English Language Learners

While there is little doubt that excellent early education sets students up for long-term academic success, the definition of “excellent” varies along with communities’ diverse needs. This is nowhere truer than with dual language learners.

Earlier this month, President Obama proposed a new program that would provide funding for states to offer pre-K to all 4-year-olds from low-income families.

In education policy, where so much of the focus is on how much is wrong with today’s schools, it’s refreshing to see examples of something going right. In an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times, David Kirp writes about what he found after spending a year in Union City, N.J., where children are achieving at a very high rate despite coming from poverty and living in families where English is a second language.

Before taking a holiday break, Early Ed Watch has a tradition of looking back at the most significant issues we have covered over the past year.  Many of these topics generate worry and a feeling of discouragement, especially over the lack of funds to improve children’s access to high-quality pre-K and full-day kindergarten programs. But some signal hope, providing educators and policymakers new ideas for making improvements despite constrained resources.

For many early childhood educators, the words "technology" and "reading" don't go together. Yet the realities of today's hectic households and the affordances of new technologies are pushing us to think about where and how tech and literacy might overlap. As electronic games, especially apps, are increasingly aimed at children, and as digital media and social networking becomes a bigger part of parents' daily lives, it's time for new roadmaps.

As few as six percent of Illinois pre-K teachers have credentials that qualify them to teach English language learners, according to a new survey from the Latino Policy Forum. As Early Ed Watch has reported extensively, Illinois plans for all pre-K teachers who instruct groups of English language learners (ELLs) to have such credentials by 2014; these credentials are already required for K-12 teachers who instruct large numbers of ELL students.

The Latino Policy Forum surveyed 307 administrators representing 354 state-funded pre-K programs, which serve 64,482 children. The sample was not representative of all programs in Illinois: Respondents were disproportionately from Cook County, the area that includes Chicago and its suburbs and has a higher immigrant population than most other regions of Illinois.

Still, the results paint a useful portrait. While six percent of teacher respondents overall had bilingual/ESL credentials, programs in communities with a high concentration of Latino residents do have a slightly higher proportion of teachers with the credentials — nine percent.