Six large education organizations--including the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the National School Boards Association--contend that any measure reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act should ensure that educators won't have to test English-language learners until after they show "comprehension of English." They don't spell out how many months of instruction would enable the average English-language learner to be able to understand English or how educators would determine if students can do that. View the groups' May 18 statement on reauthorization of NCLB here....

A research-based initiative being piloted in 15 schools in six school districts in California requires participating schools to commit to "bilingualism, biliteracy, and multiculturalism" in teaching English-language learners, according to Jan Gustafson, the director of the project, called the PROMISE Initiative. (Its long name is: Pursuing Regional Opportunities for Mentoring, Innovation, and Success for English Learners.) Six Southern California county offices of education launched the initiative three years ago with a federal grant of $500,000. The pilot project started in September. Each of the six school districts pays an annual fee of $10,000 to participate. By 2009, the ...

Motivating English-language learners to use their Spanish is a bigger challenge than getting them to improve their English in some two-way immersion programs, according to a book published recently by the Center for Applied Linguistics. The book, Realizing the Vision of Two-Way Immersion: Fostering Effective Programs and Classrooms, profiles four schools with two-way immersion programs, also known as dual-language programs. These are programs in which children who are dominant in English and children who are dominant in Spanish learn both languages in the same classrooms. In many school districts, such programs have become the favored model of bilingual education. (I ...

Some teachers of English as a second language and professors in the field are trying to convince Florida Gov. Charlie Crist to veto a bill that some other teachers have worked very hard to get introduced and passed. The bill, passed earlier this month by both the Florida House and Senate, would decrease to 60 from 300 the number of in-service hours of English-as-a-second-language training required of reading teachers who want to work with English-language learners. The idea for the bill came from the Clay County Education Association, which represents 2,500 teachers and is affiliated with the Florida Education ...

Some of my sources have been telling me that I should look into how the break-up of large comprehensive high schools into small schools is affecting English-language learners. Well, Samual G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has beaten me to doing some very concrete reporting on this topic. He wrote a piece that ran in the New York Times on May 9 focusing on how English-language learners apparently aren't being served as well as they were before Columbus High School in the Bronx became part of the small-schools movement. The story of the numbers alone is interesting. ...

Cristina De León-Menjivar of the Napa Valley Register has written a series about how the Napa Valley Unified School District in California has responded to provisions for English-language learners under the No Child Left Behind Act. "Despite the district's solid record of success getting newcomers up to speed in English quickly," she writes, "overall that student population is a drag on the district's test scores." I notice that some of the educators in the Napa Valley school district were adept in slipping into interviews their views about how they'd like to see the federal education law altered. For example, in ...

I hear a lot of talk about how provisions for English-language learners in the the No Child Left Behind Act are indirectly making it more difficult for schools to offer bilingual education programs. I checked out this premise for an article that runs in Education Week this week. What I found was that it varies greatly from state to state whether NCLB has put a damper on bilingual education programs, because state policies differ so much. For example, in states that offer some tests in students' native languages--which is permitted by the federal law--bilingual programs are having an easier time ...

The National Council of La Raza and more than 100 other advocacy and education organizations have sent a letter to President Bush expressing "deep concern" over how workplace raids by immigration authorities have been conducted--and how they could negatively affect the children of undocumented workers who are rounded up in the raids. The May 7 letter notes that 3.1 million children who are U.S. citizens have at least one undocumented parent. A copy of the letter was also sent to Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Here's an excerpt: "In the aftermath of ...

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, ...