I'm taking a vacation and don't expect to be blogging again until Thursday, March 26. But hopefully I've left you with a couple of topics, such as how stimulus funds can be used to benefit English-language learners, that you can ponder while I'm gone. (Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com)...

A group of researchers who are experts on English-language learners and well-respected in the education field are poised to release recommendations this week on how states and school districts should use stimulus funds to improve education for English-language learners. The group of 14 researchers drew up the recommendations because they didn't want ELLs to lose out on the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, said Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, who helped convene the group and sent me the document. "We wanted to provide some input. We were quite disappointed there ...

In schools with a small number of English-language learners, first-generation immigrant students do better academically if they aren't placed in English-as-a-second-language classes, according to a study published in the March issue of Educational Policy. Their counterparts in mainstream classes without ESL do better academically than students who are put in ESL classes; this finding is true only in schools with a low number of ELLs. The study's authors say they do not interpret the finding to mean that English-language learners do not need special support services. Rather, they argue that those services available in schools with few immigrant students appear ...

New York state Assemblywoman Carmen E. Arroyo claimed in both Spanish and English this month that Maria Santos, who oversees programs for English-language learners in New York City, was lying after she presented an hourlong report at a public hearing about how services for such students are improving in the city. The hearing was looking at whether the 2002 law that gave New York City's mayor control over the public school system should be renewed. Jennifer Medina of the New York Times reported March 13 on the tensions expressed at the hearing regarding services for ELLs in the newspaper's City ...

The United States received 13,823 refugees from Iraq in fiscal 2008, up from 1,608 the previous year, according to the Migration Policy Institute, which has gathered information about Iraqi immigrants in this country. The United States has also authorized 5,000 special immigrant visas each year through 2012 for Iraqis who were U.S. government contractors in Iraq for a minimum of one year since the start of the war. The arrival of thousands of Iraqi refugees means that some of you are receiving Iraqi children in your classrooms for English-language learners. For some background information on them, ...

I explore in an article published today at edweek.org how researchers met recently at Brown University to discuss how educators and policymakers can better support children and grandchildren of immigrants in school so that they do as well academically as the first arrivals to this country. I attended this conference in part because I'm particularly interested in how schools might better support English-language learners who are born in this country. Nearly two-thirds of English-language learners are born in the United States, yet most news coverage and public attention focuses on the new arrivals. This message was conveyed in an ...

Yesterday, The New York Times launched what will be an on-going series of articles and opportunities for on-line discussion about immigration, with the first installment including commentary from experts and practitioners on how best to teach English-language learners. See "The Best Ways to Teach Young Newcomers." Linda Mikels, the principal of Sixth Street Prep School, a charter elementary school in Victorville, Calif., makes the case that English-only instruction for ELLs has been successful in her school. Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco, co-directors of immigration studies at New York University, argue that the best results for ELLs come from dual-immersion programs. In ...

A teenager of Lao descent, who was born in the United States, refuses to take an English-language-proficiency test and gets suspended from her high school in Storm Lake, Iowa. Then about a dozen students protest in front of the school to show their support for the student. (Hat tip to TESOL in the News Blog.) As most of you know, schools are required by the federal government to give an English-proficiency test to students if parents say on a home-language survey that a language other than English is spoken at home. From the point of view of one of the ...

A few blog entries ago, I noted that teachers with certification to teach ELLs had more job security than those without it during layoffs at one California school district. A blog reader sent me a news article reporting that the school board of Community Unit School District 300 in Carpentersville, Ill., recently voted to lay off 46 teachers, including all its 32 general education first-year teachers. The March 11 article in the Northwest Herald notes that the layoffs didn't include special education or bilingual teachers. Update: But in Moreno Valley Unified School District in California the school board approved the ...

For years I've been hearing educators of English-language learners complain about how many Americans don't recognize the valuable native-language skills of these students. They ask: What better way is there to reverse Americans' reputation for being fiercely monolingual but for the nation to tap into the language skills of immigrant communities? Well, as I report this week in Education Week, some legislators and policymakers in the state of Maryland are poised to take better advantage of the skills of "heritage speakers," people who speak a language other than English at home. A Maryland task force has written a report with ...