Just seven out of more than 520 elementary teacher preparation programs earned a top score for the attention they pay to getting teacher candidates—in both undergraduate and undergraduate programs—ready to meet the needs of the large and growing population of English-language learners in public schools, according to a new and controversial review of teacher education programs published earlier today.

Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, California State University-Dominguez Hills, California State University-Northridge, Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., North Carolina State University at Raleigh, New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, and the University of Maryland-College Park, each earned a top score of four stars for the instruction they provide to teacher candidates on ELLs in the newly published review of teacher preparation programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Thirty-five states are home to at least one elementary program in the NCTQ sample at either the undergraduate or graduate level that garnered four stars when it comes to ELLs.

The hotly contested review has gone viral today, and Ed Week's teacher policy reporter Stephen Sawchuk has a thorough description of the findings, along with a range of reaction.

NCTQ used 18 standards to judge the quality of teacher preparation programs. Standard 3 focuses on English-language learners, and specifically, whether teacher prep programs require reading courses for elementary teacher candidates that include strategies to meet the needs of ELLs. To score programs on the ELL standard, NCQT simply looked at whether syllabi for required courses included the presentation of literacy strategies for English-learners either through lectures or practice. That methodology is one of the major sources of criticism of the review.

Of the 527 teacher prep programs that NCQT judged on the ELL standard, more than three-quarters earned no stars at all. NCQT explains that the most common reason for programs failing to earn any stars on the ELL standard is because lectures and practice "inadequately address how to teach reading to English-language learners."

In its main report, NCTQ specifically calls out New Mexico and the "alarming" lack of preparation for teaching ELLs in most of that state's programs, noting that the state has the highest proportion of Hispanic residents in the country.

Curiously, a program like California State University-Dominguez Hills, which earned the highest possible marks on the ELL standard as well as a few other standards, falls short in NCTQ's overall methodology and is ultimately judged to be weak, as Stephen astutely points out in his story.

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Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval has signed legislation that will, for the first time in the state's history, provide funds specifically for students who are English-language learners.

It's a notable turn of events in Nevada, which is one of just a small handful of states that did not provide targeted funding to pay for the education of ELLs, something that educators and advocates have been seeking for years as the population of English-learners grew exponentially. The ELL-rich districts that will benefit most are Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, and Washoe County, where Reno is located.

Nevada in the last 10 to 15 years saw explosive growth in its ELL population—much of it driven by immigration from Mexico—which now stands at more than 20 percent of the state's K-12 enrollment. That percentage is projected to grow even more. And with one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the nation (the ELL grad rate is just 29 percent) and an economy that was among the hardest hit by the recent recession, Nevada had compelling demographic and economic reasons to start providing additional funds to its ELL students.

Sandoval, a Republican, first proposed a fiscal 2014 state budget with a modest ELL funding stream of $14 million, but revised it upward to $50 million. The governor publicly pushed for lawmakers to approve state funding for ELLs, which in previous go-rounds got caught up in partisan debates about immigration.

He tweeted recently that "ELL students face challenges wholly different than their peers. Our obligation is no less important. Proud to be 1st #nvgov to fund ELL.-BES."

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Asians became the fastest-growing race or ethnic group last year in the United States, according to new U.S. Census Bureau estimates, with a population increase of more than a half million people, or 2.9 percent, between July 2011 and July 2012.

The rate of Asian population growth outstripped that for the Hispanic population—which grew by more than 1.1 million people, or 2.2 percent—over the same one-year period.

What is particularly notable about the growth in the Asian population is that more than 60 percent of it came from migration from other countries. In 2012, there were 18.9 million Asians in the United States, according to the census estimates. Hispanics now number more than 53 million, or 17 percent of the population, and remain the nation's second-largest race or ethnic group behind non-Hispanic whites.

Across the United States, the overall minority population rose to 116 million, or 37 percent, in July 2012, with more than 11 percent of the nation's counties becoming majority-minority, the Census Bureau reported.

Even more striking is the nation's youngest population of children 5 years old and under. That demographic slice is now nearly 50 percent minority. Census officials said that if current growth trends continue, the crossover to majority-minority for that age group will happen within two to three years.

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Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who favors the bipartisan immigration reform bill, gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate earlier today entirely in Spanish.

In voicing his support for the comprehensive immigration reform bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators, Kaine, a former governor of Virginia, probably made history by being the first senator in recent times to deliver an entire speech in a language other than English on the Senate floor, according to The Washington Post.

Kaine worked with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras during the 1980s and clearly puts a high value on keeping up his language skills and communicating with his Spanish-speaking constituents. Much of his Senate website is translated into Spanish. He told the Post he wrote the speech with assistance from two Spanish-speaking staff members.

Kaine's speech followed the introduction of a new amendment to the immigration bill—from Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and Cuban immigrant who is part of the so-called "Gang of Eight" senators who authored the measure—that would require undocumented immigrants to learn English before they could earn permanent residency status. The current version of the bill would require immigrants to either demonstrate English proficiency or be enrolled in a language course. The Rubio amendment would eliminate signing up for a language class as a sufficient condition for the language requirement of seeking a green card.

As debate got underway in the full Senate for what is expected to be a weeks-long affair, President Obama held a White House event to push the Senate to approve the bill. He singled out two DREAMers—the young, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children—who appeared with him at the event as reasons for Congress to act.

As proposed, the Senate bill would create a path to citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Immigrants who are DREAMers would have a speedier path to citizenship—roughly five years—if they can meet the various conditions spelled out in the bill such as having already graduated from high school, earned a GED, completed two years of college, or spent four years in the military.

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English-learners in Los Angeles Unified posted important academic gains in 2012-13 that Superintendent John Deasy said point to an upward trajectory for a huge group of students that have had a history of languishing in the nation's second largest school system.

In a recent memo written to staff members that was published at LA School Report, Deasy wrote that the district's English-learners increased their proficiency rates on one of the district's English/language arts periodic assessments at a faster clip than all students. As a group, elementary ELLs posted a 13-point gain in ELA proficiency rates, up to 38 percent this year over 25 percent last year, according to the memo.

At the elementary level on the same periodic assessment, Deasy reports that the numbers of ELLs who scored in the bottom rungs of "far below basic" and "below basic" dropped significantly, from 37 percent last year to 26 percent this year. At the secondary level, the gains were more modest.

Los Angeles Unified is two years into the rollout of a "master plan" for English-learners that was the result of an enforcement action by the U.S. Department of Education's civil rights office to improve instruction and services for ELLs. For a district with nearly 200,000 English-learners—close to 30 percent of overall enrollment—outcomes for ELLs have a huge impact on how well Los Angeles does as a whole.

The district has especially struggled with long-term English-learners—those who remain in school for six or more years without ever reaching proficiency. One issue explored by federal civil rights officials in their probe of ELL performance in Los Angeles Unified was the ongoing academic struggles and lack of targeted support for middle and high school students who lag in achievement even after being reclassified as proficient in English.

In his memo, Deasy says several middle and high school teachers piloted new curriculum this school year that will be used districtwide in the fall for two new courses that district officials have developed for long-term ELLs. California became the first state in the nation to require school districts to break out and report data annually on long-term ELLs. The state also created a common, statewide definition for such students and requires school districts to flag those at risk of becoming long-term ELLs.

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Democratic and Republican versions of bills to renew the No Child Left Behind Act have rolled out this week, signaling again, as Education Week's congressional analyst extraordinaire Alyson Klein explains, that there's likely zero chance any actual reauthorizing of the federal education law will happen in the current Congress.

Nonetheless, I still wanted to comb through to see how the proposals envision instruction, assessment, and accountability for the 10 percent of public school students who are English-language learners.

The Democratic version of the bill, unveiled by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate education committee, would change the landscape quite a bit.

For starters, Title I schools serving English-learners—even those that haven't been the recipients of Title III dollars (the federal aid for districts that is reserved for programs that serve ELLs)—would be held accountable for how well ELLs are progressing toward reaching English-language proficiency. This could potentially put a whole lot more schools on the hook for how well they are educating ELLs.

Harkin's measure also says that states must adopt English-language development standards that articulate no fewer than four levels of proficiency. States already are required to have proficiency standards, and many are already in the process of updating them to be in line with the Common Core State Standards. Two different groups of states have joined forces to do this work, along with designing new English-language proficiency assessments. It also calls for states to use "standardized" and "evidence-based" entrance and exit procedures for determining which students are English-learners and deciding criteria for when they are proficient and no longer need services. Again, this move toward a more uniform way of identifying ELLs and when they reach proficiency is already starting to occur as a result of common standards and assessments.

Content assessments, as called for in the Harkin bill, would have to be provided in native languages in states where 10 percent of the English-learner population shares a native language and 10,000 students speak that language. The tests would be for those ELLs who "cannot yet access the content in English" and their results would be incorporated into accountability systems. For most states, there would at least have to be Spanish-language assessments, and a few would likely have to provide exams in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. It's important to note, though, that native-language assessments aren't always a valid and reliable measure of an ELL's content knowledge either, especially when they receive little to no instruction in their home language.

The bill also places some responsibility for developing English-language proficiency skills on early-childhood educators, as well as for higher education institutions which enroll students who did not reach proficiency in high school and would seem to divert Title III dollars from districts to do that.

Disaggregation of ELL data would go deeper to show the performance of female ELLs versus male ELLs, and would break down the categories of ELL performance by language-proficiency levels as well. The measure would also add an accountability category for former English-learners—those students who've reached fluency and moved out of instructional services. This is something that researchers especially have sought. Under current NCLB accountability rules, districts report on the achievement of ELLs for two years after they are reclassified as proficient. For schools that have done well by these students, they don't get any credit for their longer-term success, and for those who've not done well by them, they escape accountability beyond that period.

Overall, the measure seems to really emphasize English-language acquisition more than academic content achievement for ELLs, notes Gabriela Uro, the director of ELL policy and research for the Council of the Great City Schools. That emphasis could be a problem in the common core era, she notes.

"In the common core, ELLs can't be held back from learning content at the levels the standards require because your English isn't perfect," she said. "We can't have an overemphasis on language proficiency."

I haven't had a chance yet to go through the Republican bill, which just went public this morning. I'll come back to that one later.

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His comments aren't likely to ignite a new battle in the bilingual education wars, but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan over breakfast yesterday gave perhaps his clearest statements to date on the benefits of dual-language development and instruction, especially for students who are English-language learners.

English-learners, he said in a meeting with reporters, come to school with a major asset—their home languages—that educators should capitalize on, especially in the early grades.

"[It] is clearly an asset that these kids are coming to school with," and one that should be "maintained" so that English-learners can become truly bilingual, Duncan said.
"The fact that our kids don't grow up [bilingual] puts them at a competitive disadvantage," he said, noting that it's common practice in many other countries for students to learn at least one other language.

His position is backed by research, most recently by a federally funded analysis that concludes that young English-learners still developing oral and literacy skills in their home languages benefit most from early-childhood programs that regularly expose them to both languages. In fact, the secretary put more emphasis on the benefits of providing bilingual education to English-learners in early-childhood programs, which does not spark the heated controversies and debate that it has in the K-12 space.

Over the course of 45 minutes and a bowl of cinnamon-speckled oatmeal topped with chopped green apples, Mr. Duncan spoke about a range of issues related to Hispanic students, including the potential he thinks the Obama administration's universal preschool initiative holds for the Latino community. Nationally, children born into Latino families are less likely than their peers in other ethnic groups to take part in early-childhood programs that prepare them for school.

"Less than half of Hispanic children attend any sort of early-childhood education," Duncan said. "It's sort of staggering, and then we wonder why we have achievement gaps in kindergarten."

He stressed the need to create more early-childhood programs in Latino neighborhoods and communities, whether they are provided by public schools, community organizations, or nonprofits. During his time as schools chief in Chicago, the district began offering evening prekindergarten—from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.—in some Hispanic communities where there were long waiting lists for morning and afternoon programs.

"People thought we were crazy," he said. "But we had a huge take-up on that. You have to be creative about how you provide the opportunities."

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In a state that already has one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation, the success of English-learners will have an outsize influence on any progress Nevada makes in driving up the numbers of diplomas that its students earn.

That's because the number of ELL students is large, and still growing—20 percent of the statewide student population in 2010-11, according to state data. But the four-year cohort graduation rate for ELLs in the class of 2010-11 was just 29 percent. (Of course, that rate doesn't reflect the graduation rates of former ELLs whose performance isn't broken out in the state's report card.)

That demographic imperative seems to have caught the attention of state leaders, especially Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval who is pushing to dramatically increase spending on English-learners in Nevada's schools. The state is one of a handful of holdouts in the country that doesn't provide additional funding to districts to pay for the education of English-learners, according to this Associated Press story which more deeply explores the debate over ELLs in Nevada.

Sandoval, who initially proposed a modest $14 million in extra state funding for ELL programs across the state, recently revised his proposal upward to $50 million.

That figure, though, is the subject of much debate, particularly among advocates and Democratic legislators who say the state needs to invest much, much more into its English-learner programs in order to help districts like Clark and Washoe counties meet the unique needs of their ELL students. Among the strategies that the state and districts are contemplating for improving outcomes for English-learners is more investment in prekindergarten programs for such students and helping more general education teachers earn TESOL certifications.

Students in Lisa Cabrera-Terry's first grade class line up for recess at Jay W. Jeffers Elementary School in Las Vegas. Nevada is home to the highest density of English language learners in the country. But with graduation rates among those students standing at 29 percent, and with no state funding earmarked to help them, some are hinting at a civil rights lawsuit.
--Julie Jacobson/AP

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The U.S. Department of Education's process to find a new contractor to manage the National Clearinghouse for English-Language Acquisition seems to be one without end.

For the second time in the past six months, a protest of the department's contracting process has prompted agency officials to say they will hold a "do over" of sorts in their competition to award a $1.5 million contract for the clearinghouse, known best as NCELA. That decision means NCELA won't likely have a new contractor overseeing its operations until well into the summer.

A spokesman for the Education Department has not responded to my request to more fully explain the contracting situation.

The clearinghouse—which has been managed by researchers and consultants at George Washington University for years—was created by Congress to be the go-to source on language instruction and research related to English-language learners, as well as a reliable source of data on ELLs. English-learners are the fastest growing group of students in public schools.

But for almost a year, the status of the clearinghouse has been in limbo since the Department declined to re-up the NCELA contract with George Washington University and opened a new competition for interested bidders. The department put a priority on awarding the contract to a small business. From the beginning, the department's process was a rocky one that has been protested four times by a single bidder for the new contract, a Washington-based company called edCount.

The first protest led the department to acknowledge an error in selecting the small business size standard under which it intended to limit the NCELA competition. Then last fall, after the Department first awarded the NCELA contract to Leed Management Consulting, a small business in Silver Spring, Md., edCount filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, saying it had been wrongfully excluded from consideration and challenging the award to Leed. That GAO protest prompted the first pledge from department officials to take "corrective action" and review the entire contracting process, including whether any of the original bidders had incorrectly been excluded. That review should have been done at the end of January, but instead dragged on into April when edCount learned, once again, that it would not be considered as an awardee for the contract. The company again filed a protest with the GAO, saying the education department had wrongfully shut them out of the competition.

In the meantime, Leed, which had had its original $1.5 million for the contract cut by $560,000 last November, was defunded altogether by the Education Department in March. Around the same time, more than $350,000 was authorized to GWU for the clearinghouse through the middle of June, according to usaspending.gov, a searchable database of contracts and grants awarded by the federal government.

Which brings us to the latest wrinkle in the NCELA saga. As they did last fall when the GAO was reviewing edCount's protest, the Education Department's lawyers have written a letter (dated May 7) to the watchdog agency saying the department would take "corrective action" and re-evaluate whether any bidders were incorrectly excluded from the competition.

As I reported late last year, some researchers, advocates, and ELL administrators in states view the bungled NCELA contracting process as symptomatic of the Education Department's lack of focus and attention to the unique needs of English-learners.

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A group made up of undocumented Asian youths living in New York and other eastern states has launched a new social media campaign meant to push their stories into the public eye as the debate over immigration reform rages on in Washington.

The project, called Raise Our Story, features young Asian immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. They share their experiences as undocumented youths through photos and first-person essays that underscore the heavy toll that having no legal status exacts on them. Advocates for undocumented Asian youth—from countries as diverse as the Phillipines and South Korea—say their stories are less well-known than their undocumented peers who were brought from Mexico and Central and South American countries.

What's clear from reading these narratives is how common it is for these undocumented youths to not even know about their precarious status as undocumented immigrants until they are preparing to do things they always assumed would be theirs to do: go to college, apply for financial aide, or get a job.

"I nearly broke under the weight of my undocumented status," wrote Emily Seonhye Park, a resident of Queens in New York City who earned a private scholarship to pay for college, but has struggled since to find a job or a way to attend graduate school. "I lived in this invisible bubble, screaming inside: 'Please, someone save me.'"

The narrative project was created by Revolutionizing Asian Immigrant Stories on the East Coast, or RAISE. The group receives support from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or AALDEF. In addition to social media, the stories are being featured on Huffington Post.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today embarked on a third week of deliberations over the proposed immigration overhaul crafted by a bipartisan group of senators. The panel has been plowing through hundreds of proposed amendments. One amendment still to be considered would expand the bill's version of the DREAM Act to "little DREAMers," or those young children who were brought more recently to the U.S. illegally and can't meet the measure's conditions as currently written to be eligible for a speedier pathway to citizenship. The five-year path to citizenship would apply only to DREAMers who arrived as children but are now older than 16 and have either completed high school, earned a GED certificate, served in the military, or attended college for at least two years.

Photo: Neriel David Ponce, 18, of Staten Island, N.Y., came from the Phillipines at age 5. He didn't learn he was undocumented until he was a sophomore in high school, a revelation that he says made attending school feel "pointless."

Photo credit: Jill Damatac Futter for Raise Our Story.

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