New Column: Scaling Up Strong Practices for Supporting Dual Language Learners

On Friday, New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group published a series of papers exploring three communities’ efforts to improve how their school serve dual language learners (DLLs). That day, I also published a column for The 74 Million chronicling some of the lessons we learned about how No Child Left Behind affected these communities’ choices related to DLLs.

Today, I followed up on that work with another column, for the Education Post, on how it’s past time for policymakers to scale up the sorts of strong DLL policies that we saw during our research:

One of the persistent strains echoing through the turmoil goes something like this: we know what works and we have pockets of excellence where these best practices are in place, but we don’t know how to replicate them. We hear this a lot because it’s usually the case in our sprawling, decentralized public education system. Too often, educators’ extraordinary work never gets shared beyond the walls of their classroom, school or (at best) district.

This is absolutely the situation as far as young English language learners (ELLs) are concerned. While schools in California, New York and Texas have been supporting these students’ development for decades, the number of ELLs at home grew by over 600 percent in South Carolina and 306 percent in Kentucky during the first decade of the century. These states are emblematic of a broader trend: multilingual students are now arriving in districts where they haven’t historically enrolled.

This is an extraordinary, wonderful opportunity for a pluralistic country. A racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse America is a better America in every way—including (and especially) economically.

Click here to read the rest of the column!“