I found it refreshing to read in the Carnegie Reporter, a magazine of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, an article about educating immigrant students that didn't mention the No Child Left Behind Act. The article makes a case for why it still makes sense to provide a free K-12 education for undocumented immigrant students. It relays the context in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe that schools were obliged to educate such students. Not doing so, the court said, would promote "the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our ...

A report released by EdSource today could provide leverage for adminstrators who are trying to get teachers to buy into the idea that it's worth their time to examine student test data and use it to make decisions about their teaching. (I can already hear the groans of teachers who worry about losing their creative spirit.) The study, "Similar English Learner Students, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better?," marries the results of a survey of California principals and teachers about their practices in educating English-language learners with how well their English-language learners perform in California's accountability system. Interestingly, ...

A book and a couple of films gave me some insight recently into the challenge that immigrant children face in adjusting emotionally to U.S. culture, which can affect how well they do in school. The book was A Home on the Field, by Paul Cuadros, who writes about the lives of undocumented youths who were members of the soccer team he formed and coached at Jordan-Matthews High School in Siler City, N.C. When the team took a state soccer title, the boys felt, psychologically, that they had something to contribute to their new community. TIME Magazine ran an ...

It's a tricky matter for educators to determine if an English-language learner has only a language issue that affects learning--or a disability. In last week's Education Week, I wrote about Missouri's efforts to help educators improve how they evaluate English-language learners for special education, an area where Missouri has a problem with underrepresentation. Ten percent of English-language learners nationwide receive special education, compared with 13 percent of all children, according to data from the 2004-2005 school year collected by the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. I came across a document in my reporting that ...

Today--April 30--is designated by the American Library Association as a day to highlight the importance of helping every child learn to read regardless of his or her linguistic or cultural background. It's called El dia de los ninos/El dia de los libros or Children's Day/Book Day and is a day in which libraries in several hundred locations will feature bilingual literacy, according to Melanie Anderson, a lobbyist for the American Library Association. Her association will hold an event to highlight bilingual literacy today in the U.S. Capitol at 3 p.m....

Jorge Bustamante, an independent expert from the United Nations, begins a three-week mission today to examine the rights of migrants and immigrants in this country. His official title is the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. According to the April 27 press release from his office, he comes at the invitation of the U.S. government and will try to see firsthand what the conditions are for migrants and immigrants by visiting border areas near Nogales, Ariz., and San Diego, Calif., as well as several cities that are popular destinations for immigrants. I'm curious about how much Mr. ...

The speech that Tom Horne, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, gave at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, in which he criticizes implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act for English-language learners, takes me back to the 1970s. I remember how in that decade, my high school teachers talked about various kinds of dysfunction in Russian society, such as how people at times had to stand in long lines to buy bread. In his speech, Mr. Horne compares implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act with attempts by the government of the former Soviet Union to micromanage the Russian economy. ...

Alexander Russo's post today on This Week in Education piqued my interest regarding how the Virginia Department of Education is instructing school administrators to include English-language learners in testing this spring. I've previously noted that after several Virginia school districts put up a good fight in defiance of a federal mandate to give the state's regular reading test to beginning English-language learners this school year, the districts now have agreed to comply with the requirement. The writers of an editorial published in the Washington Post today opined that the Virginia districts did the right thing by backing down. I got ...

It may seem obvious that immigrant youths who are "out of school" aren't going to get much educational help, but a couple of researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California suggest in a research brief and study that educators should try to figure out how to reach such youths anyway. The researchers define out-of-school immigrant youths as young people ages 13-22 who are born abroad and don't have a high school diploma or a General Educational Development certificate. They note that the mission of the federal migrant education program officially expanded in recent years to include out-of-school immigrant youths. ...

Most presenters at a session about the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on English-language learners at an American Educational Research Association meeting in Chicago April 9-13 were sharply critical of the federal education law, according to their slide presentations from that meeting that have been posted by the Institute for Language and Education Policy. For example, in his case study about two Cambodian 5th graders who take the regular math test of Texas after attending U.S. schools for 6 months, Wayne E. Wright, an assistant professor in bicultural-bilingual studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio, ...