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By Bob Wise
Hispanic Link
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Today, more than five million English language learners, or ELLs, are enrolled in this nation's public schools. That's up from just two million a decade ago.
The first language of the vast majority of these students is Spanish. In fact, the 2000 U.S. Census reported that 76 percent of all ELLs in pre-kindergarten to fifth grade and 72 percent in sixth to 12th grade are native Spanish-speakers.
In coming decades, these students and those who follow them will have an enormous impact on the fortunes of the country as a whole.
Right now they are struggling. While only about a third of all eighth-grade students comprehend the vocabulary and content of their grade-level materials, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the figure drops to 4 percent for ELLs.
In other words, just one in 25 enter high school reading well enough to handle a rigorous course of study designed to prepare them for college or a good job.
To provide help for these students, the Alliance for Excellent Education joined Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Center for Applied Linguistics to convene some of the country's leading experts in English language and literacy instruction for secondary school students. Their recommendations, published in the Alliance report Double the Work, were unanimous and urgent.
For starters, states need to define more clearly who is or is not an ELL. Currently, the same student could be put in regular classes in one school, enrolled in an English language program in another, and determined to have reached English proficiency in a third.
Such inconsistency makes
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