Schools have left their approaches to serving ELs largely unchanged in the past decade. How can reformers address this?
Education reformers need to:
- Support multilingualism and multiculturalism in public education. Spiking national interest in bilingual education (now packaged as dual language immersion) is opening new space for ELs to maintain and cultivate their native language abilities. But these new bilingual programs are not always equitably accessible to ELs. In many communities, privileged, English-dominant children are increasingly gaining access to bilingual education even as ELs are being consigned to English-only schools. Equitable access to bilingual education should be a core priority for reformers across the country.
- Tell better stories. ELs are a growing share of the student population across the country—including in states that have not historically hosted large communities of newcomer immigrants. As a result, these students often arrive in classrooms where educators have limited experience working with linguistically-diverse populations. Teachers in these circumstances are almost always eager to learn how to better serve their students. They want to know research on ELs’ linguistic and academic development, and they want strategies for helping them s쳮d. But teachers can’t always sift through white papers and data tables. They need examples of other schools that have changed their practices to meet ELs’ needs.
- Rethink achievement gap accountability for ELs. English-learning students present unique challenges for reformers’ usual approach to school accountability. Early in their schooling, ELs tend to perform poorly on academic tests administered in English. Their academic performance generally improves with their English abilities. This means that EL students tend to show the strongest academic growth as they are leaving the official EL subgroup—that is, as they reach full English proficiency and are no longer officially classified as ELs. That makes it hard to decide which schools are serving ELs best. Reformers should push for more comprehensive data collection and analysis so that school accountability systems actually credit educators whose EL students are making both linguistic and academic progress each year—and across their K–12 careers.
- Widen their lanes. Reform priorities—charter schools, higher academic standards and efforts to close opportunity gaps—are valuable. But reformers who want to help ELs s쳮d can’t stay in their comfort zones. They need to engage on broader topics that shape these children’s well-being and long-term development: draconian immigration policies, housing and zoning policies that foster displacement of low-income immigrant communities, and more. Better education policies to support ELs are necessary, but not sufficient, against the backdrop of current rhetoric and harassment targeting the immigrant communities where many of these children live.
Of course, this is just a first cut. There are other ways that reformers can extend higher-quality educational opportunities for ELs. Reformers could work more intentionally to ensure that these children have access to early childhood education programs, where ELs tend to do especially well. They could commit more energy towards developing higher-quality curricular resources for EL education. They could apply a more thoroughly critical eye towards education technology that’s long on promises for serving ELs, but short on actual impact. And so forth. Above all,
reformers need to finally make English learners a funding, policy and research priority.
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