NEWS
- Education in multiple languages gives kids a big boost, which means high demand for DC's programs [DC Bilingual PCS, Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS, Mundo Verde PCS, Sela PCS, EW Stokes Community Freedom PCS, and Washington Yu Ying PCS mentioned]
- D.C. lawmakers vote to defy Congress on billions, but will anyone notice
- As Congress debates No Child Left Behind: Who should decide which schools are failing kids?
- Researchers: Five ignored factors affect outcomes for poor children
Education in multiple languages gives kids a big boost, which means high demand for DC's programs [DC Bilingual PCS, Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS, Mundo Verde PCS, Sela PCS, EW Stokes Community Freedom PCS, and Washington Yu Ying PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By David Alpert
June 10, 2015
Seven DC public schools and six charters teach children in not just one language, but two. It's an approach that helps native and non-native English speakers, poor and affluent children alike, the latest research shows. But 13 schools are far from enough to meet the demand.
Children pick up languages very quickly. When you think about it, it's quite an amazing feat to learn one language when you know zero. Their brains can easily pick up languages in the early years, and in much of the world, children learn multiple languages.
Traditionally, US education doesn't start other languages until middle school, when the window of best opportunity has closed. A once-a-week Spanish lesson isn't enough either. But a few DC schools offer true immersion, where many lessons are in a language besides English.
Unfortunately, those programs are so successful that some boast among the longest waiting lists in the city. With few such programs concentrated in even fewer neighborhoods, it's not an option open to everyone.
What is immersion and where is it in DC?
To be an "immersion," "dual language," or "bilingual" school, at least half of the instructional time has to happen in a language other than English, even for kids who are native English speakers. This isn't the same as teaching "foreign language" or "world language" as a separate subject; instead, students might have their math or history lessons in Spanish, or Chinese, or another language depending on the school.
DC Public Schools has seven bilingual elementary schools, all in Spanish: Oyster-Adams in Woodley Park, Marie Reed in Adams Morgan, Bancroft in Mount Pleasant, Powell in Columbia Heights, Bruce-Monroe in Park View, Cleveland around U Street, and Tyler in Capitol Hill.
A number of charter schools also teach in two languages: DC Bilingual in Columbia Heights, Latin American Montessori Bilingual (LAMB) in Brightwood and Brookland/Woodridge, and Mundo Verde in Truxton Circle all teach Spanish. There's also Sela, which teaches Hebrew in the Riggs Park area; Stokes, in Brookland, which teaches in French and Spanish; and Yu Ying, near Catholic University, in Mandarin Chinese.
The only private immersion school in DC I'm aware of is the Washington International School, which offers Spanish, French, or a small Dutch program only for native speakers. Some private preschools teach dual language and some teach only in one. CommuniKids runs a Spanish-immersion preschool in Tenleytown as well as both French and Spanish in Falls Church and Loudoun.
When my family took a tour, the CommuniKids administrators explained that most of their students speak English at home, but they teach entirely in Spanish; kids at that age pick up Spanish very quickly, and the Spanish at school balances out with English at home.
Of course, that's not a good strategy for schools serving non-English native speakers, such as immigrants. Many of DC Public Schools's bilingual schools are located in areas with a high percentage of native Spanish speakers (such as Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, and Columbia Heights) because many started as a way to help "English language learners" (which was called ESL when I was in school) better participate.
However, according to Vanessa Bertelli of the DC Language Immersion Project, a group advocating for more language immersion education in DC, the latest research shows that immersion helps all students, native and non-native English speaking alike.
Is immersion good for native English speakers?
Once, many people in the US believed that if you spoke to a child in two languages, he or she would learn language more slowly overall. In fact, 30 years ago, some educators discouraged bilingual parents from speaking a language other than English to their children from birth.
Today, psychologists believe there isn't a disadvantage, and in fact are many advantages, to speaking multiple languages at home.
Bertelli says that new research shows the same for school. According to a longitudinal study of 85,000 North Carolina public school students, in immersion programs where close to half of students speak the partner language, students consistently outperform their peers by close to two grade levels, regardless of ethnicity, socioeconomic status and home language.
Other studies of immersion programs that don't start until grades 2-5 "show evidence of a temporary lag in specific English language skills such as spelling, capitalization, punctuation, word knowledge, and word discrimination," but after a year or two, these gaps disappear and there is no long-term disadvantage in English proficiency.
Some highly educated parents are able to help their children with reading and math at home, but they can't offer them instruction in another language. I've talked to parents in that position who felt that a language immersion program at their local DCPS school could keep them from leaving the system for a high-demand charter or private school, or even moving out of DC altogether.
For lower-income families, the value can be even greater. Start with the overall cognitive benefit: immersion helps close the achievement gap between children of high- and low-income families. Helena Curtain and Carol Ann Dahlberg write that "Children of color, children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and English Language Learners make the greatest proportionate achievement gains from foreign language study."
Further, in an increasingly globalized economy, more and more jobs require other languages. The fastest-growing job categories in DC include health care, where bilingual workers command higher salaries, and hospitality and tourism, where the value of other languages is obvious. And knowing two languages makes it far easier to learn a third, compared to only knowing English.
Unfortunately, there are currently no immersion programs east of the Anacostia River. This may originally have been because there are few native Spanish speakers east of the river, but evidence is growing that immersion is valuable even in schools with few children speaking the relevant language.
Immersion seats are in demand
DCPS is taking steps toward expanding bilingual programs, and immersion charter schools have created new options. However, space at immersion schools is not readily available. In fact, many immersion schools top the charts of the longest waitlists.
For pre-kindergarten at age three, LAMB and Mundo Verde lead the city with the longest waitlists, while three other bilingual charters are in the top 12.
For age four, bilingual Oyster-Adams in Woodley Park (and non-bilingual Janney in Tenleytown), which start at age four, both top the list. Yu Ying is the fourth highest among elementary schools which are not west of Rock Creek Park.
Perhaps the best way to gauge the value of immersion is to look at schools which have an immersion pre-kindergarten program alongside an English-only one, such as Marie Reed, Tyler, and Cleveland. The immersion waitlists are on average 2.2 times as long as the non-immersion ones.
Personally, while we are fortunate enough to live in boundary for a school (Ross) which has the second-highest DCPS waiting list at age three, it is not an immersion program. Our daughter is one-quarter Latin American and has been learning Spanish, but not from her parents. She speaks Spanish terrifically for her age, but we fear that in an English-only school she might lose it.
Unfortunately, the long waiting lists for immersion schools, especially nearest to our house, mean immersion may not be a viable option. If DCPS and charters are able to expand immersion programs, perhaps more children can benefit at just the time when their growing brains are ready to learn this valuable skill.
The DC Language Immersion Project is organizing a panel this Thursday, June 11. Greater Greater Washington education editor Natalie Wexler will moderate the panel, which is 7-9 pm at Tyler Elementary School, 1001 G Street SE.
D.C. lawmakers vote to defy Congress on billions, but will anyone notice
The Washington Post
By Aaron C. Davis
June 10, 2015
District lawmakers defied Congress on Wednesday, voting to appropriate more than $7 billion in local tax money themselves instead of waiting for Congress to approve the spending — as they have been required by law to do for decades through the federal budget process.
However, it is unlikely that D.C. residents will feel the effects of the District’s unprecedented challenge to its congressional overseers anytime soon.
The council’s decision to implement a disputed ballot initiative appeared to be headed for a protracted legal fight over whether the District can assert fiscal independence from Congress and spend its money more like states do.
With the courts involved, D.C. officials acknowledged that their revolt would do little immediately to halt conservative Republicans, who have threatened to use the first budget since their party regained control of Congress to defund liberal District laws on topics ranging from gun control to marijuana legalization.
And they got to work on that task Wednesday. Minutes before the D.C. Council voted to usurp Congress, House Republicans made public portions of their proposed budget that, among other details, call for outlawing sales of marijuana in the District despite a voter-approved referendum last year that legalized the substance for recreational use.
The federal budget would also maintain a ban on D.C. spending to help pay for abortions for low-income residents. And as early as Thursday, House Republicans are expected to pile on additional restrictions to cripple city gun-control laws and to undo funding for the District’s health exchange created under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. A conservative group of House Republicans has also vowed to defund a local D.C. law that prohibits religious organizations from discriminating on the basis of employees’ reproductive decisions.
“You know what I think of Congress? They’re a bunch of idiots,” said D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), lamenting that D.C. could not do more to block Congress until the court battle over budget autonomy is settled. “Congress is clearly going to do something that is going to offend all of us. We’re going to be really upset for a long time until we rise up and take back our city.”
More than half of the District’s $13 billion budget — and nearly all of its annual operating costs — is funded through taxes collected on D.C. residents and businesses. But the city’s decisions on how that money is spent remains subject to final approval by Congress, akin to the way a budget is approved for a federal agency.
D.C. lawmakers have for years attempted to untether the District’s budget from the federal one. The issue is frequently a rallying cry for advocates of statehood. The District has no vote in Congress over the budget that ultimately governs the District, which has a population larger than either Vermont or Wyoming.
Wednesday’s council vote was the latest chapter in the District’s decades-long fight to find a workaround. It fulfilled a measure known as the Budget Autonomy Act, which was passed by the D.C. Council in 2012 and approved overwhelmingly by voters a year later.
Under that measure, the D.C. Council claimed voters always had the right to amend the charter that Congress used to set up the District’s current form of government in 1973. The 2013 ballot measure amended that charter to say the District no longer needed to submit its budget to the White House for inclusion in the federal budget. Rather, it said, the District could pass a budget bill governing its own tax revenue as with any other local law.
The plan hit a roadblock when then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and the District’s chief financial officer, Jeffrey S. DeWitt, refused to abide, calling it an illegal change to the Home Rule charter. A federal judge last year agreed, saying only Congress could relinquish its control over the District’s budget.
But Muriel E. Bowser (D), then the incoming mayor, withdrew administration opposition early this year, siding with the council and saying she wanted to press forward with challenging Congress for autonomy to spend the city’s roughly $7 billion in local tax revenue. In light of Bowser’s reversal, a federal appeals court vacated the earlier decision, which prompted the council to move forward on Wednesday.
One remaining problem for Bowser and the council is that the court victory came so late in the District’s budget process that, according to a spokesman, the mayor will have no choice but to submit the District’s entire budget for congressional review, as in years past. The mayor will also sign and the District will submit to Congress the second, identical version of its budget passed Wednesday by the council.
That will create an unprecedented situation on Capitol Hill in which two live versions of the District’s budget will be working their way through competing approval processes.
Bowser and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said they would consider the version passed Wednesday as District law as soon as it clears the 30-day review period that Congress has to overturn any such law. (Congress is highly unlikely to bother because, in legal filings last year, it deemed D.C. budget autonomy invalid.)
At a news conference on Tuesday, Bowser said that asserting independence over the District’s revenue was important and that she believed the plan to pursue budget autonomy would prevail.
“I am a big proponent of doing something differently to get more autonomy for the residents of the District of Columbia,” she said.
DeWitt, who controls all District spending, has maintained that he will need a clear ruling from the courts to begin issuing checks under the alternate budget. At least for this year, however, legal experts said Bowser’s submission of the entire budget will mean any alterations by Congress will be final.
Mendelson, nonetheless, said he was optimistic and was more focused on what a judge would say about the District’s long-term budgeting authority than what Congress might do to interfere with city spending this year.
“This is a seminal day in the history of Home Rule,” he said in a statement. “While litigation continues, today’s vote moves the District forward.”
As Congress debates No Child Left Behind: Who should decide which schools are failing kids?
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 10, 2015
From Rand Paul on the right to Elizabeth Warren on the left, members of the Senate education committee pushed aside their policy disagreements earlier this spring when they voted unanimously in favor of a bipartisan revision to the widely reviled No Child Left Behind law.
But key differences remain to be resolved in both chambers of Congress before the rebranded “Every Child Achieves Act” can make it into law. Among the stickiest: how and whether Congress should define which schools are failing to serve students well and need intervention.
It is an issue that has not only divided the parties but also pitted two traditional Democratic allies — civil rights groups and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union — against each other.
Now the Congressional Tri-Caucus has sided with dozens of civil rights groups and the Obama administration. In a letter to the Senate on Wednesday, more than 80 members of the Tri-Caucus said they cannot support the bill without key changes, including a requirement that states take action at schools that are failing to serve subgroups of children, such as those who are low-income, African American or English learners, or those who have disabilities.
Specifically, the Tri-Caucus — made up of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus — wants the federal government to compel states to act when a school fails to meet testing targets for subgroups of students two years in a row.
That type of change is anathema to many Republicans, who see it as a federal overreach, and to the NEA, which likens it to a return to the test-centric and overly punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind. But members of the Tri-Caucus say that the requirement is key to ensuring that states do not overlook the nation’s neediest children.
Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (Va.), the ranking Democrat of the House education committee, said he and his colleagues are seeking a new law that “honors the civil rights legacy of the law and fulfills the needs of all of America’s children.”
The 2002 No Child Left Behind law was so unpopular in part because of its rigid definition of a “failing” school — any school in which one subgroup of students, such as African American children or those with disabilities, failed to meet test score targets set by the federal government. Schools that were generally doing well but where one group of children missed test score targets by a few points were lumped together with truly broken schools that failed year after year to educate their students.
The Senate’s bipartisan revision of the law has swung in the other direction, giving states latitude to decide how to judge schools’ success, including how much standardized test scores should count. States are also responsible for deciding which schools don’t measure up and what to do to improve them.
Civil rights groups fear that turning over all that control to states opens up the possibility that they will hide the poor achievement of disadvantaged children.
Adding the amendment that the Tri-Caucus and civil rights groups favor would not re-create No Child Left Behind because the federal government doesn’t define the testing targets or the interventions, said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust. Schools wouldn’t be required to fire principals or teachers but would have latitude to address their specific problems in ways that make sense locally, she said.
“What we’re trying to do is thread the needle, saying you’ve got to take this seriously, you can’t year after year miseducate one group of your kids — you need to do something. But we’re not going to tell you how to do it.”
Several key business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also favor such a provision.
The NEA opposed a similar amendment when it came before the Senate education committee, arguing that it would continue to overemphasize standardized testing and again cause many schools to be wrongly labeled as failing. In a letter to the Senate in April, Mary Kusler, NEA’s director of government relations, called it “reminiscent of the Adequate Yearly Progress system,” invoking what has become perhaps the best-known and most hated part of No Child Left Behind.
“The bill the Senate approved is headed in the right direction because it represents a strong bipartisan effort to improve upon the failed test, label, and punish policies of No Child Left Behind,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said in a statement.
“As we move forward, we will continue to urge Congress to go even further in helping each and every student, particularly those living in poverty and with the greatest educational needs. We still have work to do to ensure equity and opportunity for all students. We still need to ensure the system looks at more than test scores. We need a system that takes a holistic approach of focusing on the whole child.”
The union supports the civil rights coalition’s push to require action at the bottom 5 percent of schools in each state and at high schools with low graduation rates.
The civil rights coalition includes more than 40 organizations, including the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, the National Urban League and other such influential groups. But the civil rights community is not unanimous. Groups such as the Advancement Project and the Schott Foundation for Public Education have not signed on to the coalition, saying that its faith in test-based accountability is misplaced and does nothing to ensure that all children have access to rich learning opportunities and resources.
It’s unclear how the competing priorities on school accountability will shake out when Every Child Achieves heads to the Senate floor in the next several weeks. Some Democrats are caught between two constituencies with very different views on a key issue. But key Democrats, including Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the ranking Democrat of the Senate education committee, have signaled that they want to see the current bill amended to strengthen the federal government’s role in holding schools accountable for teaching all students.
“While Senator Murray sees the federal guardrails she was able to get included in the Every Child Achieves Act as positive steps, she also believes Congress should continue working to strengthen accountability systems under the bill as it moves to the Senate floor and in conference,” a Murray aide said, “including stronger protections from the federal level to identify struggling schools and help them get the supports, resources and locally designed interventions they need to serve all of their students.
Meanwhile, many of the Republicans who dominate both chambers are loathe to give Washington any say in school accountability.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate education panel and worked with Murray to hammer out the bipartisan Every Child Achieves bill under consideration, has been one of the strongest voices in favor of reducing the federal role in education, including in school accountability.
“Our bill’s proposal to continue the law’s important measurements of academic progress of students in all groups — but restore to states, school districts, classroom teachers and parents the responsibility for deciding what to do about improving student achievement — is the best way to achieve higher standards, better teaching and real accountability,” Alexander said in a statement. “As a result of this consensus, our bill has attracted the support of governors, chief state school officers, school superintendents, and teachers’ organizations.”
Researchers: Five ignored factors affect outcomes for poor children
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
June 10, 2015
School leaders and policymakers trying to improve academic results for disadvantaged children need to look outside the classroom at social and economic conditions that directly affect a child’s ability to learn, according to a new report released Wednesday.
The paper, written by Leila Morsy and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, focuses on five factors that new research suggests hinder the achievement of poor children: parenting practices in low-income households, single parenthood, irregular work schedules of parents in low-wage jobs, poor access to health care and exposure to lead.
All those factors drag down the academic performance of a child, but education policies address none of them, Rothstein said. Efforts to improve academic outcomes for the increasing number of poor children in public schools focus too heavily on incentives aimed at teachers and schools instead of taking on the underlying conditions that hamper children even before their formal schooling begins, he said.
“Policymakers are generally focused on the wrong things,” he said. “They’re trying to fix things in schools that can’t be fixed in schools. What we’re saying is, if we want to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children, we need to get these children to school ready for all the things school has to offer.”
The five conditions that are the focus of the report are not the only factors that affect academic achievement and might not be the most important, Rothstein said. The report highlights them because recent research has yielded new insights, he said.
The factors include:
●Lead exposure. One of the great public health success stories of the 20th century has been the reduction in exposure to lead, a potent neurotoxin. By 2013, fewer than 1 percent of U.S. children tested for lead had dangerous levels in their blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But in poor urban neighborhoods, lead remains a serious hindrance to healthy brain development in children, Rothstein said.
Children who live in apartments coated in lead paint, or where water is carried by lead pipes, risk severe effects. Minor exposure can cause attention problems, hyperactivity and irritability, while greater amounts are connected to cognitive problems and permanent brain damage.
Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old Baltimore man whose death in police custody sparked riots in that city, had a history of lead poisoning from his early childhood in West Baltimore. Gray was frequently suspended and dropped out of high school, and his sisters were diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a 2008 lead poisoning lawsuit filed by the Gray family against the owner of their rental home.
“We’ve eliminated lead for white children, we haven’t eliminated it for urban children,” Rothstein said. “We should focus on cleaning up lead in urban areas. If we did that, we would have an impact on student achievement.”
●Parenting styles. Morsy and Rothstein examined new research that details racial and class differences in child-rearing styles among parents, suggesting that parenting styles account for some of the differences in school readiness between black children from low-income families and white children from more affluent homes.
White adults spend 36 percent more time than black adults reading to young children, and three times more time talking with and listening to them, according to research Morsy and Rothstein cite. White parents not only read more to their children, they offer more guidance and are more strategic about helping children build their literacy skills.
By age 6, white children typically have spent 1,300 more hours engaged in conversations with adults than black children have. White parents also tend to offer their children more choices in daily life, helping them to think through decisions and consequences, which are important skills that prepare them for critical thinking, according to the research.
Low-income parents tend to be more authoritarian, giving children direction instead of choice, Rothstein said.
Quality preschool would help balance that inequity, Rothstein said.
“We should provide more early childhood experience for children who come from homes where parents don’t have the kinds of lives that encourage inquiry and critical thinking,” he said.
●Erratic job schedules for low-income workers. Just-in-time scheduling, where shift workers are given variable work hours, has been a boon to employers who are able to more efficiently schedule workers when they are most needed. But they wreak havoc on low-income families, Rothstein said.
Constantly shifting work schedules make it difficult for a parent to arrange for quality child care and establish consistent routines at home, he said.
“We should have regulatory reform in the labor market that creates disincentives for this kind of practice,” Rothstein said.
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