Learning the Language
Education Week reporters covered English-language learners, bilingual education, and civil rights issues and explored the educational, policy, and social issues surrounding ELLs in U.S. schools. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: English language learners and bilingual education.
Education
Languages on Their Death Bed
If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I try to draw your attention to efforts to support students in maintaining and improving their native languages.
Education
How to Create English-Proficiency Standards and Tests
WestEd researchers today released a guide they'd been working on for 18 months, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, to help states create standards and tests for English-language proficiency. It's a clearly written guide that poses a lot of important issues for states to consider, such as who serves on the committee to craft standards and tests for ELLs, what is the intended purpose of them, and to whom that purpose is communicated.
Education
'The Scariest Way in the World to Learn English'
Kathie Dior of Dior Publishing in Lafayette, Ind., sent me a teacher's edition to a grammar book for teaching English as a second language. Each chapter starts with an installment of a mystery story, and the lessons about English verb tenses, vocabulary, or how to improve listening comprehension are loosely built around that mystery segment. Here's an excerpt of the mystery:
Education
'Missed Opportunity' in the Stimulus Package
Over at civilrights.org, a blogger quotes David Goldberg, the senior counsel and senior policy analyst at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, as saying that the stimulus package doesn't have any money for high school reform or English-language learners, which Goldberg calls "missed opportunities."
Education
Should Arizona's ELL Funding Be Cut?
"Foolishness" is the word that Eduflack uses to characterize Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne's proposal to reduce the funding for English-as-a-second-language programs in Arizona by $30 million for next school year. I mentioned Horne's proposal here.
Education
Clustering ELLs in Schools by Languages
I learned recently that Amherst Regional Public Schools in Massachusetts clusters its English-language learners in four different elementary schools according to the children's home language. In a blog post, Catherine A. Sanderson, a member of the school committee for that district, explained that one elementary school has a concentration of Spanish-speaking students, another of Chinese-speaking students, another of those who speak Khmer, and yet another of children who speak Korean.
Education
A Good Read: A Story About a Refugee Kid Named Bill Clinton
The eighth installment of a series about a school year in the life of a 9-year-old named Bill Clinton Hadam didn't say one thing that this reader wanted to know: How did a Congolese boy who grew up in a refugee camp in Tanzania get that name? I had to turn to the fine print in "about this project" over at the Christian Science Monitor to learn that bit of information.
Education
Tom Horne: $30 Million Can Be Saved (Slashed?) From Arizona's ELL Programs
If you live in Phoenix, you might want to drop by Senate Hearing Room 1 in the State Capitol at 2 p.m. tomorrow and hear Arizona Superintendent of Instruction Tom Horne explain how Arizona's program to teach English skills to English-language learners for a four-hour block each day can be implemented for about $9 million. This school year, the state spent $40 million on the program. I just got a press releasing saying he'll explain in his annual "state of education" speech why the program needs $30 million less of taxpayers' money for the 2009-10 school year.
Education
Parent Education Classes May Be First Thing to Be Axed
At least one school district is cutting funds for family literacy centers and another is thinking about slashing English-as-a-second-language classes for parents. The Provo, Utah, school district has slashed $230,000 from schools with family literacy centers for English-language learners. Immigrant parents are pushing the school board of Fairfax County, Va., to preserve English classes that serve thousands of foreign-born adults.
Education
A GED Just Isn't as Good
I can't find references in "Grad Nation," a new comprehensive guide for communities on how to combat the dropout crisis, to English-language learners, but the guide does point out that the dropout rate is high among Hispanics, many of whom are ELLs.
Education
Retrospective: 'The Emerging Politics of Language'
Twenty-five years ago this week, Education Week published several stories about the rise of bilingual education in this country and how, even then, the educational method was running into political problems. The lead story was "Law and Policy in the Lau Era: The Emerging Politics of Language," which is not available online. The stories were part of a series on language policy and marked a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in Lau v. Nichols that the San Francisco school system was violating the civil rights of Chinese-speaking students by not helping them learn English. I learned from the article that the case received only a one-sentence mention in The New York Times and was ignored by most other newspapers.
Education
Manga and Comics for ELLs
My colleague Debra Viadero writes in "Scholars See Comics as No Laughing Matter" in this week's Education Week that scholars are viewing comics as a promising subject for educational research. She reports that about 125 teachers, scholars, and artists attended the first academic conference on "Graphica in Education" about how comics can be used in the classroom.
Education
Resource: Gran Enciclopedia Hispanica
Although 75 percent of English-language learners in the United States speak Spanish, bilingual education teachers tell me it can be hard to find high-quality classroom materials in Spanish. World Book Inc. is apparently trying to fill the void. The company, in partnership with Hispanica Saber, has created a comprehensive online encyclopedia in Spanish.
Education
Quality Counts 2009--With British Spellings
The Guardian Weekly, a British newspaper, just published an adaptation of an article I had written for Quality Counts 2009 about the impact of provisions for English-language learners in the No Child Left Behind Act. The newspaper put a more provocative headline on the article, "No Child Left Behind, Did Bush Get It Right?", than did Education Week, but the content is basically the same as in "English-Learners Pose Policy Puzzle," which I shortened at the Guardian Weekly's request. Let me clarify that while the description of me at the end of the article says I'm "author" of Quality Counts 2009, in fact, the report is authored by a whole team of people from Education Week, including me, and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.