The federal Education Department's research arm is gearing up to try to build a research-based case for building better supports for English-language learners.
At its next meeting, to be held in Washington Jan. 31, the National Board for Education Sciences is expected to hear from Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford University specializing in racial and income gaps in education, as well as Gabriela Uro, the ELL policy manager at the Council of the Great City Schools, and Eileen de los Reyes, deputy superintendent of academics for Boston public schools.
Reardon has found racial segregation creeping back into the nation's schools and neighborhoods as prior court-ordered desegregation plans are phased out, and linguistic isolation for immigrant English-language learners is becoming a particular concern. In a separate study, de los Reyes collaborated with University of Massachusetts Boston researchers and others to track English learners in Boston schools from 2006 through 2009. They found "deep vulnerability" for ELL students entering middle and high school with low language proficiency, particularly because more than 80 percent of them attend high-poverty schools, and more than three out of four attend schools that don't meet state accountability benchmarks in reading or mathematics.
Read the full story here.
Read a chapter that Sean Reardon wrote on the achievement gap between rich and poor students here.
Read an article citing Sean Reardon on income inequalitiy here.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
