A guest post from a Fordham Research Intern, Hannah Miller. Hannah attended the Quality Counts release event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC yesterday.??
Education Week and Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) made a smart choice when deciding the order of events for the release of their 13th annual education report card.
If they'd begun with the state-by-state report cards, the presentation might have been a bit ho-hum. After all, the results were largely the same as the 2008 report (only eight states' grades changed from the year before and those changes were generally modest) and the nation itself received a discouraging grade of C+ on the Chance-for-Success Index which examines the role of education from childhood to employment.
But rather than begin with the latest round of statistics for what has become a tried-and-true formula (though, granted, it is modified from year-to-year), Christopher Swanson, director of the EPE's Research Center, dove right into the Quality Counts 2009 special report.
This year, Quality Counts focuses on English-language learners (ELLs), a traditionally under-studied population but one that's rapidly growing (increasing from 3.2 million in 1995-1996 to 5.1 million in 2005-2006) and thus deserving of the closer attention paid by Education Week and EPE. ??
Although some states have programs and policies that work for educating ELLs, many have a long way to go. Maine reported that a whopping 44.9 percent of their English-learners failed to make progress toward English-language proficiency (in Connecticut, the number was only 1.4 percent)!
That's a huge discrepancy, and Quality Counts 2009 examines some of the challenges in addressing that gap. For instance, ELLs are more likely to attend school districts that are larger, lower-income, and more racially and economically segregated than districts serving non-ELL students.?? English-language learners are half as likely as non-ELLs to have at least one parent with a postsecondary degree, and they come from families with median incomes that are nearly $25,000 less than those of non-ELL families.
However, ELLs are not the monolithic population they're sometimes assumed to be. While many do speak Spanish, other ELLs speak over 100 other languages, and two-thirds of ELLs are native-born citizens, not first-generation immigrants.
Education Week's statistics and profiles of individual ELL students were fascinating, but even better was the concluding panel discussion in which experts from the Center for Applied Linguistics and NYC's Office of English Language Learners, among others, shared their expertise about the challenges facing ELLs. It was a fitting conclusion to a ??presentation that didn't get bogged down in the details of which states received Bs and which received Ds, but instead offered a look at how better research might lead to better programs and policies benefiting millions of English-learners and the teachers and principals who serve them.