Arizona Still Grappling With Balance on Mandated ELL Instruction

Arizona education officials are giving school districts some room to diverge from a mandate that all English-language learners be taught specific English skills in classrooms separate from other students for four hours a day.

Even so, the state is still pushing ahead with its overall requirement that districts provide intensive—and separate—instruction of English skills for those students, despite criticism from experts who say there is little evidence to support that approach.

“The proposed four hours of instruction do not have a rigorous research basis,” Deborah Short, a researcher with the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, said in an e-mail. “There are no experimental or quasi-experimental studies that show this type of instruction helps students learn...