July 2010 Archives

Supporting programs that increase the preparedness of Latinos for college and help them to enroll is a grantmaking focus of the Lumina Foundation for Education based in Indianapolis, Ind., I learned while recently reporting for EdWeek about Latinos' tendency to go to community colleges rather than four-year colleges.

Less than 40 percent of people in the United States who are of working age have a two- or four-year college degree, said Jim L. Applegate, the vice president for program development for the private Lumina Foundation. He said the foundation has a goal to help increase that proportion to 60 percent by 2025. "The only way to get there is to open up college opportunity for the fastest growing youth population in the country, which is the Latino population."

The foundation supports a Web site, www.knowhow2go.org, that provides information for students in middle school and high school to learn what it takes to prepare for and enter college. The foundation has embarked on an effort to help create statewide efforts that can support disadvantaged students to prepare for and enroll in college. For example, it is supporting ENLACE to coordinate a push in Florida to encourage youths to get a postsecondary degree. ENLACE means "link" or "connection" in Spanish and stands for ENgaging, Latino, African-American, and other Communities in Education.

The story I wrote about Latinos and college for EdWeek focused on what can be done to support more Latinos to go to four-year institutions of higher education rather than community colleges. But the Lumina Foundation takes the position that associate degrees as well as bachelor's degrees are valuable in the workplace and has spent a large part of the last five years trying to help improve the quality of education at community colleges, according to Applegate.

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A refugee resettlement organization is using federal funds to run an educational program for refugee children this summer in New York City. The classes in English literacy and math are being taught on the Bushwick High School campus in Brooklyn, but the New York City Department of Education isn't in charge of the program. The International Rescue Committee, or IRC, a nonprofit organization and refugee resettlement agency is running the program with a "refugee school impact" grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to James Lenton, the director of the IRC's New York youth program.

The program's main objective is to prepare refugee children for school who have just arrived in New York City, said Lenton. Many have had interruptions in their formal education, he said.

About 120 students are enrolled this summer for the educational program that started July 6 and finishes Aug. 13. The students include Tibetans, Bhutanese, Burmese, Iraqis, and Liberians. In the morning, students work on their English and math skills. In the afternoon, they participate in creative arts and recreational activities.

About a dozen students enrolled in the summer program can't read or write in their native language, said Elizabeth A. Demchak, the education services officer for the IRC's New York youth program, in a phone interview this month.

She said that the six teachers in the summer program aim to help students to start to adjust to some of the expectations of U.S. schooling such as to work in cooperative groups, give oral presentations, and produce written work. Many come from school systems where teachers typically lecture and students listen, she said.

I include information about this program on the blog to remind educators that refugee resettlement organizations can be partners with schools in helping newcomers to adjust to the U.S. education system.

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The Associated Press has reported that a federal judge has blocked some parts of Arizona's controversial immigration-enforcement law, which is scheduled to go into effect tomorrow.

The judge put on hold the part of the law that requires police officers to inquire about a person's immigration status while taking action on other laws. I wrote an article for Education Week about the possible repercussions of that part of the law on undocumented students in schools.

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Since the start of the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Justice has opened more than 15 investigations into services for English-language learners in schools, according to a spokeswoman for the department. One of those investigations is going on in Boston Public Schools, which I learned from reporting for an article about ELLs' access to services. That story should soon be published at edweek.org.

Currently, the Justice Department is looking into about 30 matters involving services for ELLs in schools, Xochitl Hinojosa, the spokeswoman, told me in an e-mail message. She was responding to a query from me, asking whether the Justice Department is stepping up enforcement of civil rights laws that apply to English-language learners. As I mentioned in a blog post yesterday, the Justice Department enforces the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, which calls for schools to take action to overcome language barriers that hinder English-language learners from getting equal access to a high-quality education.

"Although the EEOA does not have its own guidance, the department takes the position that districts must provide educationally sound ELL programs that are adequately resourced and that enable students to achieve English proficiency so that they can meaningfully participate in educational programs," Hinojosa said.

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Following a recommendation in an audit by the U.S. Department of Justice, Nevada's Carson City School District has expanded a part-time position for a director of the district's English-as-a-second-language program to a full-time position, reports the Nevada Appeal.

What's noteworthy about this July 16 news article from a national point of view is that an audit by the Justice Department apparently spurred a change in how a school district provides services for English-language learners. This is the second time this month I've heard of the Justice Department's involvement in reviewing services to ELLs. The department recently announced that the Illinois state board of education had clarified administrative rules to ensure ELLs in that state receive special help to learn the language until they reach proficiency in the language.

I've reported news that the Obama administration is beefing up enforcement of the civil rights of students in schools. When the U.S. Department of Education announced it would more strictly enforce civil rights laws, it focused on actions that would be taken by the office for civil rights of that government agency. But I'm wondering if the Justice Department is also becoming more active in this realm.

It's the job of the Justice Department to ensure that school districts comply with the section of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 that calls for them to take action to overcome language barriers that hinder English-language learners from getting equal access to a high-quality education.

I sent an e-mail message to a spokeswoman for the Justice Department asking if the department is stepping up enforcement of civil rights laws for English-language learners. I'll pass along any response that she may give me in a future blog post.

Let me know if Justice Department officials have visited your school district to review services for ELLs and what the outcomes were from the visit.

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Teacher evaluation protocols need to be better tailored to gauge the effectiveness of special education teachers and specialists who work with English-language learners, a research and policy brief from the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality says.

The brief makes the case that teacher effectiveness is different for specialized teachers, such as those who work primarily with students with disabilities and ELLs, and those elements need to be spelled out in evaluation processes.

The issue is important, the brief indicates, because federal policy has spurred some states to change their policies to put a greater emphasis on teacher evaluations. States received extra points in the federal Race to the Top funding competition if they linked teacher evaluation to student achievement data. The brief mentions that Illinois, Tennessee, and Rhode Island are among the states that approved such policy changes.

"Although many teacher evaluation instruments explicitly address teachers' attention to meeting the needs of 'diverse' learners, they may not attend to the special skills and strategies that are required to balance the acquisition of English with the affirmation of students' home culture and language," the brief says. "Teacher evaluation protocols should include and affirm teachers' abilities to navigate this territory."

The brief says that the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, a professional development model promoting strategies for working with ELLs, could provide a starting point for states to include information about what it takes to be effective with ELLs in their teacher evaluation systems.

Critics of policies that link teacher evaluations of ELL specialists with students' scores on standardized tests contend that such tests are not valid and reliable for ELLs so the scores on such tests shouldn't be used to gauge teacher effectiveness with such students.

This is the first publication I've seen that examines in some depth how evaluations of ELL specialists could be improved. The authors of the brief call for evaluation protocols to provide a checklist or rubric that includes specific standards for ELL specialists. They also say that protocols should account for evidence of teachers' contributions to student learning other than only how their students perform on standardized tests.

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Two of the researchers who created one of the most widely used professional development approaches for how to teach English-language learners, known as "SIOP," have written a book on how "response to intervention," or RTI, can mesh with that approach.

Jana Echevarria, a professor emerita at California State University, Long Beach, and MaryEllen Vogt, a professor emerita of education at California State University, Long Beach, have written a book that tells how the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, which is a set of strategies for modifying instruction for English-language learners, can work with response to intervention. In RTI, students who are struggling are given academic interventions with the intention of preventing their having to be referred to special education.

The book, Response to Intervention (RTI) and English Learners: Making It Happen, delves into some topics I haven't yet seen discussed in the few research briefs or books that have come out on this subject. For example, it includes a section on how to use RTI with English-learners at the secondary level. For that section, it uses as a foundation some of the work the Pennsylvania Department of Education has done to guide educators in carrying out RTI. Echevarria and Vogt's contribution is to urge all teachers who provide instruction at the Tier 1 level of RTI to adopt strategies for working with ELLs. And ideally, the researchers say, all teachers providing interventions for Tiers 2 and 3 would use those strategies as well.

The researchers steer educators away from thinking of RTI for English-learners as just a new fad, and encourage them to think of the approach as a way of using a school district's existing resources, programs, and personnel to improve teaching and learning. I like a lot of the sidebars in the book that provide checklists that administrators or teachers can use to evaluate if they are making RTI work. Questions for administrators include: Are your teachers qualified to work effectively with English-learners? Are you supervising the RTI process by observing in classrooms?

This is the most practical and comprehensive book I've yet seen on how to carry out RTI for ELLs. Echevarria and Vogt acknowledge that RTI can be done badly. At one point, for example, they list everything that Tier 1 in the educational approach "is not." It's not core instruction where some students are successful and others are not. It's not reliance on teachers' aides to determine what students need and to provide remediation. It's not teachers working primarily on their own. It's not dividing students into fixed instructional groups with a high group, average group, and low group of achievers, they say.

Pearson, the publisher for the book, says it will go on sale this month for $42.99.

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Two Democrats from the U.S. House of Representatives said at a policy briefing yesterday on Capitol Hill that they plan to introduce a bill that would authorize $400 million in funding for fiscal 2011 for the teaching of foreign languages to K-12 students. They hope the bill will become part of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

"Today, the lack of a second language doesn't just isolate people. It makes them less competitive," said U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, from California, at the briefing, which was hosted by the Asia Society and several other organizations that have joined together to advocate for more foreign-language instruction at the K-12 level. Chu, who grew up in a bilingual household, said that people who speak more than one language end up with "more customers" and "a better future."

U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, from New York, also pledged his support for the bill and also emphasized how bilingualism can improve a young person's economic prospects. "Our future workers are going to be working in a global marketplace. They need to know English isn't the only language in the world," he said.

Organizers for the event said that U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, is also supporting the bill, though he was unable to attend the briefing.

A description of the bill handed out at the briefing said it would provide $100 million for the U.S. Department of Education to take a leadership role in supporting the teaching of foreign languages, such as coordinating with the departments of state, defense, and commerce to promote best practices for language teaching. Some of the money would provide scholarships for students and teachers to study abroad.

Another $100 million would go to states to "expand and articulate" statewide efforts for language learning.

Lastly, the bill draft proposes that $200 million pay for grants from the Education Department to "partnerships" that would develop and expand model foreign-language programs. Right now, the Education Department has only one grant program with this purpose, called the Foreign Language Assistance Program. That program gave out $19 million in fiscal 2009, down from $23 million in 2008.

So if this bill were approved, it would mean a huge increase in funding for language learning by the federal government.

Most of the presentations at the briefing focused on how to boost programs for children who don't speak a language other than English at home. Dan E. Davidson, the president of the Joint National Committee for Languages and the National Council for Languages and International Studies, made a case for why the United States would benefit from having students start learning Russian at the K-12 level rather than starting out with the language as college freshmen. Essentially, he said, if students come to college with some proficiency in Russian, colleges and universities can be successful in moving them to a proficiency level that they can use professionally. But if they start from scratch in college, they don't reach professional competence by the end of four years.

One presenter, Michael Nugent, the deputy director of the National Security Education Program, a federal initiative backing the learning of less commonly taught languages, mentioned a pilot program at the K-12 level that builds on the skills of students who speak Arabic at home and attend Dearborn, Mich. public schools. In that program, Dearborn public schools are benefiting from a U.S. Department of Defense grant that went to Michigan State University to work with K-12 schools to create an Arabic-language-learning pipeline. I wrote about the potential to increase Arabic teaching and learning in Dearborn schools back in 2006.

"Once you build the program," said Nugent at the policy briefing, "not only does the heritage community come out and support it, the non-heritage people get exited, too."

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Today's Washington Post features a photo of an undocumented student, Diana Martinez, 18, being handcuffed by a police officer yesterday after she participated in a sit-in in a U.S. Senate building to push for passage of the DREAM Act.

The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors—or DREAM Act—was last introduced into Congress in 2009. The bill says that undocumented youths who meet certain criteria and attend college or serve in the military for at least two years would be put on the path to legalization. Opponents say it's a form of "amnesty" for people who have broken U.S. laws.

Student activists pushing for its passage have become increasingly bold. During actions this week in Washington to raise awareness about the act, some undocumented students, such as Martinez, have been getting arrested, the Post reports. In May, undocumented students staged a protest in front of Republican Sen. John McCain's office in Arizona; three were arrested and are in deportation proceedings, according to the Post.

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About 5 percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States speak a language other than English at home and have difficulty speaking English, according to parent surveys, says a federal trend report.

"The Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities" report provides the latest data describing English-language learners in this country. It says that in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, 11 million school-age children spoke a language other than English at home. That equals 21 percent of all students. The report says that one in four of the students who spoke a native language other than English at home had difficulty with English, according to their parents.

Another way of stating that last statistic is that three out of four children who speak a language other than English at home speak English with ease. That indicates to me that commonly, the children of immigrants are learning English.

The categories for reporting English proficiency are "very well," "well," "not well," and "not at all." If parents reported that children spoke English less than "very well," they were counted as speaking English with difficulty.

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A photo today posted by The Onion, makes education politics in Arizona the object of satire. One of the "News in Photos" today at The Onion is entitled "Arizona High Schools To Now Teach Spanish Entirely in English." (Hat tip to www.hispanictips.com.)

To avoid the risk of causing any confusion, let me make it clear here that the "news" printed in The Onion is not true—even if it seems at first glance as if it could be.

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The civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice has announced that with the adoption of new administrative rules, the Illinois State Board of Education has satisfied a concern federal officials had that Illinois school districts weren't providing adequate services to English-language learners.

And in the July 13 press release making that announcement, Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, states that an English-language learner in this country has the right to receive special help to learn English as long as he or she has that label.

"All English-language learner students have the right to appropriate language support services until they achieve English proficiency, and when educational agencies terminate such services prematurely, they deny these students the equal educational opportunity that federal law guarantees them," Mr. Perez said in the press release.

In the decade I've been reporting on these students, this is the clearest statement I've seen from a high-level federal official saying schools need to provide special help to ELLs as long as they are in that category. From some of the audits I've read of services to ELLs in large urban school districts, I gather that many ELLs do not get special help to learn the language once they reach intermediate or advanced levels of English proficiency but haven't yet tested as fluent.

The Justice Department press release says federal officials previously determined that the Illinois board was violating the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 because it only required school districts to keep English-language learners in special programs to learn the language for three years. That civil rights law says a school district must "take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs." The Justice Department spells out how the law applies to ELLs here.

The statement says that the Illinois board responded that Illinois school districts weren't violating federal law, but the board would amend its administrative rules to clarify that ELLs have a right to receive services after three years if they haven't yet attained proficiency in English. In Illinois, students are considered to be ELLs until they pass the state's English-language-proficiency test.

In a phone interview today, Darren Reisberg, the general counsel for the Illinois State Board of Education, told me that federal officials had asked state officials how they knew that ELLs were receiving a meaningful educational experience after they left special programs to learn the language. The state officials answered that they stood ready to investigate any complaints that ELLs weren't appropriately served after the three-year time period, but hadn't received any such complaints, he said.

The new rules, expected to go into effect by the end of the month, require school districts to submit to the board of education plans outlining how ELLs are served beyond year three, the qualifications of staff involved in those services, and the resources and materials used to support them. (The rules don't say that a district has to provide the same kind of services after three years that it did for the first three years that a student was learning English.)

The purpose of the new rules, Reisberg says, is to say: "Hey, districts, just remember all students need to receive a meaningful educational experience, and you have to show us in a plan how you are doing that."

Reisberg said that with parental consent, ELLs can stay in special programs to learn English for more than three years. He said the Illinois board has asked the Justice Department for guidance on what a meaningful educational experience looks like for ELLs after three years of special help, but the federal government hasn't yet delivered it. "At this point, we're shooting in the dark," he said.

I've sent an e-mail to the Justice Department asking for further comment and a response on whether federal officials will issue guidance on what kind of language support is appropriate for ELLs who have already received services for a very long time.

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A large number of the 2.1 million undocumented immigrants in this country who meet the age, duration of U.S. residency, and arrival age that would make them eligible for conditional legalization under a bill pending in Congress are not likely to attain legal status if the bill is enacted, says a study released this month by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.

The bill—called the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM, Act—says that undocumented youths who meet certain criteria and attend college or serve in the military for at least two years would be put on the path to legalization. The bill was first introduced in Congress in 2001, but has never made it any further than being approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The DREAM Act was last introduced in 2009.

Many of the undocumented immigrants who it seems could be beneficiaries of the DREAM Act don't have a high school education and have such limited English that it would be hard for them to be admitted to college or join the military, the researchers in the study conclude. One of the criteria for getting conditional legalization is having graduated from a U.S. high school. The researchers estimate that only about 825,000, or 38 percent, of the 2.1 million potential beneficiaries would eventually attain legal status. (The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, the nation had 11.9 million undocumented immigrants.)

A staff member for U.S. Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., who has been the chief sponsor of the bill, told me in an e-mail that proponents will continue to try to get the bill passed as a stand-alone piece of legislation. He added that it's most likely to be taken up as part of comprehensive immigration reform. Sen. Durbin told the Associated Press this week that it's "very unlikely" Congress would pass the DREAM Act before the fall elections.

Student activists who want to see the DREAM Act enacted started this week to hold a "DREAM University teach-in" in the nation's capital to raise awareness about the bill. The Associated Press reported yesterday that they set up a make-shift school in Lafayette Park across from the White House where local professors gave free classes.

In a July 1 speech at American University asking Congress to back comprehensive immigration reform, President Obama restated his support for the DREAM Act. He did not set a timetable for immigration reform to be addressed by Congress.

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At a summit for revitalizing indigenous languages held this week here in Washington, a founder of a Native Hawaiian language-immersion school asked Charles Rose, the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Education, to "please look at" the Native American Languages Act of 1990. The educator was among several founders of language-immersion schools who argued that provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are in conflict with the Native American Languages Act and a hindrance to running language-immersion schools. I wrote about the educators' petition to Rose for relief from some of those provisions in an article published yesterday by Education Week.

The request of Rose by William "Pila" H. Wilson, the head of the academic-programs division for the University of Hawaii's College of Hawaiian Language, in Hilo, to revisit the Native American Languages Act prompted me to read the act for the first time. I had trouble finding a copy posted by the federal government so I pulled up a copy that had been posted by the National Association for Bilingual Education.

The act says that it is the policy of the United States to "encourage and support the use of Native American languages as a medium of instruction." That means that the federal government is going much farther than simply saying students should be able to study the language of their indigenous community only an hour or so each day. The act is saying the federal government supports students to take actual core academic subjects in a Native American language.

And interestingly, the act goes on to say that it's the policy of the United States to "recognize the right of Indian tribes and other Native American governing bodies to use the Native American languages as a medium of instruction in all schools funded by the Secretary of the Interior." That statement would refer to the schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

While Native American students may have the right to receive core instruction in the language of their communities at BIE schools, in fact, it appears not to be happening much.

A recent federal study found that at BIE schools, only 23 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native 8th graders who participated in a survey reported that people in their schools talk to each other in a Native American language "every day or almost every day." Forty-one percent of the 8th graders at the BIE schools said people at their school talk to each other in a Native American language "never or hardly ever." (Thirteen percent said "once or twice a month" and 23 percent said "once or twice a week.") The study didn't report if any of these BIE schools use a Native American language as the medium of instruction.

At regular public schools, American Indian or Alaska Native students reported even less exposure to Native American languages than their peers at the BIE schools.

At the summit, Wilson said in a presentation that "the Native American Languages Act says we have these rights in the United States, but that law hasn't really been used."

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Velázquez Press in El Monte, Calif., has published a Spanish and English glossary for math terms that could be a good resource for Spanish speakers either in a bilingual or sheltered English math classroom.

Called the Velázquez Spanish and English Glossary for the Mathematics Classroom, the reference book contains more than 10,000 entries for math words or phrases that the editors have decided are typically used in math classes for grades 4 to 12. I have observed a few English-language learners at the high school level who keep a general bilingual dictionary close at hand to help them decipher what's going on in their classes. It seems that it might be easier to find a relevant translation for words used in math class in a specialized glossary than a general dictionary.

I see that Velázquez Press has also published specialized Spanish and English glossaries for social studies and science. Each glossary costs $12.95.

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Rules adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education that require all public preschools in the state to identify preschoolers who are English-language learners and provide them with bilingual education will soon go into effect, according to a spokeswoman for the board of education.

Early-childhood experts have told me they don't know of any other state that has rules that are as prescriptive as those soon to be implemented in Illinois for how preschool-age English-language learners should be educated.

The Illinois education agency staff created the rules to accompany a change in state law that took effect Jan. 1, 2009. The change extended the category of "children of limited-English-speaking ability," or ELLs, in regular public schools to include 3- and 4-year-olds. The state board of education adopted the rules on June 24.

But for new rules in Illinois to be finalized, a panel of lawmakers, called the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, has the right to either object to them or issue a "certificate of no objection." Mary Ann Fergus, a spokeswoman for the state board of education, told me that the committee issued a certificate of no objection yesterday, so the rules will be filed with the state's secretary of education and are expected to go into effect by the end of this month.

Under the rules, school districts will need to select and use a screening test that meets certain criteria to determine if preschoolers have limited proficiency in English. They will need to provide transitional bilingual education to ELLs if they have 20 or more students enrolled at an attendance center who speak the same native language. The rules require that any preschool teachers who teach in a transitional bilingual education program have certification to do so by July 1, 2014.

The phrase, "transitional bilingual education," commonly refers to a program in which students are taught some subjects in their native language while also learning English. However, the state board has indicated that under the umbrella of transitional bilingual education, preschools may implement bilingual programs that are often known as two-way immersion programs. In such programs, students who are dominant in English and students who speak another native language learn both languages in the same classroom.

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The American Youth Policy Forum has published a policy brief about what state policymakers learned during a May "fact-finding trip" to Austin, Texas, about the education of English-language learners. The trip was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and focused on a project, also funded by the Gates Foundation, to revamp instruction for ELLs at the secondary level in Austin. (I'll mention here as well that Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, has received some grants from the Gates Foundation.)

The project centers on the implementation of a professional development model developed by Aída Walqui of WestEd called Quality Teaching for English Learners, or QTEL, in the Austin Independent School District. I've been very interested in QTEL and have been wanting to take a fact-finding trip to Austin myself to see how the approach to coaching content teachers on how to work with ELLs has been working. It's a whole-school reform model based on the premise that all teachers in a school need to ensure that ELLs have access to rigorous academic content and that principals and other administrators need to be on board with the effort as well, according to the policy brief. You can find a description of QTEL by WestEd here.

Berkeley Policy Associates has embarked on a five-year random assignment study of QTEL being underwritten by the U.S. Department of Education, so we're likely to hear more about the effectiveness of the educational approach in the next few years.

The participants of the fact-finding trip focused on the use of QTEL at two Austin high schools, International High School and Lanier High School. Since implementation of the approach, test scores have risen for all students at these schools, with the greatest gains for ELLs, the policy brief reports. Teachers at the schools report that QTEL has given them a common instructional language and strategies they didn't learn in pre-service training, according to the brief.

The visit also focused on what the Texas Education Agency does to support the academic achievement of ELLs. The agency has formed a working group on ELLs with representatives of various departments who meet regularly and aim to "elevate the priority of ELL education within TEA," the policy brief says.

The May trip included state education agency staff, state board of education members, or policy advisers for governors from Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

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The California Department of Education has published a guide with effective practices for educating English-language learners with chapters written by many of the best-known researchers in the field. The flier for the book, Improving Education for English Learners: Research-Based Approaches, describes it as "an anchor publication to assist school districts in the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs for English-learners."

I'll try to get my hands on a copy of the book and tell you more about what's in it, but for now, I'll just pass along what I've learned in the book's promotional materials.

Diane August and Timothy Shanahan, who edited a report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2006, have written a chapter for the California-sponsored guide about effective literacy instruction for ELLs. Jana Echevarria and Deborah Short, two of the creators of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, used widely across the nation as a professional development model for teaching ELLs, have written a chapter about how to modify instruction for ELLs.

Other prominent ELL scholars whom the California Department of Education invited to write chapters for the book include Kate Kinsella, Claude Goldenberg, Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, and Fred Genesee.

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The number two education official at the Arizona Department of Education has asked Arizona's task force charged with recommending policies for educating English-language learners to consider some changes in the state's controversial four-hour program, the official has told me.

For two school years, the state has mandated that all ELLs be taught discrete English skills for four hours each day. The state also requires that ELLs should continue to receive that four-hour block of English until they can pass the state's English-language proficiency test. (Parents, however, can ask for ELLs to be removed from the program and assigned only to mainstream classes.)

Margaret Garcia Dugan, the deputy superintendent of public instruction for the Arizona Department of Education, told me that at a meeting of the task force yesterday, she asked the panel to review possible educational approaches for educating ELLs if they are not successful in testing as fluent in English after spending one year in the four-hour program. She's not suggesting that any changes be made to the program for the first year that an ELL student spends in it.

Yesterday, nine research studies were released by the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at the University of California, Los Angeles, that are mostly critical of Arizona's four-hour program. I reported in EdWeek how researchers said some teachers estimate many ELLs will spend three or four years in the program before being able to test out. That raises questions about how they'll be able to earn enough credits at the high school level to be able to graduate on time.

Dugan told me yesterday in a phone interview that she's fine with students' graduating in five years. And she thinks that if the program is implemented with fidelity, ELLs should be able to learn enough English to succeed in mainstream classrooms after two years with the four-hour block.

Nevertheless, she said she does see how some flexibility on the amount of hours ELLs spend learning English during the second year they spend in the program might be warranted. Hence her proposal to the task force.

Dugan reported to me both by e-mail and in a voice-mail message last evening that she's asked the task force to invite practitioners to present possible instructional models for ELLs who have reached at least an intermediate level of English proficiency but have not tested as fluent in English after one year with special help to learn English. She said the process of program review would start in September and would focus on how ELLs in middle and high school are being served.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teachers College Press has published a book that synthesizes research on how best to educate preschoolers whose native language isn't English, according to a web site post by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

The book, Young English Language Learners: Current Research and Emerging Directions for Practice and Policy, is written by Eugene E. Garcia, a professor of education at Arizona State University, and Ellen C. Frede, the co-director of Rutgers' National Institute for Early Education Research. Garcia was the director of the office of bilingual education and minority languages affairs (now called the office of English-language acquisition) in the U.S. Department of Education from 1993 to 1995.

The book provides a review of research on topics such as the development of bilingualism, family relationships, classroom practices, and teacher-preparation practices, according to the summary on the Rutgers web site.

Sometimes advance copies of new books about the education of English-language learners miraculously appear in my mailbox, but this one hasn't so I haven't read it. But the book focuses on a topic that many educators are looking at with increasing interest. I moderated a web chat for EdWeek on the subject of educating preschoolers who are ELLs last month. You can find the chat transcript here.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A series about the profound loss and confusion a Burmese refugee couple experiences after their 7-year-old daughter is murdered in Salt Lake City is a "runner-up" winner for one of the categories of the 2010 Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism. The young man suspected of murdering the child is also a Burmese refugee to Salt Lake City.

The 2009 series shows how the U.S. court system's lack of capacity to overcome language and cultural barriers in communicating with the couple leads to their becoming overwhelmed and confused about the investigation of their daughter's murder. At one point, the bereaved mother is so frustrated that she throws court papers away.

What I find interesting are a couple of references to how one school district employee supports the couple. When the couple is first resettling in the country, they run low on food, and they can't locate their resettlement caseworker, who is called "Mr. Tomorrow" by refugees because of his unreliability. The couple turns to a woman who serves as a refugee liaison for the Granite School District in the Salt Lake City area, who takes them groceries and helps them set up a phone. And after the couple moves their family from Utah to Iowa, this same woman contacts them with updates on what's happening in the case of the man charged with murdering their daughter. I can imagine that when this woman agreed to be a school refugee liaison, she never thought she'd be following a murder case.

For the series, Missing Peace, Salt Lake City Tribune reporter Julia Lyon traveled to a camp for Burmese refugees in Thailand that the couple had lived in prior to moving to the United States with their children in 2007. (Her international travel was supported by the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University, which explains how she could do this kind of work during these difficult financial times for newspapers.)

I think the message for educators from this series is to understand that refugees are often left very much to their own devices in this country even if they are officially supposed to be receiving support from resettlement agencies.

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An organization that seeks to halt illegal immigration to this country has put out a report saying that educating the children of undocumented immigrants costs $52 billion and is the largest public expense for providing services to families with undocumented adults. The report says that the lion's share of that cost is absorbed by state and local governments.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, says in its July 6 report, "The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on the United States Taxpayers," that services to the families of undocumented immigrants in this country—including education, health care, welfare, and the expense of deporting foreigners—cost $113 billion.

The Immigration Policy Center, the research and policy arm of the Washington-based American Immigration Council, put out a statement saying the report was "highly misleading" because FAIR "completely discounts the economic contributions of unauthorized workers and consumers."

I wanted to understand, however, how on target the report might be in its statement that it costs state and local governments $49.4 billion to provide schooling for the children of undocumented immigrants. I checked the FAIR statements with statistics from Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior demographer at the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center.

The FAIR report estimates that U.S. schools enroll about 3.5 million children of undocumented immigrants, including both U.S.-born children and foreign-born children. Passel puts that number at about 3.4 million. As of 2008, he said, 1.3 million immigrant children in schools had a parent who was undocumented. The same was true for 2.1 million U.S.-born children.

FAIR multiplies the 3.5 million statistic times the average per-pupil expenditure in states to come up with its estimate that state and local governments spend $40.9 billion to provide a regular education to the children of undocumented children. FAIR also estimates that state and local governments pay $244 million to pay for tuition subsidies for children of undocumented immigrants at colleges and universities.

But what's particularly interesting for readers of this blog, I think, is that FAIR also estimates the cost to state and local governments of providing English-acquisition services to the children of undocumented children above and beyond providing a regular education, which the organization puts at $8.3 billion. To come up with $8.3 billion, FAIR estimated the amount each state spends on English-language-acquisition services by multiplying the number of ELLs in that state times a dollar amount that equals one-fourth of the average per-pupil spending in the state (with a few exceptions). Then it added up all the state figures to come up with the national figure of $8.3 billion.

In that section of the report, FAIR seems to be off base. That's because it says it calculates cost according to a premise that "most often, although not exclusively" English-language learners are the children of undocumented immigrants. FAIR doesn't provide any data to back up that premise.

Passel doesn't have statistics that answer the question directly of what proportion of English-language learners have at least one undocumented parent. But he did give me some information that raises questions about FAIR's claim.

Passel says that slightly fewer than half of immigrant children in U.S. schools, those who were born in another country and then moved to this country and attend school here, have at least one undocumented parent. Of 2.7 million children ages 6 to 17 who are immigrants themselves, 1.3 million have at least one undocumented parent, he said. And only about a quarter of the 8 million children ages 6 to 17 who have immigrant parents and were born in the United States have at least one undocumented parent, Passel says.

Since most English-language learners are either immigrants themselves or the U.S.-born children of immigrants (based on a chart on page 15 of Quality Counts 2009), FAIR's contention that "most often, although not exclusively" ELLs are the children of undocumented parents cannot be correct.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Politico and CNN have reported that the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a legal challenge in a federal court in Phoenix today challenging Arizona's controversial immigration-enforcement law that is scheduled to go into effect July 28. The law requires police officers to ask about the immigration status of suspected undocumented immigrants involved in a "lawful stop, detention, or arrest."

I wrote last month for Education Week about how this law might affect undocumented students in schools depending on how school police officers would carry it out.

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Two organizations concerned with the education of English-language learners have written letters welcoming the U.S. Department of Education's new director of the office of English-language acquisition and critiquing current federal policies for ELLs.

Last month, the Education Department announced that Rosalinda B. Barrera has been appointed as the director of the office that has traditionally been in charge of policy for English-language learners. She is now the dean of the college of education at Texas State University—San Marcos. As I wrote in my blog post about her appointment, it's not clear how much power to form ELL policy Barrera will have in her new position, given that the administration of federal ELL initiatives was reorganized toward the end of former president George W. Bush's last term.

The Institute for Language and Education Policy sent a letter July 1 to Barrera saying that its members have been encouraged by President Obama's public statements acknowledging the need to strengthen schooling for ELLs and recognizing the value of multilingualism. But the institute's members are concerned about how some of the policies of the federal Race to the Top competition may affect ELLs, the letter says. The letter characterizes that competition as promoting "high-stakes testing, draconian penalties for so-called failing schools, pay systems for teachers based on standardized test scores, and an aggressive expansion of charter schools."

In another letter sent this month, the National Council of State Title III Directors, whose members are state officials who administer the section of the No Child Left Behind Act that authorizes funding for English-language-acquisition programs, asks Barrera to provide "clear, focused guidance" to state agencies on how to implement Title III. The letter also asks for the Education Department to reverse the reorganization that happened in 2008 with initiatives for ELLs and move the federal officials who enforce Title III from the Education Department's office of elementary and secondary education back to the office of English-language acquisition.

Readers, do you have any words of wisdom for Barrera that you'd like to add?

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Modifying the English on math test items doesn't change the math knowledge assessed, concluded a study on math testing accommodations conducted by the Regional Educational Laboratory West and released this week by the Institute of Education Sciences.

The study compared the performance of three groups of 7th and 8th graders on two sets of 25 math test items, a set with modified English and a set that hadn't been altered linguistically. The three groups of students studied were English-language learners, students who had tested as proficient on English/language arts tests, and students who had not tested as proficient on English/language arts tests. The study says that the sets of test items were assigned to students within each class at random, with about half of students receiving one set and the other half receiving the other set.

The effect of the linguistic modification on students' math performance was the largest for English-language learners. The study's researchers found a smaller effect for students who weren't proficient on language-arts tests and virtually no effect for those who were proficient.

I turned to Jamal Abedi, an education professor at the University of California, Davis, and an advisor for the study, for insight into how the findings of the study might be applied to assessing English-language learners.

He said that the effect size found for English-language learners is "relatively small." The most important finding of the study, he said, is that modified English didn't interfere with the validity of the math test items.

Linguistic modification is thus "a very safe accommodation to use for ELLs and sometimes it shows effects but the effects are not huge," Abedi said.

He said his research shows that giving ELLs a customized dictionary or glossary is also a recommended testing accommodation for such students.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend