves on welfare. (Update: I just got a clarification from Sana Hardina, the advocacy officer for the International Rescue Committee, one of the resettlement agencies, who says some refugee families are put on welfare in states if they are immediately eligible rather than receive the eight months' worth of assistance targeted for refugees. Typically immigrants can't receive welfare payments, she said, but refugees are the exception because they are considered particularly vulnerable. She says California has the most generous rate for the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program at $721 per month for a family of three.)

I interviewed three Iraqi men who all spoke English fluently, who have been in this country for at least eight months (added in an update to this post), and are using welfare checks to support their families. Among them was a former captain of an oil tankard (who finally got a job in El Cajon for $8 per hour in a pizza place), a man who was a translator in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq for two years, and a man who ran mess halls for U.S. soldiers and contractors in Baghdad. The man who was a translator had also been a physics teacher in Iraq, so he's trying to get his educational transcripts evaluated to see what he has to do to get certified to teach in the United States. He had to borrow money from friends in Iraq to pay the fee for the evaluation. He said the family has spent all its savings.

Three recent reports on Iraqi resettlement nationally speak to these larger issues of whether U.S. refugee policy enables Iraqis to become self-sufficient.

The entry-level jobs that refugees usually land in this country are scarce and more competitive in the current slow economy, according to a report put out this month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The report says Iraqis tend to have high levels of education, but have struggled to find work.

Two other reports are critical of U.S. refugee-resettlement policy, saying the nation isn't providing enough assistance to help refugees get on their feet financially.

A 2009 report by Georgetown Law students says that "the United States is opening its gates to refugees and simply forgetting about them after they have arrived." The report says refugee assistance should be increased from eight to 18 months. It says a stronger emphasis should be placed on the core barriers to self-sufficiency and integration, including lack of English-language skills, lack of transportation, and lack of opportunities for education and recertification. Some Iraqi refugees have ended up homeless in the United States, the report says.

The federal program doesn't meet the basic needs of today's refugees and requires urgent reform, contended a report by the International Rescue Committee, also released in 2009. The IRC is one of the organizations that has helped to resettle some of the 5,000 refugees from Iraq who moved to El Cajon in the last few years.

I asked the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which both have a hand in refugee policy, for a response to the criticism.

State Department officials agreed with the report by Georgetown Law students that "additional assistance is needed to help refugees bridge the gap until they are self-sufficient," said Beth Schlachter, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. She said that on Jan. 1, 2010, the State Department doubled the amount of money it gives to each refugee from $900 to $1,800 for the first 30-90 days in the United States. But she said Health and Human Services is responsible for the eight months' worth of support that follows. That department hasn't yet responded to inquiries I made yesterday on this matter.

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A commentary published today at edweek.org and three books released in the last few months all make the case that federal and state language policies for education have a huge impact on both the English and bilingual skills of young people over the long run.

But they have different prescriptions for what kind of language policies lead to better acquisition of English.

The commentary, by Rosemary Salomone, a law professor at St. John's University School of Law, in New York City, argues that the No Child Left Behind Act is an impediment to supporting bilingualism among the nation's English-language learners. She says that the education law's provision that holds schools accountable for reclassifying students as fluent in English each year leads them to ignore instruction in students' native languages and move them "swiftly and exclusively toward English."

Salomone just had a book about language policy, True American, published by Harvard University Press. In it, she contends that bilingualism doesn't impede academic success.

A second book published this year that urges schools to support bilingualism among English-language learners is Forbidden Language: English Learners and Restrictive Language Policies, edited by Patricia Gandara and Megan Hopkins and published by Teachers College Press. The book provides research studies that show state policies in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts restricting bilingual education have not been successful in helping students to learn English.

Proponents of a restrictive language policy in Massachusetts, called Question 2, "promised more rapid acquisition of English for [English-learners] in Massachusetts and, with that, a rise in academic achievement and a narrowing of the achievement gap," write several researchers in a chapter on language education in that state. They say that the results have actually been very different than that claim, as pass rates for ELLs in Boston public schools declined on state math and English tests. Also, the achievement gap between ELLs and students in general education classes in Boston widened in both math and English after the ballot measure that restricted bilingual education was implemented.

Lastly, a new book by Rosalie Pedalino Porter, who campaigned to get Question 2 passed by voters in Massachusetts, makes the argument that the state improved the prospects of ELLs to acquire English by curtailing bilingual education. Her book, American Immigrant: My Life in Three Languages, published by iUniverse, a self-publishing company, is mostly about her own experiences in this country as an immigrant from Italy, but she does talk about her support for state policies that restrict bilingual education. She writes that "for thirty years the wrong-headed idea that children should be taught in two languages had been the law in Massachusetts and several other states, in spite of its poor results." She contends that the restrictive language policies in California and Arizona have been successful. She faults Massachusetts for not putting out a research report that looks at the impact of Question 2 on English-language learners in that state. She doesn't mention the research study that indicated ELLs in Boston public schools fared worse after passage of the measure.

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A specialist in assessments of English-language learners will impart her wisdom on the subject this Wednesday, March 17, in a free Webinar, hosted by the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. The Webinar will run from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time.

Rebecca Kopriva, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will talk about how best to include English-language learners in regular state content tests. She'll touch on computer-based assessments and portfolio tests.

I'm familiar with Kopriva's work with Obtaining Necessary Parity Through Academic Rigor, or ONPAR, a project to develop test items in math and science that are appropriate for ELLs. The effort is funded by the U.S. Department of Education (see the second article, written by Kopriva, in the fall newsletter of the clearinghouse here). The World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment consortium has also posted a description of the project. ONPAR now has its own Web site as well.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently called the issue of how best to test ELLs one of the most challenging matters that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will need to address.

Kathia Flemens of the clearinghouse is also joining the Webinar as a presenter. Register for it here.

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For the common standards to work for English-language learners, states will have to supplement them with English-language-proficiency standards aligned with them and provide professional development and materials geared toward helping ELLs attain them, says Kenji Hakuta, an education professor at Stanford University.

He writes in comments that he submitted to the California Department of Education, and also sent to me in an e-mail, that while the common standards document released this week includes an introductory statement on how to apply the standards to ELLs, it is "silent" on how such students will equitably attain them or how long that would take them.

I've heard murmurs from a couple of people in the field about how ELLs' educational needs aren't getting enough attention in the writing of the standards.

Hakuta, one of the most recognized names in the field of ELLs, was not on the committee to write the standards. But he is on the validation committee.

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It's a good feeling to have been part of a team here at Education Week that was just awarded first prize in the multimedia category by the Education Writers Association for a set of online profiles of English-language learners.

My contribution to the package, published as part of Quality Counts 2009: Portrait of a Population, was to identify some of the ELLs profiled and tell their stories in print. But the students' stories really came alive with the addition of audio interviews and photo portraits by Christopher Powers, the associate director of photography for Education Week.

Last year, Chris, Yasmine Mousa, and I received a special citation from the EWA in the multimedia category for a narrative and interviews published online in 2008 as part of a package about Iraqi students in Jordan, called "The Lost Years."

I feel honored to have heard all of these students' stories and helped them to become known.

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On the day after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech saying the Obama administration was going to step up enforcement of civil rights laws in schools, federal education officials announced they were pursuing action on civil rights in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Both the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press published stories yesterday saying the Education Department's office for civil rights is investigating whether English-language learners in that school system are receiving a fair education.

The AP story mentions a recent study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute that found 29 percent of students who are identified as ELLs aren't reclassified as fluent in English by the 8th grade.

Back in 2002, I wrote in Education Week that L.A. schools had thousands of English-language learners who were teenagers and had been born in the United States but hadn't yet become fluent in the language.

Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary for civil rights for the Education Department, will hold a town hall meeting out there today focused on English-language learners in the schools.

It will be really interesting to see whether the OCR requires the school district to take any specific action to improve its offerings for ELLs.

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After much deliberation, the governing board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress has approved a policy saying that states should include ELLs in testing who have been in the United States for one year. Under the new policy, states and school districts should aim to include 85 percent of ELLs and students with disabilities in their testing samples, reports my colleague Stephen Sawchuk in a story published at edweek.org today. Stephen also reports that the policy says states and school districts must include 95 percent of all students in NAEP testing.

Regulations for the No Child Left Behind Act require states to include ELLs in their regular state tests in reading after the students have been in U.S. schools for one year. States must, however, give their math tests to ELLs during the first test administration after the students enroll in U.S. schools. But for accountability purposes, states are required to report test scores in reading and math only for ELLs who have taken the tests after being in the United States for a year.

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The U.S. Department of Education expects to put out guidance soon on the civil rights of English-language learners who have disabilities and also those who are gifted.

In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said the federal government will put out guidance in 17 areas, including some that touch on the education of ELLs. The conference call was a preview to a speech on civil rights that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave in Selma, Ala., yesterday.

Duncan mentioned ELLs both in the conference call and his speech, so I can, at least for the time being, stop pointing out on this blog that the Obama administration isn't drawing attention publicly to the needs of such students.

I get a sense that educators are hungry for any research findings or models on how best to determine if ELLs have disabilities based on the amount of traffic this blog gets whenever I post something on the subject. The latest tidbit I have to share on the subject is from a book, Why do English Language Learners Struggle With Reading?, published in 2008 by Corwin Press, that the press person for that publishing company just sent me.

The book includes a chapter intended to help reading teachers distinguish if an English-language learner who is struggling to read has only language issues or also has a disability. It offers this tip: "If the majority of ELLs [in one's class] are making little progress, the teacher should focus on improving instruction. If most ELLs are doing well and only a few are struggling, the teacher should look more closely at what is going on with those individual students and consider that they may need additional support."

Not much, however, comes across my desk that provides information about ELLs who are gifted. Perhaps that's one of the next hot topics in this field.

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to give a speech today in Selma, Ala., promising to invigorate enforcement of civil rights laws in U.S. schools, which I blogged about over at Politics K-12.

In his prepared remarks, which were circulated to reporters, Duncan mentions that English-language learners are one of the groups of students that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act must protect, along with minority students and those with disabilities.

For years I've heard advocates of ELLs complain that the office for civil rights of the U.S. Department of Education is lackluster in enforcing civil rights law in schools. At the same time, I've reported in depth on at least one school district, Salt Lake City, that was forced by the Education Department's office for civil rights to dramatically improve its programs for ELLs.

I'll be curious to see if educators notice any big changes in how schools are held accountable to provide equal opportunities to English-language learners after the Obama administration rolls out new civil rights guidance this spring.

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Native Americans told aides of federal lawmakers how they could change the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to better serve Native American students in a "listening session" hosted by the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs this week.

Some of their suggestions at the March 3 gathering on Capitol Hill had to do with how the U.S. Department of Education can help tribes keep their native languages alive.

Kathleen Tom, a tribal council member for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, in Oregon, for instance, called on Congress to authorize creation of an office for Native American languages within the U.S. Department of Education. She envisioned such an office as supporting language-immersion schools and helping high schools and colleges to provide credits for the study of Native American languages.

Representatives of the Navajo Nation asked for the federal education law to recognize the Dine department of education (Navajos call themselves Dine) as the equivalent of a state education agency and eligible to receive federal education dollars directly. Willy Tracey Jr., a Navajo tribal leader, said such a move would enable his tribe to focus more on the teaching of language and culture. Andrew Tah, the superintendent of schools for the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Ariz., said his tribe would like support from the federal government to develop an assessment tool in Navajo and teach ke, the Navajo concept of character development.

John E. Echohawk, a Pawnee and the executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, in Denver, also asked federal lawmakers to enable tribal education departments to be recognized as the equivalent of state education agencies.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Florida, Illinois, and New York—three of the five states with the most English-learners in the country—are among the 16 finalists selected by the U.S. Department of Education for a portion of $4 billion in Race to the Top federal stimulus funding.

I make this point because ELLs were never mentioned specifically in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which authorized the stimulus funding for education. So far, I've learned of only a few school districts that have targeted stimulus funds for ELLs. That's even after a group of researchers, calling themselves the Working Group on ELL Policy, made it one of their missions to promote the use of education stimulus aid for ELLs.

If Florida, Illinois, or New York are named in April as winners of the first round of the Race to the Top competition, I imagine that some ELLs might benefit.

The two states with the most English-language learners, California and Texas, however, are not on the list. Texas didn't apply and California, which has about 40 percent of the nation's ELLs, was not selected.

I got the ranking for the states with the most ELLs in preK through 12th grade from the Migration Policy Institute, which based its analysis on data for the 2007-08 school year from the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. The institute reports that the nation had 5.3 million ELLs that school year.

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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that learning how to revamp tests for English-language learners and students with disabilities might be the toughest question that needs to be tackled with reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, according to an article written by my colleague Alyson Klein about yesterday's hearing held by the House Education and Labor Committee.

At the hearing, Rep. Robert E. Andrews, D-N.J., asked how the Department of Education would like to change testing for those groups of students.

Duncan mentioned that he has tapped Alexa Posney, the assistant secretary for special education, and Thelma Melendez, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education and a former English-language learner herself, to address how best to assess ELLs and students with disabilities.

I've blogged about a forum that the department held in Denver in January regarding testing for ELLs.

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