School & District Management

Innovation: LUCHA Helps ELLs Get High School Credits

By Mary Ann Zehr — May 11, 2010 1 min read
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The LUCHA program, which provides online courses to English-language learners in Spanish while they learn English, is continuing to gain a foothold in Texas public schools, according to a press release posted yesterday.

When I visited Brownsville Independent School District a couple of years ago, I observed English-language learners taking the online courses in a computer lab with a teacher supervising them. There, the courses were intended for new arrivals to the United States. ELLs could get a certain amount of high school credits through the Spanish courses, for subjects such as biology, while they were acquiring English.

LUCHA, housed at the University of Texas, Austin, also offers a service in which educators evaluate transcripts of students coming from Mexico and recommend how many credits a U.S. school district should award them. For more about LUCHA, which stands for Language Learners at the UT Center for Hispanic Achievement, see my EdWeek article from last year.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.