Learning the Language

By December 4, 2008 at 1:00 PM

The Web link is now live to sign up for a Dec. 11 webinar in which U.S. Department of Education staff will answer questions about the supplement-not-supplant provision of Title III under the No Child Left Behind Act. Specifically, the department staff will discuss guidance released this fall about the provision. The webinar will take place from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and is being hosted by the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, which has a contract with the federal education department to provide technical assistance to states. Dec. 10 Update: The Education ...

By December 3, 2008 at 10:05 AM

The Council of the Great City Schools is conducting a study of four urban school districts that it deems as having success with English-language learners at the elementary school level, and it will produce a report on what has led to their success with these students. The organization expects to release the study's results at its annual conference next fall. But in the meantime, I'd thought you'd want to know which school districts have been selected. They are the Dallas, New York City, San Francisco, and St. Paul, Minn., school districts. The council chose the school districts based on achievement ...

By December 2, 2008 at 1:40 PM

Cecilia Munoz has been selected to be the director of intergovernmental affairs for Barack Obama's administration, according to the Washington Post. She's now the senior vice president at the National Council of La Raza and was a 2000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner. In her new job, she will be in charge of the White House office responsible for relations between the Obama administration and state and local governments. A 2005 piece on National Public Radio provides insight into her motivation to stand up for the rights of immigrants. Education Week has quoted Ms. Munoz over the years on issues ...

By December 2, 2008 at 1:39 PM

Bill Sizemore is not a familiar name to all of you. But his name is familiar to educators of English-language learners in Oregon. He was the sponsor of Measure 58, a ballot item that was rejected by Oregon voters on Nov. 4. If approved, it would have put a cap of two years on the amount of time that ELLs in that state could have received instruction in their native languages. A Dec. 1 article in the Oregonian says that Mr. Sizemore was jailed after a county judge found him in contempt of court for the fourth time. The article ...

By December 2, 2008 at 10:05 AM

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation highlighted Brownsville Independent School District's success with Hispanic and low-income students when announcing that the district had won the 2008 Broad Prize for Urban Education. But the district couldn't have won the prize if it hadn't had success with its English-language learners, who make up 42 percent of the district's 49,000 students. I wrote what I learned about the school district's programs for ELLs in "It's No Secret: Progress Prized In Brownsville," which was published yesterday at edweek.org. The district has a very well-articulated transitional bilingual education program in the elementary grades ...

By December 1, 2008 at 1:43 PM

Kris Gutierrez is an expert on the education of English-language learners and has been selected to be a member of the education policy working group of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team. She's a professor of social-research methodology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She's also one of the 11 members of the U.S. Department of Education's Reading First Advisory Committee. I quoted her in October 2007 in an article I wrote about how many educators and experts felt that Reading First, a program authorized by the No Child Left Behind Act, had to be refined to be more ...

By December 1, 2008 at 11:56 AM

For this 8th edition of the ELL/ESL/EFL carnival, bloggers provide answers to some of the questions I presume that educators of English-learners might have. OK, I admit that the first question may not exactly have been on the tip of your tongue, but it could help some ELL teachers to stretch in how they engage students. Q: What are ways to get ELLs involved in making text-to-speech animated movies? A: Nik Peachey has put together a tutorial video to help you envision how this technology can work in the English-as-a-foreign-language or English-as-a-second-language classroom. He also has ideas for ...

By November 26, 2008 at 2:48 PM

Friday, Nov. 28, is the deadline for submissions to a blogging carnival on the education of English-language learners. Use this form for submissions. Look for a post of the eighth edition of this niche carnival, founded by Larry Ferlazzo, around noon on Monday, Dec. 1. I'm taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday and will be back to blogging on that day. Happy Thanksgiving!...

By November 26, 2008 at 9:13 AM

Staff of the U.S. Department of Education are scheduled to answer questions about permissible uses of Title III funds at a webinar on Dec. 11 hosted by the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. Title III is the section of the No Child Left Behind Act that authorizes funds for English-language acquisition programs. But the money may not be used in place of money from other local, state, or federal sources that would otherwise be spent on programs for ELLs. It's a tricky matter. The webinar will take place from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Standard ...

By November 25, 2008 at 10:28 AM

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano has been a key figure in the long-standing controversy in Arizona over how to provide adequate funding for the education of English-language learners in the state. So when I heard that President-elect Barack Obama reportedly was picking her to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, I wondered what her absence in Arizona might mean for Flores v. Arizona, the federal lawsuit regarding funding for ELLs. If Ms. Napolitano, a Democrat, leaves her post as governor, the next person in line for the job is Arizona's secretary of state, Jan Brewer, who is a Republican. ...

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