Experts on the education of English-language learners will be on hand at a conference in September to discuss how the common core standards can be implemented appropriately for such students. The conference, scheduled for Sept. 27 and 28 in Alexandria, Va., is being sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Council of the Great City Schools, the National Council of La Raza, and the Association of Multilingual Multicultural Education.
Jamal Abedi, an education professor at the University of California, Davis, and Rebecca Kopriva, a senior scientist for the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are scheduled to speak at the conference about how assessments for ELLs can be aligned with the common core standards. Lead writers for the standards are expected to talk about how the standards were created.
The publicity for the conference says that the following questions will be addressed: What is too much specificity of curriculum and what is too little? How can teachers best be supported to teach the new standards? What considerations must be explored in implementing the standards for ELLs?
I’ve written for Education Week about how the writers of the standards incorporated the advice of some experts of ELLs in crafting them. But they did not spell out how the standards applied to specific levels of English proficiency. They left it up to states to create English-language-proficiency standards that align with the core standards or to spell out how specific standards can best be taught to students depending on their level of English proficiency.