Well, on May 9, Coachella Valley and eight other school districts filed an appeal in a California state court contending that a judge from the San Francisco Superior Court was wrong in ruling a year ago that the court didn't have the authority to tell the state how to comply with NCLB regarding the testing of English-learners. The districts argue that the state is not testing ELLs in a "valid and reliable" manner, as stipulated by NCLB, because it tests them for accountability purposes only in English.

I spoke by telephone this week both with Mary Hernandez, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, and with Elizabeth Leavengood, a lawyer who is representing the California Department of Education in the case. At issue in the appeal is that the judge ruled the duties given to California by NCLB are "discretionary" not "mandatory," and decided that the state hadn't abused its discretion in implementing the law. The appeal argues that "the determination that NCLB imposed no duties on the state was erroneous."

Ms. Hernandez pointed out that the battle is still far from over. The San Francisco Superior Court judge still hasn't had a chance to rule on the claims of the original case that California is violating the rights of ELLs under the California constitution by testing them only in English. "They are denied equal access to integral components of the public education system that other children have access to—and that is meaningful participation in the accountability system," Ms. Hernandez said last week.

Meanwhile, Coachella Valley ISD, where more than 60 percent of students are ELLs, faces a possible state takeover under NCLB because 19 of its 21 schools haven't met adequate yearly progress for four years in a row.

I called AT&T today to see what kind of grant money might be available for technology at other school districts. Dan Feldstein, a spokesman working out of Houston for AT&T, told me that the $25,000 that paid for the iPods in Corpus Christi was part of a $1.5 million grant initiative from the AT&T Foundation that paid for wireless technologies for educational uses. It was a one-time deal and the recipients have already been selected. (The Caller-Times article is wrong, he said, in saying that the whole $1.5 million went to projects in ELL classrooms.) But Mr. Feldstein added that the AT&T Foundation has just announced that education is the new focus of its giving.

Back in September 2007, I reported on an English-as-a-second-language teacher, Mercedes Pichard, of Fort Myers, Fla., who was given 36 hand-held computing devices by Intel Corp. to use in her teaching.

I have no idea how hard it is to land such financial support for educational technology, but if I hear of any other such opportunities, I'll let you know. I believe English-language learners deserve to have the same chance to use technology in school as other students do, and some activities with technology, such as practicing listening and speaking with podcasts, may benefit them MORE than other students.

I was curious if there was a connection between the subpoena and the immigration raid. In other words, did any information provided by school district officials, when they complied with the subpoena, get into the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents? And is this another incident where educators have been dragged into an area of federal law that is murky? What steps should school officials take in such situations to ensure that undocumented students get the free public education in this country guaranteed by the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe? (I've written about this issue in a Sept. 12, 2007, article for Education Week, "With Immigrants, Districts Balance Safety, Legalities.")

I followed up with my own interviews of Gail Sheridan-Lucht, an attorney for Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil, and David Strudthoff, the superintendent of the Postville school system, to write a story about the immigration raid and the subpoena, which you can find here.

Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said she issued the subpoena to the school district as part of a joint investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Iowa Division of Labor Services into various labor practices of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville. The investigation included the possible violation of state and federal child labor laws, Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said. (In fact, 12 minors were arrested at the plant during Monday's raid, according to federal officials.)

Mr. Strudthoff said he wasn't told about the impending immigration raid at the time that he was handed the subpoena in early April—and he doesn't know if information about Postville students, such as addresses and telephone numbers, was turned over to federal immigration authorities. Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said she couldn't comment on the issue because the labor investigation was still going on.

Roger L. Rice, the executive director of Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy Inc., a Somerville, Mass.-based immigrant advocacy group, pointed out to me in a phone interview that the Postville school district was served with a subpoena from a state agency, not a federal court. "I have never heard of this before," he said. "How many branches of the state of Iowa government are there? Can they all get this information? I don't think so."

Mr. Rice said he believes Postville school district lawyers should have gone to court "to quash the subpoena as a violation of [students'] privacy rights and their right to attend school."

But Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in immigration law, had a different take. "I am not against legitimate law enforcement, including enforcement of child labor laws," he wrote to me in an e-mail message. "If that is accomplished by a legitimate subpoena, I assume it has met the test of such requirements. That it involves immigration ... does not change the basics."

California officials call the standards for preschoolers "foundations." The foundations spell out what children ages 3 to 5 should know and be able to do. The foundations in English-language development, which start on page 103 of the 205-page standards document, lay out what second-language learners should know and be able to do in English in "beginning," "middle," and "later" stages of learning the language. The foundations are also organized around the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

For additional insight on implementation of the "foundations," read the Frequently Asked Questions document that tells about them. I learned, for instance, that California doesn't have an official process for identifying English-language learners at the preschool level. "If a family reports that a preschool child's primary language is other than English, the child is considered an English learner," the FAQ document says.

In my reporting on the draft foundations, I learned that some educators questioned whether they might take some of the joy out of learning for youngsters. See my earlier post, "Standards for Preschool ELLs: It's a Trend."

One challenge I didn't write much about in the EdWeek article is that states are struggling to report the progress in English of ELLs who haven't taken their state's English-language-proficiency test for two school years in a row. That would be ELLs who haven't been in a school district for long enough to take the test twice.

Kathryn M. Doherty, a special assistant to Deputy Secretary of Education Raymond J. Simon, told me in a telephone interview that states are excluding one-fifth to one-third of ELLs served by Title III programs in reporting progress because they lack "two data points" for those students. The notice in the Federal Register proposes that states come up with a way to include those students.

But the solution, according to Gary Cook, a research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, isn't simple. Mr. Cook explained that the tests, called "screeners," that school districts use to place ELLs in special programs upon their arrival at a school typically aren't very comprehensive and wouldn't work well to be the first data point. Another option, he said, would be for a school district to give an English-learner the state's comprehensive English-language-proficiency test as soon as he or she enrolls, and use that as the first data point. But that would mean that students might have to take the English-language-proficiency test twice in the same school year, and some students would have had more months to make progress in English than others before taking the test for the second time.

He added, "These batteries take longer, and then you have the student out of class [for a long time]."

Experts on ELLs whom I spoke with had a lot of concerns about the proposed interpretation. It will be interesting to see how much Education Department officials will alter the proposed requirements after hearing some of those concerns. They are receiving comments on it until June 2.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley businessman, financed the campaigns that advocated the passage of anti-bilingual initiatives in all three states so they are nicknamed the "Unz initiatives."

I attended the conference in Sacramento, Calif., last week—hence the light posting on this blog recently—and wrote about how the researchers believe that structured English immersion hasn't proved to be any kind of magic method for teaching English to ELLs. My article, published on-line today at edweek.org, also quotes a couple of people who believe the initiatives have had a positive impact.

He notes that while the group is advocating for the federal education law to require states to collect and report more comprehensive information about Asian-Americans, it isn't recommending that schools and school districts be held accountable for the academic performance of Asian students by ethnicity. The report says services to ELLs who are Asians should be stepped up based on how well they are doing on standardized tests.

The Kansas survey also found that teachers who graduated from academic programs that stress hands-on experience in creating lesson plans for ELLs during student teaching tended to feel more prepared to teach ELLs than those who didn't have such practical experience. Also, teachers said that they felt better prepared to teach those ELLs who were more proficient in English.

The 2,400 teachers surveyed had attended Kansas colleges and universities and not obtained an endorsement to teach English as a second language. The response rate of teachers was 25 percent. The audit says that some teacher-preparation programs in Kansas embed small amounts of ESL training into required methods courses. Others require specific courses focused on teaching ESL. To get an endorsement in ESL, teachers must take 15-18 college credit hours in addition to their regular coursework and pass a test on ESL content.

Florida is one of the states that requires all teachers to receive training in how to work with ELLs, and some educators have felt that too many hours of training were required for reading teachers. A bill that proposed reducing the amount of in-service hours in ESL required of reading teachers, which I wrote about last month, did not pass in the most recent session of the Florida legislature to the delight of a number of TESOL professors who opposed such a paring back of the requirement. (See "ESOL training rules may stay the same," an April 30 article in the Miami Herald.)

Food for thought: The Linguistic Minority Research Institute of the University of California has published a newsletter article by Barbara Merino spelling out "critical competencies" for teachers of English-learners (Find the Summer 2007 issue).

Meanwhile, Tom Horne, the state's superintendent of public instruction, is quoted as saying that Mr. Hogan doesn't care about ELLs because he's trying to halt implementation of the new programs in which schools must provide four hours of English-language-development instruction to ELLs each day.

I wrote an article about how the state plans to distribute $40.6 million in additional funds for ELLs, which appears in this week's Education Week. School administrators who aren't slated to receive any extra funding aren't very happy about how the money is expected to be distributed, but supporters of the distribution formula say that it's applied consistently across school districts, so they say the federal court should accept it.

For more about the four-hour programs, see my earlier post, "What's in Store for Arizona ELLs?"

One of the biggest changes that I see is that states will have to use the same criteria for deciding when English-language learners exit from programs as they use to determine if students have attained proficiency in English for reporting purposes under accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, states set criteria for what it means for students to attain proficiency in the language for NCLB purposes. But that is usually a different, typically less stringent, set of criteria than what school districts use to say children must stop getting special instruction to learn English.

The proposed interpretation permits states to use additional criteria, beyond that of students' scores on the state's English-proficiency test, to determine if students have attained proficiency in English. Those criteria might include students' performance on a state's reading or math tests. But if states decide to go that route, they would have to incorporate that additional criteria into their definitions of what it means to reach English proficiency.

In states such as California and Virginia, state education officials have left it up to administrators in school districts to decide when students should leave special programs. And it's my guess that many of these school administrators will not want to give up this discretion.

States have increasingly been moving toward standardization, but most haven't standardized their criteria to the extent that the interpretation would require.

The U.S. Department of Education is receiving comments on the proposed interpretation until June 2. Comments can be sent to LEP.Partnership@ed.gov. If you don't like something about it, this is the time to speak up.

A bill passed by the Arizona legislature in March 2006 requires school districts to give ELLs at lower levels of proficiency four hours of English-language-development instruction each day. Up until this school year, when a state task force further spelled out what was to happen in those four hours, the four-hour mandate was largely ignored. According to a report by the Arizona Office of Auditor General released last month, only three school districts or charter schools out of a sample of 18 had implemented the program this school year.

But Mr. Horne has said that school districts must have the four-hour programs in place by the start of next school year.

But it's still hard to predict what those programs will look like because the state task force and Mr. Horne are in the process of considering requests by school districts to carry out "alternative models."

One point of confusion has been whether the four hours of English instruction must be divorced from the teaching of academic content. The task force—and Mr. Horne in a memo called "rumor control"—clarified that "classroom materials used in an [English-language-development] class may reflect content from a variety of academic disciplines."

Could you call an ELD class "math" or "social studies?," I asked Mr. Horne during a telephone interview this week. He said, "no," that "the primary purpose has to be language development." He added that English-learners can take math class during part of the two hours of the school day not occupied with ELD instruction.

Another point of confusion is whether ELLs must be separated from other students for the full four hours.

Mr. Horne said that some school districts with very small numbers of ELLs will be exempted from the mandate to keep the students separate. In addition, he said, a school district may be exempted from the requirement to separate ELLs for four hours if it has a high rate for reclassifying students as fluent in English each year. He said he hasn't set a number for what is "high." In Arizona, school districts reclassify ELLs as fluent in English if they pass the state's English-language-proficiency test.

On average, Mr. Horne said, the reclassification rate in Arizona is 13 percent. "All I care about is getting the reclassification rate up," he said, "I think a 13 percent reclassification rate is a scandal and we have a moral duty to teach these kids English."

See earlier posts, "Critiques of Arizona's Take on Research," and "Arizona Spells Out 'Research-Based' Models for English Immersion."

The study, "Religiousity, Education and Civic Belonging: Muslim Youth in New York City Public Schools," also showed that 17 percent of Muslim students responding to the survey said they had been the target of bigotry, often in the form of teasing or taunting about Islam, according to a Teachers College press release.

Click here for more information about the conference. It includes the launch of a book, This Is Where I Need to Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in New York City, published by a Teachers College student press initiative.

The video captures excerpts of Ms. Griego's model lesson delivered to ELLs in 3rd grade, and conversations between the two teachers. It's available online from Stanford's School of Education. The coach explains, for example, why she thinks it works best to assign ELLs to work in groups of four, with students of different levels of proficiency in the same group.

The video is one of a series on teaching ELLs that have been created by professors Kenji Hakuta and Guadalupe Valdes. The one I watched was called "Modeling and Coaching SDAIE." The acronym, by the way, refers to specially designed academic instruction in English, a set of strategies used in California to teach intermediate ELLs content and language at the same time.

The video lessons seem to be well-thought-out and and correspond with three Stanford courses concerning the education of ELLs.

I learned about them through the Princeton, N.J.-based ETS, which hosted Mr. Hakuta and Ms. Valdes as panelists at a symposium about ELLs in January. You can find Power Point presentations from that meeting posted online at the conference site by clicking on the "Agenda" tab.

Here are a few of the basics: Bhutan is a small country wedged between India and China. It has been the home to different ethnic groups, including the refugees, who lived in Bhutan for generations and retained their Nepalese language and culture. The refugees say they were forced out of the country by discriminatory policies that made it difficult for them to legally live and work there, though the Bhutanese government says they left the country voluntarily. The Bhutanese refugees who just started to arrive in the United States have been living in refugee camps in Nepal for about 16 years. Tens of thousands are expected to arrive over the next five years.

I tell more about what I learned in "Schools Brace for Bhutanese Wave," published this week in Education Week. I found out, for instance, that I can keep track of the new groups of refugees arriving in the United States through the Cultural Orientation Resource Center of the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics.