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Professional educators--in the classroom, library, counseling center, or anywhere in between--share one overarching goal: ensuring all students receive the rich, well-rounded education they need to be productive, engaged citizens. In this regular feature, the work of professional educators is explored--their accomplishments and their challenges--so that the lessons they have learned can benefit students across the country. After all, listening to the professionals who do this work every day is a blueprint for success. In this article, a teacher of English language learners describes how she encourages her students to share their immigration stories so they can both improve their fluency in English and realize they are not alone.

Mention teachers' practice of reading aloud to their students and a typical image comes to mind: In a cozy corner of an elementary classroom, youngsters are gathered on a rug, listening intently to "Charlotte's Web." But, in fact, many teachers across the country are reading to students in middle and high schools, too, and some education researchers say more teachers of adolescents ought to be using the same strategy. Many teachers made reading aloud a regular practice after attending sessions at education conferences by Jim Trelease, a journalist and the author of the "Read-Aloud Handbook." "If the only thing a teacher shares is from a textbook, how are you going to get students excited about reading?" he said. Other teachers found by trial and error that reading aloud worked for adding interesting content or making literature come alive for students. And some educators say they read to their classes to model good reading, such as by asking comprehension questions as they go along, or simply because students love it. This article discusses the research findings about reading aloud and explores how teachers use read-alouds at the middle school level.

Through order and English immersion, a network of charter schools strives to turn Latino students into informed citizens and leaders inside and outside the community. Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization, or UNO, is a Latino advocacy group with a history of community organizing. The group recently received a $98 million grant from the state of Illinois to open new schools. That is believed to be the largest grant of public capital funds to a U.S. charter school operator. Juan Rangel, the chief executive officer of the organization, preaches the value of a disciplined school climate, and imparts that philosophy to students and staff, along with other goals that are set for the schools, from the top down. The network's overall mission is to foster a culture that can turn out students who are leaders in the community and beyond.

The academic success, tendency to stay out of trouble, and physical health of children of immigrants to the United States tend to decline significantly from the first to the third generation. This article reports that this troubling pattern brought researchers together at Brown University to examine a provocative question: Is becoming American a developmental risk? More than two decades have passed since researchers began to document what they call the "immigrant paradox:" Immigrants generally do much better in American society than expected, given the challenges of navigating in a new culture, not speaking English well, and often having little money, yet their early success often is not sustained by later generations. One of the goals of the conference at Brown was to nudge researchers toward finding solutions that could help the children and grandchildren of immigrants have as much success as the first arrivals in their families.

This article features Brownsville Independent School District which was awarded the prestigious 2008 Broad Prize for Urban Education for being the nation's most improved urban school district. The Texas border district sees teacher training and data-based instruction as paths to learning gains--and the $1 million Broad award adds validation. In giving the $1 million prize, which will be used to provide college scholarships for graduating seniors in the school system this spring, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation highlighted Brownsville Independent School District's success with Hispanic and low-income students. Underlying that success is its strong track record of enabling students from Spanish-speaking homes to acquire the English they need to do well in the classroom and on state tests. As the 10-person Broad prize jury recognized, the district fares well according to a number of indicators. In 2007, for example, the district outperformed other Texas districts that serve low-income students in reading and mathematics at all grade levels. More than 94 percent of the district's students are from low-income families. Brownsville also is narrowing ethnic and income achievement gaps.

Thousands of children were deprived of schooling in the difficult aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq five years ago. During those times, more than 2 million Iraqis have fled their homeland, mainly to Jordan and Syria. Even though the schoolchildren who came to these neighboring Arab lands with their families are now given seats in classrooms, they still feel isolated, and many lag far behind in their studies.

This article discusses the Federal Migrant Education Program as implemented in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The program is relatively small as federal programs go--its budget for the current fiscal year was $386.5 million. According to the No Child Left Behind Act, the term "migratory child" means a child who is, or whose parent or spouse is, a migratory agricultural worker, including a migratory dairy worker, or a migratory fisher, and who, in the preceding 36 months, in order to obtain, or accompany such parent or spouse, in order to obtain, temporary or seasonal employment in agricultural or fishing work--(1) has moved from one school district to another; (2) in a state that is comprised of a single school district, has moved from one administrative area to another within such district; or (3) resides in a school district of more than 15,000 square miles, and migrates a distance of 20 miles or more to a temporary residence to engage in a fishing activity. Complex eligibility rules for the federal program, such as what is considered agricultural work and what was a family's reason for making a move, have dominated national discussions about the program in recent years and are at the center of the debate on its reauthorization. Those who run the program in Chester County say the eligibility rules are hard to apply to the people they seek to serve: immigrants from Mexico who have little education, who do not speak English, and who are distrustful of questions. The educators have some ideas about how the law could be improved and they would like the reauthorization to make it easier to determine if families are eligible and to permit more families to participate.

The Navajo Language Immersion School--"Tsehootsooi Dine Bi'olta'," to use its Navajo name--made adequate yearly progress in all subgroups under the No Child Left Behind Act during the 2005-2006 school year because "the teachers know exactly where their students are in terms of data." The K-8 school with 235 students in the Window Rock Unified School District, on the reservation of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, draws on both Navajo tradition and modern accountability tools to improve student achievement. Educators at the Navajo-immersion school, where 71 percent of students are from low-income families, have embraced state academic standards and federal accountability requirements under the law through a school improvement plan. The school also teaches standards for Navajo culture published by the tribe and operates a program intended to teach literacy and improve oral proficiency in "Dine"--the word Navajos use for their people and language. Kindergartners and 1st graders receive all instruction in Navajo. Lessons in English, including reading, begin in 2nd grade and occupy an increasing amount of class time with additional grades. By 6th grade, children receive half their instruction in each language. There is no question that school leaders see the infusion of native culture and language as a key to its success.

In the St. Paul, Minnesota public schools, "pullout" teaching is frowned upon. Instead, "collaboration" is the favored method when it comes to teaching English-language learners. For three of the past four years, the district has made adequate yearly progress for its English-language learners under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It has done so with a population that is primarily Hmong, a Laotian ethnic group that was first resettled in the Twin Cities in the late 1970s after the Vietnam War. The St. Paul district is "amongst the best" of 65 urban school systems in nearly closing the achievement gap between English-language learners and native speakers based on an analysis of state data. Over the past seven years, the district in the Minnesota capital has revamped its programs for elementary students so that inclusion has replaced assigning English-language learners to a full-day English-as-a-second-language track or having an ESL teacher regularly pull them out of class. Now, mainstream and ESL teachers co-teach in the same classroom, which is not a commonly used method. This article describes how teachers team-teach to help English-language learners.

Picked up by immigration authorities, undocumented children who are apprehended without their parents are sent to shelters throughout the United States and educated while they wait out deportation proceedings. At one such shelter in Miami, new students appear almost as rapidly as others leave. The shelter is run by Catholic Charities of Miami under contract with the federal government. The children's stay at the school is short, an average of 25 days before being released to family in the United States, getting sent back to their countries, obtaining papers to stay in this country, turning 18, or in some other way having their status changed.

This article presents a school-based summer camp called the Get FIT program. Students in Eagle Pass, Texas, go to summer camp to learn how to eat better, play harder, and make smarter decisions about their health. This article also presents an experience of an eleven-year-old child who was once "real fat." The child improved his eating habits after he and his mom joined the weekly Get FIT program. Furthermore, the author states, that school district officials in this small but sprawling city right next to the U.S.-Mexican border have good reason to help sponsor the program.

In this article, the author reports how religious schools are being pressed to spell out their policies regarding gay students and the children of same-sex couples. As homosexuality has become one of the fiercest battlefronts in the "culture wars," religious schools have found it harder to exclude gays or their children without lawsuits or unwanted coverage in the news media, even though court precedents favor their right to take such action. As such, religious schools are clarifying their policies concerning the sexual orientation of students, parents, and faculty. However, the policies tend to be drawn up at the school level and can differ even within the same religious denomination.

English is hot in many foreign language schools abroad, and as the trend accelerates, so too has debate over the value of English in a global society. English-only countries steadfastly cling to their strong historical connection to imperialism, and monolingualism at the risk of losing their share of the world marketplace. While advocates of English teaching and foreign-language study praise the increasing attention to various programs to teach English, concern is widespread that the efforts are piecemeal or haphazard, or a fad that will wane with changes in governmental leadership. The greatest concern, they say, is the quality and quantity of teachers to carry out those efforts. Many governments see a need and urgency to set up English programs, but no one seems to have figured out how to do it in an efficient way. Public systems are haphazard, and the private sector is often unregulated. For now, the demand for English programs and teachers is growing rapidly world wide. English proficiency is a key educational strategy and is considered a basic skill. In Europe, nearly every country has reported in recent years increasing numbers of students learning English in the early grades.

If the United States is going to take advantage of the linguistic skills of millions of children in this country who speak languages other than English at home, policy has to change at the district, state, and national levels, experts in the field say. Citing Dearborn public schools as an example, the author illustrates the importance of heritage speakers in the United States. Located in the industrial suburb of Detroit, 40% of Dearborn's 17,700 students are of Arab descent. Many of heritage speakers in this district are fluent in Arabic, they however, can barely read or write the language. Not many U.S. public schools provide the training to build on students' home languages other than English, even when they have a critical mass speaking the same language. Instead, schools almost overwhelmingly focus on students who are learning foreign languages from scratch. This article also includes a music video of 2nd graders at Becker Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, rehearsing a song in Arabic.

In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka," the South Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side was home primarily to Polish and Czech immigrants. In the decades since, South Lawndale has undergone dramatic change. Eastern Europeans moved out, and people of Mexican descent settled in the area now known as "La Villita." Today, Chicago is home to the nation's second-largest community of people of Mexican origin, second only to Los Angeles, and the La Villita neighborhood reflects the dramatic change and demographic shifts brought about by the historic court decision that struck down racially segregated schooling. Nationwide, Hispanic students have outnumbered African-American children in public schools since 1998, a trend that has heightened the complexity of American education's demographic profile, after decades in which integration-in most people's eyes-was literally an issue of black and white. In La Villita, Latinos attend schools enrolling mostly minority students from poor families, reflecting a national pattern. Hispanic students are, "by most measures, the most segregated by both race and poverty," according to a recent report by Gary Orfield, a researcher at Harvard University. Residents of La Villita believe that Latinos have gotten short shrift when it comes to educational opportunities in Chicago, and have even resorted to hunger strikes in an effort to get a new neighborhood high school to relieve overcrowding and provide strong academics. In 2004, construction began on this new high school, which cost $61 million (more than any other public school in Chicago's history) and included a swimming pool, two gymnasiums, a health clinic, and a rooftop auditorium. La Villita residents are concentrating on how to make their new high school more successful than the comprehensive high schools now serving large numbers of Hispanic students. Their hopes are riding on a plan to design four separate small schools within the building. Each will have its own principal and academic theme: social justice; world languages; fine and performing arts; and mathematics, science, and technology.

More families are seeking the Christian-based culture of evangelical schools. Schools, like Fredericksburg Christian, that are run by evangelical Christians have been growing in number, total enrollment, and proportion of the private school market, according to data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. The most recent statistics available from the NCES show that the enrollment at "conservative Christian" schools--a category that covers those schools that have joined four national school associations espousing evangelical Christianity--increased from 12 percent of U.S. private school enrollment in the 1991-92 school year to 15.4 percent in 2001-02. The number of students in those schools grew by 41 percent, from 585,217 to 823,500, during that time.

Regions in America's heartland are now getting large numbers of immigrants en masse. Corresponding with this skyrocketing immigration--mostly by Latinos--is a huge growth in the number of children who have limited proficiency in English. In the light of this trend, some schools districts in the heartland regions are well on their way to incorporating the lessons they have learned about teaching children who speak little or no English. However, other districts, often because of a lack of resources or a resistance to change, have long learning curves ahead of them. This article examines how well the heartland regions are serving students who speak little or no English.

Educators often say that what young people learn at home about behavior and how to view themselves has a lot to do with how well they do in school. The Mesa, Arizona school district opened Parent University 18 years ago as a place where adults could discuss and hone parenting skills. It goes further than many other districts to help parents who seek advice on discipline, communication, and other aspects of raising children.

One Washington state school district uses mariachi music lessons to engage Hispanic students in school and deter them from dropping out. The district's dropout rate is very low, despite its high Hispanic population. Students in the top-performing mariachi groups say that participating has motivated them academically. Just as mariachi has transformed students' lives, students are transforming the music as girls are breaking into this male dominated music form. (SM)

Describes the Hutterites, a communal German-speaking Christian sect in the northwestern United States and western Canada, who typically school their children only through eighth grade and allow further education only for teacher training. Discusses how well Hutterite children do in public schools, Hutterite teacher education programs at universities, and changing community attitudes toward higher education. (TD)

Relates experiences with replacing textbooks with computer-based multimedia, citing middle-school use of multimedia software Science 2000 in Laredo, Texas. Advantages include interactivity, extensive databases, visual learning, data links, and student enthusiasm. Drawbacks include superficiality, lack of infrastructure support, teacher resistance, and a program that is too advanced or too passive for students. Improvement on standardized tests is questioned. (SAS)

State-level momentum in support of vouchers and tax credits that help students go to private schools highlights what has been a largely theoretical issue: private school capacity to support voucher-financed enrollment. Academics say the national supply of seats in secular and religious private schools is sufficient to meet short-term demand from existing voucher programs and from those being considered in states such as Pennsylvania. And if the voucher movement continues to gain traction new private schools may be established or old ones expanded, a pattern that took place with the spread of charter schools. Longer term, however, meeting the demand for voucher-funded seats will depend on factors such as the scope of those programs, what grade levels they serve, and whether a program's design encourages private school participation or tangles it in red tape. Private schools have kept up with demand so far, academics say, but voucher programs' design and scale complicate longer-term prospects. The author reports on private schools' capacity issue that looms for vouchers.

Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter middle schools enroll a significantly higher proportion of African-American students than the local school districts they draw from, but 40 percent of the black males they enroll leave between grades 6 and 8, says a new nationwide study by researchers at Western Michigan University. With 99 charter schools across the country, most of which serve grades 5 to 8, the Knowledge Is Power Program network has built a national reputation for success in enabling low-income minority students to do well academically. And some studies show that KIPP charter schools have succeeded in significantly narrowing race-based and income-based achievement gaps between students over time. While not disputing that track record, the new study attempts to probe some of the more unexplored factors that might play into KIPP's success. Researchers say high attrition rates and private donations help explain the charter school network's success record.

Leaders of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools are optimistic that they can reach a long-term agreement with the Baltimore (Maryland) Teachers Union in a nationally watched dispute over teacher pay for an extended school day, reducing the likelihood that the charter network will carry out its threat to close its two schools in that city. The union has indicated its willingness to negotiate a 10-year agreement that meets KIPP's needs. If such a deal became final, the KIPP organization would stop trying to push through the Maryland legislature a bill giving it flexibility to amend an existing collective bargaining agreement as long as 80 percent of teachers in a school agreed to it. At issue is a desire by KIPP not to pay teachers the full hourly rate specified in union contracts for working beyond the regular school day. Longer school days, and even some Saturday classes, are key to the teaching philosophy of the national KIPP network, which now includes 99 public schools in 20 states, and it's also integral to several other charter school models across the country. The practice has raised questions over the years about whether those schools could sustain their programs without risking teacher burnout. The KIPP school day in Baltimore is 9 1/2 hours, or one-third longer than the contractual school day. KIPP, however, negotiated a one-year deal with the Baltimore Teachers Union to pay teachers only 20.5 percent more for the longer school day. The charter operator will not stay in Baltimore unless it can seal that same deal, or a similar one. KIPP schools have the longest school day of any charter school in the city, possibly explaining why the negotiations between KIPP and the union have been more problematic than between other charters and the union. Charter schools in the city address the extra-hours issue through one of three arrangements: (1) they provide an extended school day through after-school programs that are optional for both teachers and students; (2) they offer an extended day that is required for students but not teachers and contract for overtime only with those teachers who step forward; or (3) they require an extra-long day for both students and teachers. KIPP schools fall into that last category.

The author reports on the "restart" option in the federal school turnaround program which offer new opportunities for charter school operators. Some of the nation's largest and best-known charter-management organizations have not jumped at the opportunity to "restart" schools with federal economic-stimulus money, but a wide range of smaller charter operators, private for-profit companies, and nonprofit groups has filled the gap. Only about 5 percent of schools receiving School Improvement Grants as part of the federal economic-stimulus package chose to turn around schools with the widely touted restart model, the only option out of four that enables school districts to turn schools over to charter operators as part of the U.S. Department of Education's $3.5 billion grant competition. The small proportion of restarts is an indication that most school districts don't want to take on the political and implementation challenges of shutting down low-performing schools and starting over, said Todd Ziebarth, the vice president for state advocacy and support for the Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

It's not easy to keep young people on task for learning in a youth prison, but David Domenici, the principal of the Maya Angelou Academy, a charter-like school serving incarcerated juveniles, is trying to do it while at the same time creating a model program for improving educational services for young offenders. Located at the New Beginnings Youth Development Center, a lockup facility housing young men convicted of crimes in the District of Columbia, Maya Angelou is one of a small number of schools run by charter school operators targeting incarcerated youths. As of late last month, the academy was educating 60 to 70 teenagers, ages 14 to 19, who were serving time for crimes ranging from unauthorized use of a vehicle, to armed robbery, to manslaughter. A few stay as little as five days; others may be incarcerated for a year. Yet, in the short time they're at the Maya Angelou Academy, Mr. Domenici hopes to give each of them the best education possible and also likely the best education they've ever had. The See Forever Foundation, a nonprofit organization that operates three charter schools in the District of Columbia, won the contract to provide education services to incarcerated youths more than three years ago from Washington's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Mr. Domenici, a lawyer and a son of former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., initially co-established the foundation with fellow lawyer James Forman Jr. in order to run a school for youths who had been arrested. The small program grew, though, into three charter schools serving a broad range of students. Before the foundation turned its attention to youths at the lockup facility, those services were managed by the District of Columbia school system. The facility was known then as Oak Hill and was housed in decrepit buildings in Laurel, 20 miles north of the nation's capital. Problems at Oak Hill led to an ongoing consent decree from the District of Columbia Superior Court to improve services, including education, for Washington's juvenile delinquents.

In the midst of an attempt by Arizona's legislature and top education official to shut down ethnic-studies courses in the Tucson Unified School District, students at Tucson High Magnet School are flocking to the courses this school year. School district officials say enrollment in Mexican-American studies in Tucson Unified's 14 high schools has nearly doubled since last school year, from 781 to 1,400. Some students say the controversy over ethnic studies caused them to want to check out the courses for themselves. But others say they signed up to learn more about social justice generally or Mexican-American culture and history specifically. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and Deputy Superintendent Margaret Dugan contend the courses teach anti-American ideas and encourage Mexican-Americans to think of themselves as victims. Horne helped convince the Arizona legislature to approve a law, signed in April 2010 by Governor Jan Brewer, that aims to ban the kind of ethnic studies public schools are offering. Scheduled to take effect December 31, the law bars all public schools across the state from providing courses designed for a particular ethnic group, that advocate ethnic solidarity, or that promote resentment toward a race or group of people. Last month, Horne sent a letter to John Carroll, Tucson's interim school superintendent, saying that if the district continues to teach ethnic studies after the law becomes effective, the Arizona education department will withhold 10 percent of the school district's funds. A cut in funds "would sting," said Abel Morado, the principal at Tucson High. But he said he believes the Tucson Unified school board will stand up for continuing to offer ethnic studies. The courses are valuable, he said, because "a student's identification with the curriculum is nonnegotiable."

The author reports on state and independent reviews that cite shortcomings in four urban systems. According to the reviews of those school systems over the past two years, four urban districts--in Boston, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington--did not provide special help to learn English to all students entitled to it under federal law. The reviews come as the Obama administration steps up enforcement of civil rights laws in schools. Directors of programs for English-language learners in the four districts, who say they are trying to fix the problem, maintain that part of the issue is confusion over how to apply federal civil rights laws to the education of such students. In their defense, educators say more federal guidance is needed on how to apply civil rights laws to programs for English-language learners. The U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Education are expected to bring some clarity to the challenge of upholding the civil rights of ELLs as they undertake investigations of programs around the country. In a written statement, Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division of the Justice Department, laid out some guidance for districts.

A growing number of school districts are trying to break up concentrations of poverty on their campuses by taking students' family income into consideration in school assignments. Some of the districts replaced race with socioeconomic status as a determining indicator after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that using race as the primary factor in assigning students to schools violates the Constitution. Other districts that take family income into account never included race as a factor. Many experts believe the composition of a school's student body affects achievement. If black and Hispanic students, who are more likely to be poor, go to the same schools as their better-off white peers, the thinking goes, they'll all do better and aspire to higher education. But since the Supreme Court essentially blocked a race-conscious path to racial diversity, some integration advocates are looking to socioeconomic status to reach the same goal. Advocates hope to clear the path to racial diversity in schools, through the use of poverty measures. They argue that educating students of different social and economic levels in the same classrooms is a powerful tool for increasing achievement.

In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in the northwest corner of South Carolina, high schools' attempts to curb student dropouts may not match what many people picture when they hear talk of the nation's "dropout factories." Yet one-fifth of the 2,000 high schools nationwide categorized that way by researchers at Johns Hopkins University are in rural areas, some of them small schools where students get a lot of personal attention. The 2004 report "Locating the Dropout Crisis" first drew attention to a list of about 2,000 high schools that researchers considered to be dropout factories--"an institution that does a good job of systematically producing dropouts," said Thomas C. West, a University of Chicago researcher who is affiliated with the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which put out the report. Since the inception of the list, most of the attention to the nation's dropout problem has been on urban schools, where the average graduation rate for the class of 2006 was 58.7 percent, compared with 73.1 percent in rural schools, according to Diplomas Count 2009. While most of the attention is on urban high schools with low graduation rates, rural schools also struggle to retain at-risk students.

A growing chorus of people are saying that some school districts are overzealous in categorizing students as English-language learners (ELLs) in the aim of complying with federal and state laws to ensure that children of immigrants get extra help with English. They contend that the information requested on the home-language survey that parents are commonly asked to fill out when they enroll their child in a public school can be misleading or misused. In Orange County and many other districts across the country, once a student is designated as an ELL, the label is not readily lifted. Meanwhile, in Arizona, state education officials have changed the home-language survey there to ask only one question rather than three, saying they want to cut down on the overidentification of students as ELLs. The U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights is investigating a complaint that contends, however, that by simplifying the home-language form, Arizona is discriminating against children who may be dominant in English but still need extra help to gain proficiency in it. States differ in whether they permit parents to remove a child who has been identified as an English-learner from special English instruction, such as English-as-a-second-language classes. The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act permits parents to remove their children from special English classes, but it also says that states' laws on the matter take precedence over the federal law. Arizona, California, Iowa, and Texas let parents waive special instruction in English. New Mexico and New York do not. Under the NCLB law, school districts are required to assess ELLs each year with an English-language-proficiency test, an exam that other students don't have to take. Districts vary in whether they are willing to honor a parent's demand not to give the test.

Many students at the Edward Coles Model for Excellence World Language Academy or the Rachel Carson Elementary School in Chicago--schools that takes part in the Striving Readers program--say they came to enjoy reading for the first time or became better readers through the program, now in its fourth year. The federal program supports the implementation and evaluation of "research-based" reading interventions for schools that are at risk of not making adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act, or that have large proportions of students who are reading below grade level. The federal program, which the Obama administration wants to expand, has not shown impressive student-achievement results so far. The U.S. Department of Education released evaluations of Striving Readers' effect on student achievement during the initiative's second year of implementation, the 2007-08 school year. The evaluators concluded that students in Striving Readers programs in five of the seven participating districts, including Chicago, did not improve significantly more in reading than did their peers in those same districts who did not take part in the initiative.

Across the country, high school graduation rates are bemoaned with regularity. Many states and districts aren't even tracking the rate for the fastest-growing population of students, or if they are, they aren't telling the public how many English-language learners (ELLs) are leaving school with a diploma. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was supposed to rectify that. Now, nearly eight years after its passage, 13 states and numerous districts still don't report that information to the public or the U.S. Department of Education. Some of those that do are offering numbers that may not be entirely accurate. The NCLB law specifies that states must report graduation rates for subgroups of students, including ELLs, in their report cards. Subsequent Education Department regulations make clear that school districts must do so as well. Newer regulations, released last October, may force states and districts to be more transparent about the rates, and, at least in theory, put more effort into helping English-learners through school. The new rules require that schools and districts be judged on their graduation rates overall and by subgroup, including ELLs, to determine whether they've met goals for adequate yearly progress, beginning with the 2011-2012 school year. The population of ELLs in the United States has been expanding. As a result, some education experts say that school officials and policymakers must pay attention to the graduation rate for all such students, not just Latinos. About 75 percent of ELLs are Latino. Others contend that the rate for ELLs doesn't mean that much. What's paramount in their view is to find out whether students are acquiring English, and then how well they perform academically during the two or three years after they leave special language-learning programs.

Nurta Muktar, a 17-year-old refugee of Somali heritage, learned to read this school year at East High School. It likely would not have happened if East High did not provide classes in basic reading skills for English-language learners (ELLs). And the school likely would not have such classes, some Salt Lake City teachers say, if the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights (OCR) had not forced the Salt Lake City district to bolster services for English-learners in response to a complaint by a local activist in 2001. Salt Lake City's experience illustrates the array of changes a district may need to undergo to meet federal mandates on educating such students. After five site visits and eight years of monitoring, OCR officials released the school district from scrutiny in March, saying in a letter that ELLs "have meaningful access to the district's educational programs." Some Salt Lake City teachers who directly work with ELLs say their needs would likely still be ignored if the OCR had not gotten involved. They say they feel good about how the district is now addressing the students' needs.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments later this month from a class action Miriam Flores, 42-year-old Mexican-born homemaker, joined on behalf of her first child in 1996. The lawsuit, Flores v. State of Arizona, contends that programs for English-language learners in Nogales are deficient and receive inadequate funding from the state. Since it was filed in 1992, the lawsuit has pitted state officials against one another, and it has forced Nogales and school districts statewide to change the way they serve English-learners, including separating them for long periods of the day from other students. One of the state's arguments is that compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act trumps civil rights law, said Roger L. Rice, the executive director of Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy Inc., a Somerville, Mass.-based advocacy group for ELLs. On the other hand, he said, if the court ruled in favor of the Flores side of the case and said clearly that states have an obligation to sufficiently fund ELLs under civil rights law, advocates could go to court in states that do not provide any additional funds for such students and make the same argument that the Nogales parents have made. The outcome of this case before the Supreme Court could have further ramifications, not only for Arizona but also for districts and ELLs nationwide.

This article reports that a number of history and social studies teachers have found that because of the parallels they're able to draw between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression, their students are seeing that history is relevant. They're engaging more deeply in history lessons than they have in previous years. The teachers say they have brought new energy to their lessons about the Great Depression and the recovery efforts of that time, and in many cases have devoted more class time to them than usual. The Great Depression was a worldwide economic slump that occurred in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929 and ended in the late 1930s or early 1940s, depending on the country. In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt devised a series of programs, called the New Deal, that included economic stimulus, social-safety-net policies, and new regulatory structures designed to reform the nation's economic and social systems and put unemployed Americans back to work. Teachers are comparing and contrasting the causes of the Great Depression and the current recession, as well as the New Deal and the recent stimulus package and other government responses to today's crisis. Teaching about the Great Depression period is standard fare in American schools at the secondary level.

American educators in cities such as Syracuse, NY, Burlington, VT, and St. Paul, MN, for reasons including civic culture, existing ethnic communities, availability of jobs, and the location of refugee-resettlement organizations, periodically receive waves of resettling immigrants. Officials in those communities have become adept at educating themselves on the cultures and educational needs of newly arriving groups, which in recent years have included refugees from Burundi, Burma, Somalia, and now Bhutan. School administrators and teachers who work with English-language learners browse the Web sites of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the State Department, or the Cultural Orientation Resource Center of the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics to learn more about what to expect. Educators say they typically do not know what specific needs they will have to address until the children of refugee families arrive at the schoolhouse door, however. The Bhutanese Lhotshampas ("People of the South") are members of an ethnic group that retained its Nepalese culture and language while living in Bhutan for generations. The government of Bhutan enacted policies in the early 1990s that has made it increasingly difficult for the Lhotshampas to live and work legally in that country.

It's no accident that in undertaking improvements to its school system, the Ministry of Education in this small, oil-rich Persian Gulf country has made the most progress so far with an initiative to retrain school principals. After all, Vincent L. Ferrandino, the American consultant the ministry hired to help develop the school improvement plan--and who has a five-year contract to help the United Arab Emirates implement it--specializes in what it takes for principals to raise the level of instruction. For eight years, until last summer, when Mr. Ferrandino relocated to the UAE, he was the executive director of the Washington-based National Association of Elementary School Principals. He's also a former Connecticut commissioner of education. He is part of a small, but influential, group of foreign education consultants who are helping the UAE and a handful of other Arab countries adopt standards-based reform, child-centered teaching methods, decentralization of top-down bureaucracies, and other school improvement strategies familiar in the West. Two concepts that are well developed in the American education system, and that Mr. Ferrandino's team is helping the UAE implement, are that principals need to be instructional leaders and that schools must have a process for identifying children with disabilities and serving them.

This article reports that educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners (ELLs) are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English. Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are stepping up their training of teachers on how best to teach second-language learners to read under the No Child Left Behind Act's flagship reading program, which serves grades K-3. Last school year, the 410,000-student Chicago public school system established a new position at the district level for a bilingual specialist to coach teachers at the city's 17 Reading First schools with large numbers of ELLs on how to tailor reading instruction to such students. The Los Angeles Unified School District, where 38 percent of the 708,000 students are ELLs, started an institute for Reading First teachers this school year on reading strategies for ELLs. And since last school year the 1.1 million-student New York City school system has been providing workshops and coaching to Reading First teachers and administrators on the same topic. The U.S. Department of Education's 11-member Reading First Advisory Committee has enough concerns about whether ELLs are getting what they need under the $1 billion-a-year program that it set up a subcommittee to look into the issue. Among the program's problems are that students' reading skills are tested before they learn English, the literacy curriculum is too narrow, and teachers are not prepared to work with ELLs.

In this article, the author discusses attempts by schools to navigate stepped-up federal efforts to curb illegal immigration, protection of student privacy, and the safety of students during enforcement operations. In Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example, school personnel are barred from putting information about a child's immigration status in school records or sharing it with outside agencies, including federal immigration authorities. Personnel are also told to deny any request from immigration officials to enter a school to search for information or seize students. School officials--with the help of lawyers--instead would determine whether to grant access. Meanwhile, some small communities with an influx of immigrants are weighing how best to respond if children are left stranded at school because family members have been detained in an immigration raid.

Illegal immigration is a divisive issue in the politically conservative East Texas community of Tyler, known by many locally as "The Rose Capital of America." Drawn by jobs in the rose fields and iron foundries, Mexican immigrants began settling here with their families in the 1970s. Hispanic children--citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants alike--now make up 34 percent of the 18,000-student Tyler school system, and the tensions aren't hard to spot. Letters to the "Tyler Morning Telegraph" rail against undocumented immigrants. Some residents complain about the undocumented Mexican men who regularly wait in a local parking lot for day labor. Against that backdrop, the Tyler Independent School District this month will reach a milestone in the area of immigrants' rights: the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in "Plyler v. Doe," which barred Tyler--where the case originated--and other public school systems from charging tuition for undocumented children. Since that 5-4 decision on June 15, 1982, public schools across the country have been obligated to enroll children regardless of their immigration status. In sharp contrast to the national upheaval over racial desegregation in the wake of "Brown v. Board of Education," the immigration ruling became a quiet fact of life for educators in Tyler and elsewhere. Still, the debate has not entirely settled down, and some of Tyler's citizens continue to object to the use of community funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants.

This article discusses the withdrawal of the United States government from educational reform in Iraq. It has however, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, awarded a two-year National Capacity Development contract, which is aimed at helping Iraq's government ministries to function better. This article discusses how security issues played a role in the U.S. government's withdrawal from the education sector. It also discusses how Creative Associates International Inc., a Washington-based firm charged with carrying out most of the USAID's education work in Iraq, had helped in the education reform. Among other things, the article also discusses the little change in school noticed by some Iraqi high school students since the defeat of Saddam Hussein, and that some Iraqis or Iraqi Americans want the USAID to stay in the education sector.

Earning a high school diploma is one of the milestones for students who come to the United States from other countries. But for those who arrive in their middle to late teens, learning enough English to earn a diploma can seem all but impossible. Some students from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, however, are discovering an option that has received little public attention, even among educators: the Spanish-language version of the General Educational Development test. The GED certificate, which is recognized by all states as the equivalent of a high school diploma, can be earned by taking the GED test in Spanish or French, as well as English. As debate over immigration simmers in Congress and among the public, the foreign-language GED could get more scrutiny. Though the debate has centered on border security and the status of illegal immigrants, the issue of language--especially as it relates to the large proportion of newcomers who speak Spanish--is closely intertwined.

Educators have several reasons to follow the volatile debate over immigration in Congress--a debate that ground to a halt last week before lawmakers' spring recess. In the long term some of the plans would allow more teachers from other countries to work in schools or change the enforcement of rules governing other school related jobs. More immediately efforts to crack down on undocumented immigrants promised to intensity rallies planned for April 10 across the country. Most students who had skipped school over the previous two weeks to protest an immigration bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives were back in class this week. The students had rallied against the measure which would make it a crime to be in the country without legal sanction or to help illegal immigrants.

Educators who specialize in teaching English-language learners agree that the 4-year-old No Child Left Behind Act has brought unprecedented attention to those students by requiring schools to isolate test-score data for them. They disagree, though, on whether changes in instruction spurred by the law have been positive or negative overall. Such conflicting opinions reflect the continuing national debate over President Bush's flagship education initiative, as its effects reverberate through public schools across the county. It's unrealistic, many educators say, that the law requires such students to take the same state academic tests as children who have been speaking English all their lives. The law does permit states to provide tests in students' native languages, but only 10 states do so, and then mostly only in Spanish and not necessarily for both reading and math. The No Child Left Behind Act-- and overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act signed into law by President Bush in January 2002--requires that schools break down test results for various subgroups of students, including English-language learners. The schools must reach the same accountability goals for each subgroup that they must meet for all students. Many schools have failed to make AYP because the test scores of their English-learners were too low. Some educators say that schools have responded to the pressure to raise test scores for children who speak little English by narrowing the curriculum.

It is not unusual to hear students at the Cesar Chavez Learning Center say that if they were not able to go to this kind of school, they would have given up on formal education a long time ago. Housed in a strip mall a mile and a half from the U.S.-Mexican border, the Chavez center allows students to attend school for a half day--morning or afternoon--for just four days a week and still get a regular high school diploma. Flexible scheduling is just one of the many accommodations made by the network of Arizona charter schools that includes Cesar Chavez. Such adjustments are all part of a bid to attract and retain busy high school students and would-be dropouts. Cesar Chavez is one of 13 charter high schools run by Portable Preparatory Education Portal Inc., a Tucson, Arizona-based nonprofit organization started by a Baptist minister in the late 1960s to help farmworkers and their families. This article presents how Cesar Chavez accommodates its students.