Learning the Language - Education Week

Transparency Watch: Federal ELL Clearinghouse Remains in Limbo

2013-05-22T14:15:49Z

The U.S. Department of Education's process to find a new contractor to manage the National Clearinghouse for English-Language Acquisition seems to be one without end.

For the second time in the past six months, a protest of the department's contracting process has prompted agency officials to say they will hold a "do over" of sorts in their competition to award a $1.5 million contract for the clearinghouse, known best as NCELA. That decision means NCELA won't likely have a new contractor overseeing its operations until well into the summer.

A spokesman for the Education Department has not responded to my request to more fully explain the contracting situation.

The clearinghouse—which has been managed by researchers and consultants at George Washington University for years—was created by Congress to be the go-to source on language instruction and research related to English-language learners, as well as a reliable source of data on ELLs. English-learners are the fastest growing group of students in public schools.

But for almost a year, the status of the clearinghouse has been in limbo since the Department declined to re-up the NCELA contract with George Washington University and opened a new competition for interested bidders. The department put a priority on awarding the contract to a small business. From the beginning, the department's process was a rocky one that has been protested four times by a single bidder for the new contract, a Washington-based company called edCount.

The first protest led the department to acknowledge an error in selecting the small business size standard under which it intended to limit the NCELA competition. Then last fall, after the Department first awarded the NCELA contract to Leed Management Consulting, a small business in Silver Spring, Md., edCount filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, saying it had been wrongfully excluded from consideration and challenging the award to Leed. That GAO protest prompted the first pledge from department officials to take "corrective action" and review the entire contracting process, including whether any of the original bidders had incorrectly been excluded. That review should have been done at the end of January, but instead dragged on into April when edCount learned, once again, that it would not be considered as an awardee for the contract. The company again filed a protest with the GAO, saying the education department had wrongfully shut them out of the competition.

In the meantime, Leed, which had had its original $1.5 million for the contract cut by $560,000 last November, was defunded altogether by the Education Department in March. Around the same time, more than $350,000 was authorized to GWU for the clearinghouse through the middle of June, according to usaspending.gov, a searchable database of contracts and grants awarded by the federal government.

Which brings us to the latest wrinkle in the NCELA saga. As they did last fall when the GAO was reviewing edCount's protest, the Education Department's lawyers have written a letter (dated May 7) to the watchdog agency saying the department would take "corrective action" and re-evaluate whether any bidders were incorrectly excluded from the competition.

As I reported late last year, some researchers, advocates, and ELL administrators in states view the bungled NCELA contracting process as symptomatic of the Education Department's lack of focus and attention to the unique needs of English-learners.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Undocumented Asian Youth Seek Higher Profile in Immigration Debate

2013-05-20T18:06:13Z

A group made up of undocumented Asian youths living in New York and other eastern states has launched a new social media campaign meant to push their stories into the public eye as the debate over immigration reform rages on in Washington.

The project, called Raise Our Story, features young Asian immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. They share their experiences as undocumented youths through photos and first-person essays that underscore the heavy toll that having no legal status exacts on them. Advocates for undocumented Asian youth—from countries as diverse as the Phillipines and South Korea—say their stories are less well-known than their undocumented peers who were brought from Mexico and Central and South American countries.

What's clear from reading these narratives is how common it is for these undocumented youths to not even know about their precarious status as undocumented immigrants until they are preparing to do things they always assumed would be theirs to do: go to college, apply for financial aide, or get a job.

"I nearly broke under the weight of my undocumented status," wrote Emily Seonhye Park, a resident of Queens in New York City who earned a private scholarship to pay for college, but has struggled since to find a job or a way to attend graduate school. "I lived in this invisible bubble, screaming inside: 'Please, someone save me.'"

The narrative project was created by Revolutionizing Asian Immigrant Stories on the East Coast, or RAISE. The group receives support from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or AALDEF. In addition to social media, the stories are being featured on Huffington Post.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today embarked on a third week of deliberations over the proposed immigration overhaul crafted by a bipartisan group of senators. The panel has been plowing through hundreds of proposed amendments. One amendment still to be considered would expand the bill's version of the DREAM Act to "little DREAMers," or those young children who were brought more recently to the U.S. illegally and can't meet the measure's conditions as currently written to be eligible for a speedier pathway to citizenship. The five-year path to citizenship would apply only to DREAMers who arrived as children but are now older than 16 and have either completed high school, earned a GED certificate, served in the military, or attended college for at least two years.

Photo: Neriel David Ponce, 18, of Staten Island, N.Y., came from the Phillipines at age 5. He didn't learn he was undocumented until he was a sophomore in high school, a revelation that he says made attending school feel "pointless."

Photo credit: Jill Damatac Futter for Raise Our Story.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Dual Language in Early Education Best for Youngest ELLs, Report Says

2013-05-14T14:29:44Z

Young English-language learners who are still developing oral and literacy skills in their home languages benefit most in early-childhood programs that regularly expose them to both languages.

That's one of several major takeaways in a new federally funded analysis of the large, and growing, population of dual-language learners, ranging from birth to 5, already enrolled in, or headed for, early-childhood-education programs.

The analysis, released today, also underscores that dual-language learners develop language skills differently than their monolingual, English-speaking peers. Young dual-language learners, who are using two separate language systems, will take longer to reach proficiency in both languages than their peers learning only one.

"Their development is different," said Dina C. Castro, one of the report's lead authors. "It's not better, it's not worse, just different. We need to understand their development by looking at all the other factors that surround them that will also interact with their ability to learn." Too often, Castro said, dual-language learners' school readiness gaps in kindergarten are assumed to be language related, rather stemming from other factors, such as poverty.

Done by researchers affiliated with the the Center for Early Care and Education Research—Dual-Language Learners, the analysis is a summary of more than 200 studies, including research done at the center itself, that shed light on how dual-language environments and bilingualism impact language and cognitive development in young children and how early-childhood practices can hinder or help dual-language learners. The center, based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, started its work in 2009 and is funded through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency that oversees public early-childhood programs for poor children, namely Head Start and Early Head Start.

Many existing dual-language programs for young learners are currently found in Head Start and Early Head Start, which established standards that require its providers to address the needs of dual-language learners and "principles" that direct Head Start programs to develop children's first languages, as well as English. Some state-provided early-learning programs—Illinois, for example—also require development of home languages and English.

Overall, however, there are few early-childhood programs that feature what the researchers call "intentional" home language instruction and support.

Their review also highlights early-childhood practices that have shown the most impact on dual-language learners.

Among those: Using the home language of young children, in addition to English, is probably "the most important aspect" of effective early-childhood education for dual-language learners. And when early-childhood classrooms emphasize English-language development only, a dual-language learners' first-language skills can decline and harm their progress toward English-language proficiency later.

"Young children really benefit when they are exposed to two languages, there is a good research base for that conclusion," said Linda M. Espinosa, an author on the report. "But children need to also be exposed to English in those early years."

Espinosa, a retired professor of early-childhood education at the University of Missouri-Columbia who has written extensively on young dual-language learners, said dual-language programs in early-childhood settings "vary enormously." Many classrooms, for example, don't have fully bilingual teachers, she said, but still offer frequent opportunities for children to hear, speak, and interact in their first language.

The report recommends the expansion and availability of dual-language environments in early-care-and-education programs. To do that, the authors write, will require federal and state policymakers to support more preparation and training programs for early-childhood educators to support the literacy and language development of young dual-language learners. The authors also say there needs to be much tighter coordination between early-childhood programs and K-12 systems, so that the early dual-language development skills aren't lost once children move to kindergarten and beyond.

Eugene E. García, an emeritus professor of education at Arizona State University and the former head of the office of bilingual education in the U.S. Department of Education when Bill Clinton was president, said the research shows clearly that language development problems for young English-learners crop up when support for their home language is not provided. "It's counterintuitive," said García, also a lead author on the analysis. "But building the literacy and language skills in the first language helps students build their proficiency skills in English."

That conclusion is still debated in some circles, especially because of the controversial nature of children being taught in any language other than English. Certainly, the focus of federal education policy for K-12 English-learners for years has been squarely on them acquiring English and not on developing their first language to become fully bilingual/biliterate. So maybe the early-childhood folks will be the ones to help change the conversation about language learning and the best practices to pursue in the K-12 realm, especially in the earliest grades when language is still developing.

García thinks the potential is there. "We haven't made much headway in reducing the achievement gaps for English-learners," under current policy, he said.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Immigration Bill: What Happens to Youngest Undocumented Children?

2013-05-13T17:30:21Z

As many as 1 million undocumented children who were brought to the United States at a very young age would have to wait as long as their parents—at least 13 years—to pursue citizenship under the current version of the bipartisan immigration reform measure being debated and shaped (and reshaped) in the U.S. Senate.

These so-called "little DREAMers" would miss out on the speedier path to citizenship that their older siblings and peers would benefit from under the DREAM provisions in the legislation. That provision—essentially a version of the long-stalled DREAM Act— would create a five-year path to citizenship for those who are already old enough to have graduated from high school, earned a GED, completed two years of college, or spent four years in the military. As currently crafted, the measure would benefit undocumented immigrants who entered as children but are now over the age of 16 and can meet the other conditions.

Immigrant advocates say forcing the youngest undocumented immigrants onto the far longer route to earning citizenship would be unfair and counterproductive.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, agrees, and has introduced an amendment to the bill (one of more than 300 amendments introduced last week) that would extend the five-year path to all undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

"They were brought to this country through no fault or choice of their own, but they are too young to qualify" for the five-year path, Blumenthal said in a call with reporters earlier today. "All children who are immigrants should have this opportunity to achieve the American dream in the country they call home."

Blumenthal is not in the bipartisan "Gang of Eight," the group of senators who crafted the immigration bill, but he is a member of the Senate Judiciary committee, which is set to resume its markup of the legislation this week. Most of the little DREAMers that would benefit from Blumenthal's proposal are likely enrolled in public schools and the amendment has drawn support from education groups such as the National Education Association.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Unaccompanied Minors Crossing Border Has Tripled, Report Finds

2013-05-13T15:00:26Z

In fiscal 2012, nearly 25,000 unaccompanied minors who came into the United States illegally were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol, more than triple the rate in 2008, according to a new report from Stateline.

In a border state like Texas, as many as 120 undocumented children are crossing into the U.S. alone each day.

That means that even as the entry of undocumented adult immigrants has fallen off, the numbers of undocumented children arriving in the U.S. alone is on a steep uptick.

This increasing inflow of undocumented children comes to light just as Congress is in the heat of shaping an immigration reform measure, that, in its current form, includes a provision to ensure that unaccompanied minors receive legal representation. Under federal law now, these children are not entitled to lawyers as they go through immigration proceedings.

In fiscal 2012, more than half of the children who were stopped at the border were referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an arm of the U.S. Health and Human Services agency, which places them in shelters and group homes in states around the country. The other 10,000 or so children who were stopped were from Mexico and were sent home. A report issued last year by a nonprofit group that provides legal services to some unaccompanied minors paints a complex and intimidating picture of the process these children go through once they are apprehended.

Most of them say they are fleeing gang and drug violence and extreme poverty in their home countries; some are seeking to reunite with parents and other family members already in the United States.

Three-quarters of the unaccompanied minors are boys and most are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico, according to the report. Most of them fall between the ages of 14 and 17, but 12 percent of them are younger than 14.

Once they are in the ORR system of care, unaccompanied minors are supposed to receive basic services, including education. Education Week wrote about these schools for unaccompanied minors in 2006.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Latino College Enrollment Outpacing Whites, Report Finds

2013-05-09T21:20:39Z

This post was written by Caralee Adams and first appeared on the College Bound blog.

Latino students have reached a new milestone in the United States: A higher percentage who graduate from high school are enrolling in college than white students.

In the class of 2012, a record 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates went on to pursue higher education, compared with 67 percent of white graduates, according to a report released today by the Pew Research Center in Washington. In 2000, just 49 percent of Hispanic high school graduates enrolled in college the following fall.

While Latinos made up just 11 percent of high school graduates in the Class of 2000 (or 300,000 students), they comprised 22 percent of the most recent class (or 697,000 students) in 2012.

Overall, 66 percent of high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college, including about 63 percent of black students and 84 percent of Asians.

You can read Caralee's full account over at the College Bound blog.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

English-Language Learners, Common Core, and Literacy

2013-05-07T14:15:20Z

Tomorrow afternoon, two prominent language-acquisition scholars will be my guests in an edweek.org webinar that will focus on helping educators prepare for teaching the Common Core State Standards to English-language learners.

Kenji Hakuta, a Stanford University education professor, and George C. Bunch, an associate education professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present on how the new English/language arts and literacy standards can be fully accessed by all English-learners, regardless of their proficiency levels.

The presentation will include details from a middle school English/language arts unit that Bunch and others ELL experts created and piloted in three districts this spring. The unit was designed to show how reading complex, informational texts, and writing arguments—a key requirement in the common core&mdash&can be used with ELLs to deepen their learning of content as well as language.

Hakuta and Bunch are part of the Understanding Language initiative at Stanford University, a group of ELL experts who are developing an array of open-source resources on the common core and English-learners for educators. Hakuta co-chairs the initiative; Bunch is the chair of the English/language arts and literacy work group.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

English-Learners Need More Philanthrophic Investment, Report Says

2013-05-02T18:20:42Z

English-learners are the fastest-growing subgroup of students in public schools and will likely be so for the next decade, but education philanthropy dollars targeted toward the unique needs of these students haven't kept pace, a new report says.

The Portland, Ore.-based Grantmakers for Education, a membership organization for public and private education-related philanthropies, has just published an analysis of the current state of grantmaking meant to improve educational outcomes for English-learners. The main finding: The level of investment in ELLs is "relatively small" and "small in comparison to the magnitude of this population and the depth of educational need."

And even among the funders who do invest in English-learners, the majority of the grants they count as being for ELLs are not exclusively for such needs. Nearly all of the grants are supporting broader education programs or strategies that include ELLs, along with immigrant students, for example, or low-income children.

Grantmakers for Education surveyed more than 130 philanthropic organizations that indicated they provide grants for English-learners or immigrant students, and did follow-up telephone interviews with about two dozen of those survey respondents to glean more information about their investments in ELLs.

The analysis goes on to outline lessons funders must understand to invest more strategically in programs and services for English-learners. Chief among them is that focusing on Latino communities, immigrant communities, or low-income communities will not adequately address the needs of English-learners. ELLs need specific, targeted investment.

Four case studies highlighting effective and targeted investments in English-learners—three of them focused on the early years—are also included in the analysis. One of them is the Sobrato Family Foundation, in California, which has invested in an instructional approach in a handful of schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties that focuses on the development of the literacy and language skills of young ELLs in Spanish and English so that they get on track to become bilingual and biliterate early on, and, by fourth grade, close the gap in academic achievement between them and their native English-speaking peers. One school I visited last year in San Jose, Gardner Academy, was in its third year of implementation and was showing early, promising results.

The report concludes with a call for more, and smarter, investments in English-learners.

"Together, the growing numbers of ELLs, the persistent achievement gaps and barriers to access, and an increasingly high set of stakes add up to a seminal moment for people and institutions investing in school reform and the education of English-learners," the report says.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

A Closer Look at ELL Assessment Group Led by Oregon

2013-04-26T20:15:51Z

Thanks to the folks at the K-12 Center at Educational Testing Service, we now have the best snapshot to date of what the group of states known as ELPA 21 have planned for developing a new English-language proficiency test that will be directly connected to the language demands in the Common Core State Standards.

Remember that ELPA 21—or the English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century consortium—started as a group of dozen states that landed a $6.3 million grant last fall from the U.S. Department of Education to develop the new test. It is one of two groups of states creating a new assessment to measure the progress of English-learners. Oregon is the lead state in the consortium.

The other group—the 31-state consortium known as ASSETS, or Assessment Services Supporting ELs through Technology Systems—is being developed on behalf of member states by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment Consortium, or WIDA, based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

ELPA 21 is at least a year behind ASSETS, which won its grant in 2011. It has also had a bit of upheaval in its first months when original member California decided to withdraw, taking its 1.4 million English-learners from the group. But 11 states remain, including ELL-rich Florida.

The ETS brief offers ELPA 21's timeline for test development, a description of its governance and accountability, and a graphic representation of the components of the assessment system the group is designing.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Calif. Neglecting Thousands of English-Learners, Lawsuit Claims

2013-04-24T20:10:25Z

More than 20,000 English-learners in California's public schools are not receiving language instruction and the state department of education is failing in its role to ensure that schools educate such students, alleges a lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU of Southern California's lawsuit contends the department of education has neglected its obligation to monitor English-language-acquisition programs for students in many of the state's more than 1,000 school districts. California's public schools enroll more than 1.4 million English-learners, roughly one in four of the state's K-12 population. ACLU of Southern California, Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and the private law firm of Latham & Watkins LLP are representing plaintiffs in the suit filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Among the allegations in the lawsuit, the ACLU says that some districts receive tens of millions of dollars in state aid, as well as federal Title III dollars, for the purpose of providing English-language instruction to ELLs, but then don't provide the services. And the state is not monitoring districts as it is legally required to ensure those dollars are spent on that purpose, according to the lawsuit.

It says school districts themselves report to the state department that they have English-learners who are not receiving any instructional services through a category labeled "ELs Not Receiving Any EL Instructional Services."

In a statement reported by the Associated Press, a deputy for state schools chief Tom Torlakson said the state is determined to provide English-learners appropriate instruction and encourages parents to bring problems to the state's attention. The official also pointed to a recent appellate court decision which ruled that the state department was meeting its legal requirements for providing oversight of English-language-acquisition programs for ELLs.

The ACLU earlier this year demanded that state education officials take action against 251 school districts that it found were not providing services to ELLs enrolled in their schools. Those districts include Los Angeles Unified, the state's largest, with roughly 670,000 students.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Immigration Measure Would Ease Path to Citizenship for DREAMERs

2013-04-24T18:00:55Z

From Politics K-12 blogger Alyson Klein

K-12 education overhaul may be on the back burner in Congress these days, but immigration reform sure isn't. And there are obviously big implications in a new, widely anticipated bipartisan Senate bill for students who come to the United States as children without documentation and graduate from American high schools. (Many call themslves "DREAMers" after the DREAM act, versions of which would grant them citizenship.)

The bill creates an arguably long and bumpy path to citizenship for those without documentation who came to the country in 2011 or before. But folks who came to the nation as children could go a much speedier route, provided they pass a criminal background check, graduate from high school (or get a GED), and complete two years of post-secondary education, or spend four years in the military, or other uniformed services.

"This version of the DREAM act is one of the most generous and inclusive to date," said James Ferg-Cadima, a regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Washington. And he said the measure is particularly promising because "it's housed within this larger package of reform."

The much longer path to citizenship for folks who came to the country as adults has its own implications for education. To eventually become citizens, immigrants would have to pursue the study of English. (Very helpful graphic on the different paths here.)

Alyson has much more on the proposed immigration measure over at Politics K-12.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

PARCC Releases Draft Policy on ELL Accommodations

2013-04-18T16:30:18Z

The first of two groups of states working to design assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards today released its recommendations for the types of supports that can be used to help English-learners demonstrate their content knowledge and skills.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC—composed of 22 states—has issued its draft accommodations manual for English-language learners and students with disabilities.

In the draft policy—which PARCC will circulate for public comment through May 13—the consortia states that an accommodation considered for English-learners must meet three conditions:

•It must reduce the "linguistic load" or complexity of the language that is necessary for students to access the content in curriculum or on the assessment;
•It can't alter what is being measured in a test item or alter the test itself;
•It has to help "address the unique linguistic and socio-cultural needs of an EL by reducing the effects of English-language skills on the student's overall performance on the assessment."

The policy further states that students who are currently classified as being English-learners under the criteria used by their states will be eligible to receive accommodations approved for ELLs on PARCC tests. Students whose parents have refused language support services for them would be eligible for accommodations, so long as they are classified by their district as being an ELL.

The manual urges that any decisions about accommodations for English-learners be made by more than one individual, and may include ESL and bilingual teachers, content-area teachers, guidance counselors, principals, parents, and students themselves, among others. These same decision-makers should also decide on, and assign accommodations to English-learners early in the academic year or upon enrollment and that no student should encounter an accommodation for the first time on test day.

(To catch up on the specifics for students with disabilities, read what Christina Samuels has reported over at On Special Education.)

A student's English-language proficiency level must be a prime consideration when selecting accommodations, the PARCC policy states.

And now, to the accommodations themselves—found in Section 6 of the draft manual and rated for how effective they will be depending on where students fall on the spectrum of progress toward proficiency.

1. Word-to-word dictionaries (English to an ELL's native language) would be allowed on both the English/language arts and mathematics tests.

2. Clarification of test directions (not test items) delivered in a student's native language by test administrators in both ELA and math. (Test administrators would need to be fluent/literate in both languages.)

3. Test items and response options read aloud in English for the ELA/literacy assessments. (For math, this is an accessibility feature allowed for all students.)

4. Student can provide oral responses on math assessments, which would be dictated into text.

5. Extended time on both ELA and math assessments.

6. Frequent breaks during both the ELA and math assessments.

In the manual, PARCC lays out its adherence to the principles of "Universal Design" so that all test items can be made accessible to the widest possible spectrum of students without having to provide a unique accommodation.

Among the supports that the PARCC policy says all students will receive on the computer-based exams are a highlighting tool, a spell checker, and pop-up glossaries with definitions of pre-selected words that don't provide an advantage to answering the test item.

Gabriela Uro, the manager of ELL policy and research for the Council of the Great City Schools which represents 67 of the nation's urban school systems, said that most of the recommended accommodations seem to have been developed with "a paper and pencil test in mind," even though nearly all students will take the exams on computers. One example, she said, would be providing an accommodation on the ELA/Literacy test in which ELLs could speak their answers and have them transcribed to text, as is recommended for math.

"For kids who don't speak English well, or who have accents, this would have to be worked out," she said. "But it can be done. The technology is there."

Uro said some of the draft language related to federal law and case law that is central to ELLs having equal access to education is vague and could cause confusion for states and districts. She also pointed to language in the draft that suggests that accommodations for ELLs be "individualized," akin to how decisions are made for students with disabilities.

"How do you operationalize something like in a district like Santa Ana (Calif.) where 60 percent of the students are ELLs?" Uro said.

PARCC drew on a range of experts in what it said was a two-year long development of the draft accommodations policy.

The big outstanding question for English-learners that PARCC must still answer is whether the assessments will be translated into languages other than English. Among the PARCC states, there are some that allow translations and others that prohibit it. The group says it will have a policy on translations ready some time this summer.

The other group of states working on new assessments to measure how well students are mastering the common core—the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium;will release its draft policy on accommodations in late summer or early fall.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

English-Learners Need Federal Commission, Suggests MALDEF Chief

2013-04-15T19:25:12Z

Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, said today that he believes that English-language learners—the fastest growing subgroup of students in public schools—deserve heightened attention from the federal government, akin to the Equity and Excellence Commission, a three-year-long effort to address the entrenched achievement gaps between poor students and their more affluent peers.

Saenz, who served on the 27-member equity commission, said that the federal panel didn't address equity issues specific to English-learners, in part because it didn't have the "right set" of commissioners. He went on to say that "there really is a need to address how to govern a federal system for ELLs when you have these students in every single state." Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act authorizes about $732 million in federal aid to states and local districts for English-language-acquisition programs. The U.S. Department of Education is responsible for ensuring that Title III funds for English-learners are used to "supplement" and not "supplant" state and local funding sources for services for students who are learning English.

Saenz made his remarks about English-learners at a Washington event today that was focused on a new school equity report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

At the same event, David G. Sciarra, the executive director of the Education Law Center and a prominent litigator on school funding equity cases, said that in most states the true needs of English-learners are not reflected in funding formulas. New Jersey, where his law center is based, is one of the few states that provides a "weight" for ELL students that is close to reflecting what it costs to meaningfully teach English-learners. There, schools receive anywhere from $4,000-$5,000 in additional funds (on top of a baseline amount of about $9,000 per student) for each English-learner they enroll, he said.

Many advocates for English-learners and directors of state and district language-acquisition services have long said that federal Title III dollars fall well short of providing funds that accurately reflect the numbers of ELLs that states and districts serve. Because of the wide variation in how ELLs are defined and classified across states, the U.S. Department of Education uses census data rather than state-reported counts of enrolled ELLs to determine levels of Title III aid. California, for example, gets funding for the roughly 1 million English-learners who are captured by census data collected through the American Community Survey, rather than the 1.4 million actually enrolled in its public schools. (Efforts underway to forge a common definition of English-learners across states are expected to help deal with that issue.)

This Title III funding issue might be one of many that a commission as envisioned by Saenz might examine.

ADDENDUM: It turns out that Title III state allocations have already been the subject of a federally-commissioned study. An eagle-eyed reader brought to my attention a 2011 National Research Council study on this very issue. The recommendations from the panel that the Ed. Dept. not just rely on the American Community Survey census data, but also consider state-reported counts of students who are not proficient in English when assessed on annual exams, were included in legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That bill, of course, went nowhere.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

English-Learners and the New Science Standards

2013-04-10T18:10:50Z

The final set of new science standards released to the public yesterday presents an unprecedented opportunity for English-language learners to learn rich, academic language at the same time they are learning rigorous science content, language experts say.

At the same time, the new science standards present a far more sophisticated level of language that will challenge many ELLs and their teachers.

As with the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics, English-learners, regardless of their level of command of the language, will be expected to demonstrate their proficiency with the "next generation" science standards just like their native English-speaking peers. The standards assume that all students, even those who have traditionally struggled with low achievement in science, can demonstrate mastery of complex scientific and engineering concepts.

What's different about the science standards, however, is that the needs of ELLs and other diverse learners were given much more careful consideration as the new academic expectations were being drafted. That, in part, stemmed from the team of writers, which included at least two science educators who are also ELL experts.

The final standards also include a 21-page chapter—Appendix D—that discusses how they can made accessible to all students. The appendix includes specific instructional approaches that teachers may use with various types of learners to help them access the standards.

In a forthcoming paper to be published in Educational Researcher, Okhee Lee, an education professor at New York University and perhaps the best-known expert on ELLs and science learning; Helen Quinn, a professor emeritus of physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University; and Guadalupe Valdés, an education professor at Stanford, argue that the acts of "learning" and "doing" science and engineering as envisioned in the standards will also develop language skills. For that to happen, though, requires a number of shifts, they write. A critical one is a changing role for science teachers, who must actively encourage and support language use and participation by English-learners in classroom discourse, even when students' English is flawed.

UPDATE: The full paper is available here.

- Lesli A. Maxwell

Hartford Schools, Civil Rights Officials Agree on Services for ELLs

2013-04-09T14:15:03Z

Six years after an advocacy group first complained about inadequate services for refugee students and English-learners in Hartford's school system, civil rights officials with the U.S. Department of Education have hammered out a resolution to address those concerns with Connecticut's largest school district.

In a 15-page resolution agreement with the Education Department's office for civil rights, Hartford's education leaders have agreed to a prescribed set of actions and reporting requirements to ensure that refugee students and immigrant children who are English-language learners are properly identified, receive better language instruction, and are provided bilingual tutors and other types of language support to help them access mainstream, academic content courses.

The agreement also outlines a number of steps the district has agreed to take to recruit and train more teachers with expertise in working with ELLs, as well as students who have had their education interrupted by traumatic events such as war or government oppression. The district also agreed to provide regular communications with parents in their native languages and will prohibit the use of students as interpreters.

The civil rights office will monitor the district's compliance with the agreement through the 2014-15 school year.

The complaint was first filed with the office of civil rights in April 2006 by the Center for Children's Advocacy, a legal advocacy organization for disadvantaged children and youth in Connecticut.

Hartford has long been a refugee resettlement site with sizable communities of refugees from Liberia and Somalia, and, more recently, Karen refugees from Burma and Thailand, Bhutan, and Iraq. But children whose first language is Spanish (many of them Puerto Rican) still constitute the largest slice of Hartford's ELL population, which is 18 percent of the district's entire enrollment, said Mary Beth Russo, the lead facilitator for ELL services.

Stacey Violante Cote, a lawyer for the advocacy group, said that over the years, the district had made starts and stops to improve programs and services for English-learners, but instituting permanent solutions proved impossible with a constant churn in leadership. Nothing ever stuck, she said. Initially, the organization was concerned about a lack of services to refugee students, but eventually found that there were similar problems for a wider range of students who were immigrants or children of immigrants and were still learning English.

"That's why this agreement with OCR is so necessary," she said. "We need something that is going to outlast any administrative turnover or changes in the district's reform agenda."

Ms. Russo, however, said that the district had embarked on a number of reforms and improvements to its ELL programming after OCR officials made their first visits to Hartford six years ago.

"When they came back to us with their original findings, they had neglected to look at the new services we were offering and to gather data that reflected the reforms we had adopted," Ms. Russo said. Among those changes, Ms. Russo said, were offering a full slate of school choice to ELLs and their families and making the district's process for identifying English-learners more transparent and understandable to people outside the district. A few years ago, the district began publishing an annual resource that provides detailed information about English-learners in each Hartford school, including academic performance measures and the types of staff members available to work with ELLs. More recently, the district has been able to hire about a half dozen of its Karen refugee graduates to work both as tutors and interpreters for Karen-speaking families.

Ms. Russo characterized much of the resolution with OCR as technical in nature.

In recent years, OCR has investigated a number of districts that have struggled to adjust to rapidly changing student populations to provide not only appropriate instructional services, but adequate communications with parents who do not speak English. In December, for example, the De Queen school district in Arkansas was found by OCR to be falling short in a number of those areas before devising a resolution to improve.

- Lesli A. Maxwell