When the staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, convened a meeting on English-language learners and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act recently, they invited two of the same five people who had testified last month before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Those two were Cornelia M. Ashby, from the Government Accountability Office, and Peter Zamora, the co-chair of the Hispanic Education Coalition. The meeting was April 10. But the Senate staff also chose two panelists who hadn't yet made presentations on Capitol Hill regarding reauthorization of NCLB. ...

The U.S. Department of Education, which is in a tug-of-war with several Virginia superintendents who are protesting a federal mandate to change how their school districts test beginning English-language learners, met with those chiefs on April 13 to discuss the impasse. Maria Glod, of the Washington Post, reported in an April 14 article that a solution wasn't reached. The Virginia superintendents and school boards resisting the mandate will have to decide soon what they will do for the spring testing season. Paul Regnier, a spokesman for Fairfax County schools, which could lose $17 million in federal funds if it ...

The U.S. Department of Education has posted descriptions of some of the guides it expects to have ready this summer for states to better include English-language learners in large-scale testing. The guide for native language assessments, for example, is expected to answer such questions as "When do the numbers justify the cost?" and "What states have the most experience in using native language assessments?" More information from the Education Department on the LEP Partnership, an initiative of the federal government to help states on testing issues for English-language learners, is available here. Also, see my March 15, 2007, post "Who's...

One year after students from immigrant families organized school walkouts to protest some of the proposals in the U.S. Congress to change federal immigration laws, most of those students aren't doing the same this spring. In a March 26 article, the Dallas Morning News noted how Gustavo Jimenez, who organized walkouts among fellow high schoolers last spring, has been concentrating on finishing his senior year, working a part-time job at J.C. Penney, and making plans to attend a community college in the fall. He has continued his interest in activism, though, by lobbying for passage of the DREAM ...

A new research brief about children in immigrant families contains some interesting observations that indicate education policy can make a difference in whether children of Mexican heritage go to preschool. The researchers from the State University of New York at Albany who wrote the brief say that in Mexico, where preschool is free, 81 percent of 4-year-olds were enrolled in preschool in 2005. By contrast, in 2004, 55 percent of children in Mexican immigrant families living in the United States participated in preschool. (Preschool is NOT free in most places in the United States, though the researchers don't say this ...

A bill that would require Colorado students, starting in the graduating class of 2012, to show they are competent in English before they can get a high school diploma is working its way through the Colorado legislature. The Colorado Senate passed the bill, SB 73, on March 20, and it has been introduced and assigned to an education committee in the Colorado House. A March 20 article in the Rocky Mountain News tells about the bill, which requires each of the state's 178 school districts to decide how it will determine if its students have mastered English. Sen. Chris Romer, ...

For at least the second time, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has hired someone for an important post in the Arizona Department of Education whose views on the education of English-language learners were widely publicized in statewide controversies related to such students. Last month, Mr. Horne hired Kelt L. Cooper, 47, a former superintendent of the 6,400-student Nogales Unified School District, as the director of technical assistance for English-acquisition services of the state department of education. Mr. Cooper said in an interview with me this week that he was offered the job after he testified in federal ...

Joe DeSantis, the director of communications for a public relations firm working for Newt Gingrich, passed on some additional information about the former House Speaker's study of Spanish. The classes are being provided by an Atlanta-based institute, Bilingual America. (The institute's name seems a bit ironic, given that Mr. Gingrich reportedly said last weekend that "allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous." But of course, I have to remember that he's offered a clarification for what he said last week.) Mr. DeSantis says that Mr. Gingrich has studied 100 hours of a 280-hour Spanish course offered by the ...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who reportedly equated bilingual education with "the language of living in a ghetto" in a recent speech, has offered an acknowledgement on You Tube that his words "produced a bad feeling within the Latino community" and that "the words I chose to express myself were not the best." This Week in Education made note of Mr. Gingrich's clarification yesterday. What's most surprising to me about Mr. Gingrich's acknowledgement, though, is that he offers it in Spanish. What I just wrote in the previous paragraph is a translation that appears in subtitles on the video clip ...

These days, if you pay attention to issues affecting English-language learners, it's hard to overlook what used to be a little known fact about them--that most are not immigrants but rather were born in the United States. Peter Zamora, the Washington counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, included this fact in his recent testimony on English-language learners and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee. (For more on Mr. Zamora's views about English-language learners, see my profile of him in this ...