About 1 out of every 10 public school students in the United States right now is learning to speak English. They’re called ELLs, for “English Language Learners.”
There are nearly 5 million of them, and educating them — in English and all the other subjects and skills they’ll need — is one of the biggest challenges in U.S. public education today.
As part of our reporting project, 5 Million Voices, we set out to gather up all the data and information we could find about who these students are and how they’re being taught. Here’s our snapshot:
The vast majority — some 3.8 million ELL students — speak Spanish. But there are lots of other languages too, including Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Arabic and Vietnamese.
New York Times Magazine — In the days leading up to and after Betsy DeVos’s confirmation as secretary of education, a hashtag spread across Twitter: #publicschoolproud. Parents and teachers tweeted photos of their kids studying, performing, eating lunch together. People of all races tweeted about how public schools changed them, saved them, helped them succeed. The hashtag and storytelling was a rebuttal to DeVos, who called traditional public schools a “dead end” and who bankrolled efforts to pass reforms in Michigan, her home state, that would funnel public funds in the form of vouchers into religious and privately operated schools and encouraged the proliferation of for-profit charter schools. The tweets railed against DeVos’s labeling of public schools as an industry that needed to adopt the free-market principles of competition and choice. #Publicschoolproud was seen as an effort to show that public schools still mattered.
But the enthusiastic defense obscured a larger truth: We began moving away from the “public” in public education a long time ago. In fact, treating public schools like a business these days is largely a matter of fact in many places. Parents have pushed for school-choice policies that encourage shopping for public schools that they hope will give their children an advantage and for the expansion of charter schools that are run by private organizations with public funds. Large numbers of public schools have selective admissions policies that keep most kids out. And parents pay top dollar to buy into neighborhoods zoned to “good” public schools that can be as exclusive as private ones. The glaring reality is, whether we are talking about schools or other institutions, it seems as if we have forgotten what “public” really means.
State education chiefs at a Senate hearing Tuesday outlined how they are using the Every Student Succeeds Act to initiate and expand on efforts to improve college- and career-readiness and help low-performing schools. Senators, meanwhile, expressed concerns along partisan lines about the proper balance of power between Washington and the states.
Congress has been mostly silent this year on public school policy in terms of hearings and other events. But Tuesday’s hearing at the Senate education committee allowed for Candice McQueen of Tennessee, Christopher Ruszkowski of New Mexico, and John White of Louisiana to share their approaches to ESSA and how it was affecting their approach to public school more broadly.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the committee chairman, specifically praised the states represented by the chiefs testifying at the hearing. For example, he highlighted his home state of Tennessee’s work under ESSA to determine whether students are ready for the military or the workforce after high school, not just college. He also gave a thumbs-up to New Mexico for increasing access to services ranging from extra math help to early education through its ESSA plan…
Washington – When the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015, there was widespread worry that states would walk away from making sure that particular groups of students, English-language learners, students in special education, and racial minorities, mattered in their school accountability systems.
Now that pretty much every state has filed its plan to implement the law have those fears become the reality?
States are working to make sure that’s not the case, said several state chiefs who spoke on a panel here moderated by Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. (Some advocates are skeptical more…
The education field can always count on shifting priorities. Over the past 20 years, in an attempt to “fix” what many people dub a broken public school system, everyone from politicians to famous athletes to business moguls to education leaders has tried to find and repair the gaps in student achievement. But many educators are skeptical of new initiatives that come down the pike. Is a revamped approach really meant to help prepare children for the future, or is it just people outside of education sticking their noses where they don’t belong?
That certainly rings true in the STEM vs. STEAM argument of the past decade. In recent years, science, technology, engineering, and math have been at the center of our schools’ change fabric. These fields are desperate to fill jobs that didn’t exist before the 21st century. According to the 2016 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index, there were more than 230,000 additional STEM jobs and less than 31,000 additional graduates in these fields in 2014-15 alone. To help close that gap, President Barack Obama rolled out investments and initiatives to increase STEM education.
As schools expanded into high-tech gadget hubs, many educators argued for the integration of arts into STEM learning to bring needed creativity to the learning process. Others pushed back for keeping the arts separate, saying that adding the arts to STEM subjects simply created more distraction. While the STEAM movement has gained momentum, educators are still divided on arts integration…
The great education thinker John Dewey claimed that art is not the possession of a recognized few but the authentic expression of individuality for all. Among those who care about education, few would deny that the arts now struggle to survive in our nation’s schools. The visual and performing arts frequently are marginalized as fringe subjects, taking a back seat in school curricula when funds are tight or teaching time is usurped by subjects that count toward school accountability measures.
Yet a growing number of researchers and educators are in agreement that participation in the arts should become a central component of schooling, as research suggests that the arts can be a significant factor in improving academic outcomes. This premise may cause some arts advocates to bristle, believing that arts experiences are important for the sheer joy of human expression and that educators should not have to justify access to the arts as a way to increase learning.
That may be true, but it is hard to ignore the growing body of research that correlates arts experiences with multiple domains of learning, including academic achievement, motivation, and thinking skills. Moreover, using art forms as a pedagogical tool in teaching other subjects—known as arts integration—is showing promise for enabling students to learn and retain academic content, according to a thorough literature review by Gail Burnaford and other researchers published for the Arts Education Partnership. Students in schools that offer arts-integrated learning are more likely to show better academic outcomes, transfer knowledge from arts to nonarts domains, and demonstrate greater motivation and engagement in learning.
Despite those findings, some educators resist using the arts as a way to teach and reinforce content. In my experience leading schools, offering professional development, and teaching graduate and doctoral-level courses, I have encountered reluctance for incorporating the arts into instructional practices. Three common scenarios stand out for classroom teachers:
“Arts provide another vehicle for students with limited language or lower academic skills to demonstrate mastery of academic content.”
The teacher would like to use more arts-based activities, noting that students remember more content and seem to enjoy the subject matter better when the arts are incorporated into lessons compared with using only traditional methods. The teacher worries, however, that using arts activities will reduce the time needed to cover all the required curriculum.
The teacher believes that she is not very artistic and finds it hard to imagine the kind of arts activities that would enhance learning math; it is easier to follow traditional teaching strategies.
The teacher worries that low-performing students need more time in remediation and would not learn as much without highly structured curricula that offer repetition of essential content and skills.Noting the concerns of educators and the dearth of research that explores the causal effects of arts integration on memory for academic content, our research team at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education conducted randomized control trials to test the efficacy of arts-integrated science units (the treatment condition) compared with conventional science units (the control condition). We designed treatment and control units using the same science content and designed arts activities that would require the same amount of teaching time as in conventional lessons.
In this package, Education Week has convened a range of researchers, professors, and practitioners to argue their case for arts education’s path forward. Despite their many contrasting opinions, these experts all agree on one thing: Arts instruction is key to American schooling and is worth supporting, researching, and protecting.
This special section is supported by a grant from The Wallace Foundation. Education Week retained sole editorial control over the content of this package; the opinions expressed are the authors’ own, however.
We also matched the mode of delivery (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) to assure active learning experiences in both conditions. In the course of the studies, we provided professional development for teachers to show that robust arts-based teaching can be easily incorporated into lessons. For example, using songs, movement, and visual vocabulary does not require extensive arts training or elaborate materials.
In our studies, each randomized group of students received a science unit in either the treatment or control condition and a second science unit in the opposite condition. According to the results of delayed post-tests, arts-integrated teaching showed an advantage for long-term retention of science content. That increase in retention in the arts-integrated units was especially strong for students at the lowest levels of reading achievement. We believe, therefore, that the arts provide another vehicle for students with limited language or lower academic skills to demonstrate mastery of academic content.
Our studies provide some preliminary causal connections between arts-integrated learning and memory for content. The findings also raise some interesting questions about whether learning through the arts transfers residual benefits. We observed that students who experienced the arts-integrated units first performed significantly better in subsequent conventional units compared with students who had not yet experienced the arts-integrated units. That made us wonder if students who were taught using arts-integrated instruction may have later applied arts-based strategies, even when not taught through the arts.
These observations open interesting possibilities that warrant further investigation. Do the arts aid in thinking dispositions and problem-solving skills, as some researchers have suggested? Perhaps the current focus on 21st-century skills of creative problem-solving will lead us back to the arts as a fruitful alternative to conventional teaching—as Dewey suggested at the start of the 20th century.
Mariale Hardiman is a professor of education and the vice dean of academic affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. She is the co-founder and the director of the Neuro-Education Initiative, a cross-disciplinary program that brings educators relevant research from the learning sciences to inform teaching and learning.
President Donald Trump has tapped Mitchell “Mick” Zais, the former South Carolina chief state school officer and a vehement opponent of the Common Core State Standards, as deputy secretary, the number two position at the U.S. Department of Education.
Trump ran on getting rid of the common core—something he doesn’t have the power to do. But it’s hard to imagine Zais cheerleading the common core from his new post. As state chief in he tried to persuade South Carolina to dump the common core. And the state ultimately did shift to new standards, although it’s debatable how different they are from the common core. In 2014, Zais decided to pull South Carolina out of the Smarter Balanced testing consortia, one of two federally funded groups of states creating exams that align with the standards, even though the state board had just voted to remain in the consortium.
His reason? “The Race to the Top program expands the federal role in education by offering pieces of silver in exchange for strings attached to Washington,” Zais said in a statement back in 2011. “More federal money for education will not solve our problems. Schools need less, not more, federal intrusion to increase student achievement.”
Before becoming state chief, Zais also served as the president of Newbery College in South Carolina. And he served for 31 in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of brigadier general.
Zais wasn’t DeVos’ first pick for the deputy secretary gig. The administration had originally hoped to nominate Al Hubbard, who worked on economic issues during both Bush administrations. But Hubbard had to drop out because it would have been too costly to untangle financial conflicts of interest.
Zais is the sixth person to be nominated to a top education department post.
DeVos was confirmed as secretary in February. Peter Oppenheim, a former aide to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., is already serving as the assistant secretary in charge of congressional affairs.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos today announced the U.S. Department of Education’s 2017 cohort of School Ambassador Fellows. This year’s cohort includes four teachers, one principal and one counselor.
“This year, we are thrilled to announce we are expanding the scope of the Teaching and Principal Ambassador Fellowship into the School Ambassador Fellowship. This expanded program will allow all school-based staff members—not just teachers and principals—the opportunity to participate in this important program and provide valuable contributions to the national education dialogue,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. “The Fellowship program is designed to improve education for all students by involving practitioners in the development and implementation of national education policy. The Fellows also work directly with Department staff members to inform our understanding of how policies and programs are implemented and experienced by students, educators and families at the local level.”
The six new Fellows were at the Department this week for a three-day summit to become more familiar with federal education policy and Department staff, as well as to begin exchanging ideas for enhancing communication between teachers, stakeholders and education policy leaders.
This year’s full-time Washington, D.C., Fellow is:
Melody Arabo, a third-grade teacher in a hybrid role at Keith Elementary School and the 2015 Michigan Teacher of the Year from West Bloomfield, Michigan.
This year’s part-time Fellows are:
Elmer Harris, a 5th Grade Teacher at Christa McAuliffe Elementary School from Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Matthew Scott Crisp, principal at Jackson Hole High School from Jackson, Wyoming.
Patrick O’Connor, an Assistant Dean of College Counseling at Cranbrook Schools, from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Megan Power, an Elementary Teacher at Design39Campus from San Diego, California.
Jennifer Ramsey, a Science Teacher, KIPP DC Heights Academy from Washington, D.C.
The 2017 Fellows build on the work of the previous cohorts, who have now collectively reached and connected with more than 110,000 educators through more than 153 discussions and events with stakeholders from all 50 states, D.C., four territories and two foreign countries.
