October 2010 Archives

In the more than 30 years that Kenji Hakuta, an education professor from Stanford University, has been studying English-language learners, he's come to realize that many Americans are threatened by bilingualism, he said in at the seventh annual Brown Lecture in Education Research last evening. The lecture about equity in education is sponsored by the American Educational Research Association.

"We don't need to be scared by bilingualism, although we probably will continue to be, because it's a cultural thing," said Hakuta. Then he quipped that he wishes Stephen Colbert, a comedian who mocks unfounded fears of Americans on Comedy Central, would "do something with that."

Hakuta gave a brief history of theories for educating English-language learners that have emerged since the 1970s. He said the debate over whether bilingual education or English-only instruction is better for ELLs has eaten up a huge amount of political and research energy. He called research comparing the two approaches "horse-race studies." In summation, Hakuta said, all things being equal, bilingual education seems to yield a more positive outcome in reading for ELLs than English-only instruction does.

Hakuta praised U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Carolyn Randall for spelling out a map for educating ELLs in the 1981 case, Castañeda v. Pickard, which followed a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case, Lau v. Nichols, that said schools had to provide a bridge to the curriculum for ELLs. The Castañeda v. Pickard map is that a program for ELLs should be based on sound educational theory, implemented with adequate resources, and be evaluated for results. That interpretation, said Hakuta, "gives us a crack in the door for those of us working in this area."

Recently, the field has focused on how to teach ELLs "academic language," or the language of school, he said. He stressed the need for regular content teachers to get engaged in this endeavor. Hakuta noted that "English-language development takes time. We can be more focused and direct, but it still takes time."

He said he and other researchers are now focusing on providing advice for how the Elementary and Secondary Education Act can best be reauthorized to benefit ELLs. A big problem, he said, is that identification and reclassification procedures for ELLs are not stable. He said that the category for ELLs should count students who have become fluent in English so that the data doesn't have a "revolving door problem." As matters stand now, ELLs who become fluent in English are moved out of the category, leaving the students without full proficiency behind, so it's hard to measure progress with the overall group, he said.

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A free Webinar tomorrow afternoon will explore considerations for testing English-language learners in math and science. One of the guests is Rebecca Kopriva, a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. The event is being hosted by the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition.

Kopriva has developed some test items for math and science that fall into what some may call the "really cool" category because they enable ELLs to show what they know and can do by clicking and dragging images on a computer screen. She's created them as part of a project called Obtaining Necessary Parity through Academic Rigor, or ONPAR, which has a Web site where you can see a sample of some of the items.

I saw a few of the test items when Kopriva showed them off at a meeting in late September hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers about ELLs and common standards on Sept. 27. Studies show that both ELLs and non-ELLs score well using the test items, she said then. "That's huge. We are not losing anything."

She demonstrated, for example, how ELLs can be assessed on what they know about the mass of different materials by clicking and dragging images for sand, salt, and water. As she moved the items around herself, she said, "Do non-ELL kids love this? Oh yeah."

She'll be showing some samples of the math and science test items on the Webinar as well, she told me in an e-mail.

Tune in for the Webinar tomorrow, Oct. 29, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., Eastern time. (If you click on the link to the Webinar, you can't return directly back to this blog.)

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A charter school just approved for the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to be run by the Success Charter Network of schools headed by Eva S. Moskowitz, will give preference to English-language learners, according to The New York Times. The school will also give preference to students zoned to attend schools that received a D or F in student performance on their public report cards, the Times reports.

Some have opposed the school because they feel it could reduce diversity in other schools in the area that aren't well integrated racially.

Earlier this year New York state officials decided that ELLs fall under the category of students who are at risk of academic failure, paving the way for charter schools in the state to give preference to such students in admissions. So we may see more charter schools in that state going this route.

Moskowitz, a former councilwoman in New York City, was featured in the film "The Lottery," which followed four families trying to get their children into the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy, which is managed by Success Charter Network. The impression I had of her in that film was that she is no shrinking violet.

She wrote an editorial in the New York Post recently arguing that the new school is needed because parents on the Upper West Side "are demanding more options for their children."

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A discussion is under way and continuing through Friday over at the Teacher channel with Helen Thorpe, author of Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America. So far, several teachers have weighed in on how they are frustrated that some of their students don't meet their full potential because of the constraints of not having papers to live legally in this country. The participants in the discussion thus far seem to be in favor of a policy change in this country that would give those students a path toward legalization.

For her book, Thorpe followed four girls of Mexican heritage who were close friends. Two have legal status to live in the United States and two do not.

Thorpe opens her comments by saying that as she has traveled around the country talking about her book, which focuses on the issue of illegal immigration, she has discovered many teachers in her audiences. "This isn't surprising," she writes, "as teachers are often the primary point of intersection between immigrant families and the rest of American society."

She says that teachers typically understand that students who are undocumented have inherited a set of circumstances that they didn't create.

In the discussion, a middle school teacher in Maryland writes, "It was frustrating to learn that undocumented students could not attend our local community college, and many could not afford to pay higher tuition rates at the four-year colleges or vo-tech schools in the area. So many young people are trapped with a diploma and nowhere to go after high school."

Another teacher says that "I am concerned about non-AP students who are also interested in college, but don't have the same ability to attract the attention the four stellar girls in your book did."

Thorpe replies that it's true in her experience that "it's easier for only the top-achieving undocumented students to gain the attention of private donors, and put together private dollars to pay for college."

Readers, even if you haven't read the book, you're invited to join the discussion and ask someone who spent five years following two undocumented students what impact their immigration status had on their educational prospects.

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An elementary school in Sterling, Va., has implemented strategies for teaching English-language learners schoolwide and found them to be beneficial for all students, according to an article published this month in the The Washington Post. The article describes how Sugarland Elementary School in Loudoun County schools in Virginia has implemented the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, a professional development approach for training teachers to work with ELLs that has swept the country. At Sugarland, the teachers implement the model by emphasizing the teaching of vocabulary, hands-on interaction, and partner work. (Hat tip to Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day.)

SIOP has generally been used as an approach to help middle and high school teachers to reach ELLs in regular content classes. It's interesting that an elementary school has adopted it, let alone one that it is using it with all students.

Some teachers have told me that not all students, particularly at the high school level, appreciate having to focus on language, such as doing extra vocabulary lessons, in class. They recognize some strategies are designed for ELLs and don't want to cooperate with them.

Readers, have any of you met resistance from non-ELLs in making your regular academic content more accessible to ELLs? What's been your experience in carrying out language lessons in a class that has a mix of ELLs and non-ELLs?

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More than a quarter of Arizona's students changed schools over a four-year period, but the state's English-language learners experienced more mobility than other students, a report released this week by the Institute of Education Sciences says. But the gap in mobility between ELLs and other students narrowed over the four years that the study was conducted, from the 2004-05 school year to the 2007-08 school year.

For ELLs, the mobility rate declined from 31.3 percent to 25.9 percent during that period, while for all other students the decline was from 27.7 to 25.0 percent. The study included in the category of ELLs all students who were classified at any time during the four-year period as having limited proficiency in English.

News reports that some immigrant families with undocumented members have left Arizona for other states because of the state's new immigration-enforcement law make me wonder if the gap in mobility rates between ELLs and non-ELLs might have widened again since the last school year that was examined in the study.

The study says the highest mobility rate for ELLs is in high school. More than a third (34.9 percent) moved from one school to another during the 2004-05 school year and 28.4 percent changed schools during the 2007-08 school year.

Mobility is important, the study points out, because it is associated with lower student achievement. The authors write that research shows ELLs benefit from a coherent plan of instruction. They add that it might be hard for ELLs to get that if they are on the move.

The authors note that little research has focused on understanding the mobility of ELLs.

I agree. This is the first study I've seen on this topic. The report was prepared by the Regional Educational Laboratory West, which is administered by WestEd.

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Ten teachers and the director in the Mexican-American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District in Arizona filed a lawsuit in federal court earlier this week challenging a law that targets ethnic studies in the state's public schools. The lawsuit names Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and the 10 members of the state board of education as defendants.

I got a chance today to read the lawsuit for the first time. I'd visited Mexican-American studies classes at Tucson Unified and wrote a story about them last month.

The lawsuit challenges a state law that will go into effect in December that bans Arizona's public schools from offering ethnic-studies courses that are designed for a particular ethnic or racial group, promote solidarity for a particular group, or foster resentment toward a particular group of people.

The teachers "believe that the act is the product of racial bias aimed specifically at Hispanics, is unlawful, results in impermissible deprivations of rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution," the lawsuit says. It contends the law violates the First and 14th amendments of the constitution, including equal protection and due process clauses. The lawsuit also says that Horne has no facts to establish that Tucson Unified has violated the state's ethnic-studies law.

Horne didn't respond to my request for comment today on the contents of the lawsuit.

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Here's a heads up that a discussion with Helen Thorpe about her book, Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, starts on Monday and runs all next week. The discussion will be hosted by Teacher as part of its book club series.

I reviewed the book, which features issues affecting students who don't have legal papers to live in this country, on this blog when I read it back in February.

The book offers insight into what it would mean for some undocumented students in the United States if the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, were passed by the U.S. Congress. That proposed legislation would provide a path to legalization for undocumented youths who meet certain criteria and serve in the military or attend college for at least two years.

Just this week, Gabriella Gomez, the assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs for the U.S. Department of Education, said that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan considers passage of the DREAM Act to be a "no-brainer."

"He doesn't understand why it hasn't been done yet. You have a strong advocate in the secretary and the president to get this done," Gomez said at a White House summit on Hispanic education.

Critics of the act say that it would provide amnesty for people who have broken U.S. laws.

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An out-of-school arts program received an award from the White House yesterday for helping to reduce the dropout rate of English-language learners in Boston Public Schools, according to the Boston Globe. If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you know that Boston Public Schools needs all the help it can get these days in serving English-language learners. The school district just settled with the U.S. departments of Justice and Education on an agreement for how to improve services for such students.

Project Alerta was among 15 recipients to receive the 2010 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, presented yesterday in the White House by First Lady Michelle Obama.

Project Alerta, run by the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides enrichment programming for 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders who are Latinos and English-language learners, according to its Web site.

Here's another news tidbit related to ELLs in Boston Public Schools that I have not yet shared with you. The school district has commissioned two Boston institutions to evaluate its programs for ELLs and identify schools that have improved the test scores of ELLs at a high rate, so the best practices of schools that serve ELLs in an exemplary way can be shared districtwide, Eileen De Los Reyes, Boston's assistant superintendent for English-language learners, told me when I interviewed her earlier this month.

The Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy and the Center for Collaborative Education will conduct the evaluation.

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An audit has found that recent efforts of the Portland, Ore., school district to improve services for English-language learners are not helping to narrow the achievement gap between those students and other students. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that the audit found the district doesn't have a consistent approach for providing services to ELLs.

In her response, Superintendent Carole Smith said the district is working to improve teacher training, monitoring of students, and collaboration, according to the article.

A state audit back in Feb. 2009 also featured the problem of consistency in the district's ELL programs.

Last year, state education officials put a hold on giving federal funds for English-language-acquisition programs to the Portland school district until the programs met federal standards. Then in May, the education officials decided that the school district had made enough improvements with how it educated ELLs that the money would flow again.

Portland is not the only urban school district with systemic problems in how it serves ELLs. Boston Public Schools recently settled with the U.S. departments of Justice and Education on how to bring services for ELLs in that school district into compliance with federal law. The office for civil rights of the Education Department has eight other compliance reviews under way focused on ELL services in school districts.

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Teachers are poised to file a lawsuit challenging Arizona's law that targets the teaching of ethnic studies in public schools, according to the Associated Press.

In December, a new law goes into effect that bans public schools in Arizona from teaching ethnic studies that are designed for a particular ethnic or racial group, promote ethnic solidarity, or foster resentment toward a certain ethnic or racial group. Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, has contended publicly that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District match that description and should be shut down. I visited the Tucson Unified school system and wrote about the controversy in September. Educators there say ethnic-studies courses make the school curriculum more relevant for Mexican-American students and are open to any student. I mentioned in that story that teachers from Tucson Unified expected to file a lawsuit challenging the law this month.

Horne put out a press release yesterday saying the Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos would file the lawsuit against the law targeting ethnic studies. He said that group is as "radical" as the ethnic studies courses it seeks to protect. Horne wrote that "this legal action proves they wish to preserve a program that segregates students based on ethnicity and which treats people as exemplars of their race as opposed to treating everyone as individuals."

Horne, by the way, is running as the Republican candidate for state attorney general.

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President Obama is expected to sign an executive order tomorrow that will establish a presidential advisory commission on Hispanic education and a federal interagency working group on improving Hispanic education and the lives of Latinos. Both entities would likely be up and running by the end of the calendar year, said Jose Rico, the deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
The order would renew the initiative, which was started with an executive order signed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have also signed executive orders for the initiative.

I spoke with Rico about the executive order, scheduled to be signed tomorrow at 1 p.m., Eastern time, at a national education summit hosted today by the initiative. The summit gave attendees a chance to ask questions of numerous high-level officials in the White House or federal agencies, including the U.S. departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor. Some in attendance were dubbing the format as "speed-dating" with federal officials because the federal officials moved from one group of attendees to another every 20 minutes. They had been given instructions to spend most of the time on taking questions and they adhered to those instructions.

One of those federal officials answering questions was Rosalinda Barrera, the assistant deputy secretary for the Education Department's office of English-language acquisition, who started her post eight weeks ago. She said she's focused on a "revitalization of the office." She was asked if the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would include any provisions to address the needs of long-term English-language learners, which is a group of students who may spend years learning English but never test as fluent in the language. Barrera said the Education Department is "looking into that," and emphasized that ELLs are a diverse group of students. In answering a question about teacher training, Barrera said that "all teachers must be prepared to work with ELLs."

Look for a story about the summit tomorrow at edweek.org.

For the last 18 months, the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics has visited more than 90 communities to gather information and ideas on how the education and lives of Latinos could be improved. "One thing we heard was 'stop it with the reports, we need action,' " said Rico.

He said that next steps for the initiative are to identify nine communities that it can partner with to support President Obama's goal to ensure that the United States is the top nation in the world in college completion by 2020. The charge to the communities, he said, is to be transparent about statistics for college completion and to publicly disclose a goal for improving the rate of college graduation.

San Antonio is the first community to have committed formally to that effort, said Rico. He said the city's mayor, Julian Castro, has announced goals of doubling the number of college graduates to 200,000 and reducing the high school dropout rate in half.

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Three assistant secretaries for the U.S. Department of Education are lined up to speak today at an education summit about how to boost college attainment among Hispanics. The summit is being hosted here in the nation's capital by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. The executive director for that initiative is Juan Sepulveda.

Under the initiative, Sepulveda and other White House officials visited more than 90 communities in 20 states over the past year to gather information and ideas on how to improve the lives of Latinos. Today's education summit, held at the Organization of American States building, is meant to be a "next step" in connecting communities nationwide to improve the educational attainment and lives of Latinos, a press release for the event says.

Tomorrow at 1 p.m., President Obama is scheduled to sign an executive order to renew the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.

Expected to speak at today's summit are Thelma Melendez, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education; Carmel Martin, the assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy deveopment; and Gabriella Gomez, the assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs.

UPDATE (3:30 p.m.): Read more about the summit and tomorrow's announcement in my new post.

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Dianne Piche had her last day on the job yesterday as the number two person in the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights. On Tuesday, she begins a new position leading the education policy team of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. (Hat tip to Alexander Russo's This Week in Education.)

She declined to say in a phone interview today why she stepped down from her job as the deputy assistant in the office for civil rights, which she started in May 2009.

In her new position, she'll be working with a coalition of civil rights groups to push for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, she said. "There's been considerable frustration that the law hasn't been reauthorized," she said. "Many advocates believe that it can and should be done in 2011."

She said that, in regard to English-language learners, civil rights groups will focus on ensuring that such students have access to high-quality language programs and teachers who are effective in giving them instruction.

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One- third of children in Australia have at least one immigrant parent, compared with 24 percent of children in the United States. In the United Kingdom the proportion is 16 percent while in Switzerland, it is 39 percent. Those are some facts that make for interesting reading in a special issue of Child Indicators Research that compares how children of immigrants are faring in eight affluent countries.

Donald J. Hernandez, a professor in the department of sociology at Hunter College, writes in an overview of the special issue that "not until 2009 did basic internationally comparable indicators become available to measure the number of children in immigrant families living in a range of affluent countries, and to assess their family and socioeconomic circumstances compared to children of native-born families."

Those new basic indicators are used in the special issue to compare children of immigrants in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

So what do some of those "child indicators" tell us?

They show, the article following the overview says, that children with at least one immigrant parent from low- and middle-income countries are about as likely or more likely than children in native-born families to live with two parents. That's the case with all the countries in the study except the Netherlands. The researchers say that fact is important because children living with two parents tend to be more successful in education than children in one-parent families, according to studies conducted in the United States and United Kingdom.

The indicators also show that in two affluent countries, Australia and the United Kingdom, immigrant teenagers ages 15-17 who came from low- and middle-income countries are more likely to be enrolled in school than their native-born counterparts in the settlement countries. In this example, native-born youths in the comparison include 2nd-generation youths who have at least one immigrant parent.

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The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing has decided to create a new teaching credential for teachers looking to provide English-language-development instruction at the secondary level. Many ELLs in junior high or high school in California take a separate ELD class in addition to their regular English/language arts class. The new credential would aim to prepare teachers to teach those special ELD classes.

Paula Jacobs, an ELL consultant to the commission, explained that while regular English/language arts classes typically teach students about literature, ELD classes commonly help students to understand the different kinds of language used in various content areas and support their developing literacy. (The way I think of it is that the ELD class has more of a communicative approach to English.)

The secondary ELD credential is a new option for teacher preparation that the commission approved at a Sept. 30 meeting and hopes will be rolled out at least by the fall of 2012, said Teri Clark, an administrator for the commission, which is independent from the California Department of Education. She said foreign-language teachers as well as English teachers are likely candidates to get the credential.

It seems to me that a teaching credential focused on secondary ELL students is quite unusual. I can't think of any other state that has one. States such as Maryland and Virginia provide a PreK-12 credential to work with ELLs.

The commission also decided at its September meeting to review current requirements for preparing elementary school teachers to work with ELLs and see how those requirements could be strengthened.

California has 1.5 million ELLs, more than any other state. Readers, let me know if you've heard of a state that has a focused credential for working with secondary ELLs.

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Two articles in a special issue on "response to intervention" just published by the education journal Theory Into Practice provide advice on how to carry out the education approach for English-language learners. With response to intervention, or RTI, schools provide interventions to struggling students with the aim of preventing their being referred to special education.

An article in Theory Into Practice by Manuel Barrera, a research associate at the National Center on Educational Outcomes at the University of Minnesota, and Kristin Kline Liu, a senior research fellow at the same center, cautions educators that response to intervention may be a risky approach for ELLs unless educators properly assess such students. They note that the track record of schools in assessing ELLs who also have disabilities is not good as schools often don't take into consideration the great diversity of such students.

The researchers list a number of pitfalls for the typical reading assessments used in RTI when applied to ELLs. "Whether data are collected in English or a different language, one cannot know from the data whether fluency and accuracy scores result from lack of reading experience, language, content experience, or suspected disability," they write.

The researchers say that with the implementation of RTI with ELLs, educators must include accurate and current assessment of students' language acquisition and "some form of cross-cultural probing" as part of assessment.

The researchers say that "dynamic testing" is a promising tool for assessing ELLs in RTI. It assesses students on how well they learn a specific learning task that is new to them rather than assessing what a student already knows (or doesn't know). In other words, the point is to get away from outcomes testing with ELLs because that kind of testing might test their prior knowledge more than their ability to learn.

In sum, the researchers say that with RTI, which typically encompasses three different "tiers" of instruction, "one has to ask, 'What happens when the student doesn't 'fit' neatly into any tier?' "

The second article about ELLs in the special issue is about how RTI can be used in a culturally-appropriate way. In it, Michael J. Orosco, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside, argues that for RTI to be effective with ELLs, teachers carrying it out must have received professional development in how to provide culturally relevant instruction. That means they must understand how children learn two languages and how that affects their reading in two languages. The instruction also needs to build on ELLs' experiences, he writes. Orosco's article echoes some of the same themes he included in a case study published last spring in the Journal of Learning Disabilities that described how one Midwestern elementary school carried out RTI for ELLs badly.

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The 19th edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival has been posted and is rich with links to resources for the English-learning classroom. The acronyms in the title of the carnival, founded by teacher Larry Ferlazzo, stand for English as a second language, English as a foreign language, and English-language learners.

Among the posts are "50 Essential Resources for ESL Students," and "Top 10 Websites to Learn English."

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While the Boston school district has settled with the U.S. departments of Justice and Education on how to fix civil rights violations for English-language learners, services for such students in eight other school districts are currently being investigated in compliance reviews by the Education Department's office for civil rights.

OCR officials released to me this week the names of the school districts, scattered from coast to coast, where investigations are taking place. In six school districts, they're looking into whether the districts are "ensuring access to equal educational opportunities" for ELLs, an e-mail from the Education Department said. Those six are:

Los Angeles Unified School District
Hazelton (Pa.) Area School District
DeQueen (Ark.) Public Schools
New London (Conn.) Public Schools
Tigard-Tualatin (Ore.) Public Schools
Lake Washington (Wash.) School District

The OCR also has compliance reviews in process in the Tulsa (Okla.) Public Schools and Dearborn (Mich.) Public Schools. In both those districts, as well as Hazelton (listed above), investigations are looking into whether communication is effective with parents of ELLs. In Dearborn, the investigation also concerns the quality of counseling services for ELLs.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department has told me the agency has opened 15 investigations into school districts concerning ELL services since President Obama took office in January 2009, but she declined to name the districts. The Justice and Education department probes on ELLs overlap in some locations, but I don't know where at this point, other than in Los Angeles and Boston.

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Patricia Gándara spells out in a Q&A posted by the University of California, Los Angeles, what she believes is at stake for English-language learners in Arizona in the federal court case, Horne v. Flores. She speculates that Arizona's four-hour program for teaching ELLs could become "the preferred instructional model for Arizona and other states as well if sanctioned by the federal court."

Keep in mind that Gándara, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, is taking the side of parents and students of the Nogales Unified School District in the case. Those parents and students first filed a lawsuit back in 1992 saying ELLs weren't getting an adequate education in Arizona.

Gándara contends, based on studies conducted by the Civil Rights Project, that Arizona's requirement that ELLs spend four hours each day learning English is not working. She says that ELLs may be getting only about a half hour of content instruction each day, usually in math, besides their lessons in English. "The state should not be instituting a single program—without other options—that has no research evidence to support it and denies students access to mainstream peers and regular curriculum," she says in the Q&A.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Arizona's department of education have argued that the four-hour program is working, contains instruction in the content areas as well as English, and has boosted achievement for ELLs.

The case, known nationally as Horne v. Flores, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2009. The federal justices remanded it to the U.S. District Court in Tucson in June of last year to examine "changed circumstances" since the case was filed. In Arizona, the case is referred to as Miriam Flores v. State of Arizona.

I traveled to Tucson and wrote a story for EdWeek about the first day of the evidentiary hearing on Sept. 1. The hearing is now on break but will resume shortly before Thanksgiving.

I'll keep you posted.

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The editors of a much-referenced review of research on teaching literacy to English-language learners will be guests for an upcoming Webinar on that topic about three weeks from now, hosted by WestEd. If your school district has cut your travel budget for teachers to attend national conferences about ELLs, this may be the way to go.

Diane August, a senior research scientist for the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, and Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, will provide information on the Webinar—scheduled for Oct. 27, 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern time—about effective research-based approaches to teaching ELLs reading and writing. They are the editors of Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2006.

For the Webinar, they'll be focusing on approaches that they wrote about in a chapter of a more recent publication, a guide released by the California Department of Education this year, Improving Education for English Learners: Research-Based Approaches. On this blog, I've featured a chapter from that book about instruction of ELLs in secondary schools.

WestEd has five additional Webinars planned with authors of chapters in the California guide as guests. The live events are scheduled through February.

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Boston English-language learners who since 2003 didn't get the ELL services that they were entitled to under federal law are eligible to receive makeup services under a settlement agreement signed today by Boston Public Schools with the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education. The agreement says the school district must provide those "compensatory services" before the students graduate from high school.

The agreement doesn't say exactly how many students must be offered the makeup services but Eileen De Los Reyes, the Boston district's assistant superintendent for ELLs, said the number is 8,300 students. That breaks down to 4,000 students who were not identified as ELLs because of testing issues, and 4,300 students who were inappropriately categorized as having "opted out" of programs, she said.

The agreement says the services will be offered during out-of-school hours.

The 44-page agreement contains plenty of other mandates for Boston's 135 schools, including that, starting this school year, all schools must provide services for ELLs, even if they have only small numbers of such students. Previously, educators deemed some ELLs to have "opted out" of services because their parents sent them to a school that didn't provide services. The federal agencies have made it clear they won't have any more of that.

You can read about the other mandates in an article about the agreement I just wrote for EdWeek.

Given that the Justice Department has opened investigations of ELL services in 14 school districts, in addition to Boston, since President Obama took office in January 2009, it's probably not a bad idea for any school district to carefully study the settlement agreement from Boston. It gives a sense of how the current administration is interpreting the implementation of federal civil rights laws for ELLs.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Department of Justice and Education reached a settlement agreement today on how Boston Public Schools will fix violations of the civil rights of English-language learners, according to a press release issued this morning from the Justice Department.

Since 2003, the Boston school district "has failed to properly identify and adequately serve thousands of English Language Learner (ELL) students as required by the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," the release says. The Boston school district cooperated with a joint investigation by the Justice and Education departments into those violations.

The issues of not properly identifying ELLs and having students "opt out" of services when they were entitled by federal law to have them date back to 2003, according to the release. About 4,300 students were not properly identified and about 4,000 students were inappropriately labeled as having opted out of services. I wrote about those problems in an EdWeek article published in July, "Reviews Find ELL Programs Lacking in Four Districts."

The school district has agreed to a number of practices to address the problems. They include assessing students in the four domains of listening, speaking, reading, and writing (not just speaking and listening) to determine if they need ELL services, and providing sheltered English classes to ELLs in core content classes, such as math and science. That means that teachers of those classes will use techniques specifically designed to reach ELLs.

I'm now trying to see if I can get a copy of the settlement agreement to share with readers of edweek.org. Stay tuned for a story on this topic that I expect will be published this afternoon.

The Justice Department has opened investigations into the services provided to ELLs in 15 school districts since President Obama took office in January 2009, so we may be seeing more of these kinds of settlement agreements coming down the pike from other school districts as well.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend