Scholars Target Arizona's Policies for ELL Students
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Arizona’s program for teaching English-language learners, which has been implemented for two school years by state mandate, will “almost certainly” widen the achievement gap between ELLs and their mainstream peers, concludes a qualitative study of five Arizona school districts released today by a California research-and-advocacy group.
Researchers for the study say the program, which requires ELLs to be separated into classes for four hours a day to learn discrete English skills, provides instruction to ELLs that is inferior to that received by other students, and ELLs aren’t learning enough English in one year to succeed in mainstream classrooms, as the program design had intended. The study also raises questions about whether the four-hour program will hinder ELLs in high schools from acquiring the credits they need to