Ending the No Child Left Behind Catch-22 on English learner progress
CREDIT: LPI
Linda Darling-Hammond
California’s State Board of Education has an opportunity at its meeting this week in Sacramento to leave behind one of the most unfair and problematic features of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the way it calculates English learners’ progress for purposes of accountability.
In doing so, however, the state will still have some other dilemmas to resolve with respect to how it will focus on, understand, and support the nearly 1.4 million public students classified as English learners.
These decisions, which have given rise to considerable debate, will be critically important in this state with the greatest concentration of English learners in the country (about 23 percent of K-12 public school students) so that it can both credit schools with their successes in moving English learners to proficiency in English and maintain a focus on those long-term English learners who have been left behind. Long-term English learners are students who have been English learners for six or more years, and are not making adequate progress on both learning English and mastering core content.
CREDIT: STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Kenji Hakuta
What’s the problem?
While NCLB established a noble new aspiration – raising achievement while closing achievement gaps among all groups of students – itsEnding the No Child Left Behind Catch-22 on English learner progress | EdSource: