Education Week - July 8, 2015 - 6

Ariz.'s 20-Year-Old ELL Case May End, But Debate Rages On
By Corey Mitchell
A federal appeals court ruling may signal
the end of a long-standing legal fight over
Arizona's approach to educating its Englishlearners, but the state remains at the epicenter of the national debate over how to best
teach students who enter school speaking
another language.
Upholding a decision by a lower court, the
San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals last month ruled in favor of the
state in Flores v. Arizona, a 23-year-old lawsuit challenging Arizona's requirement that
English-learners spend more than half their
school day learning English.

No Violation
The plaintiffs argued that the state's approach to teaching English-learners-which
includes a mandated four-hour block of English instruction-violated the federal Equal
Educational Opportunities Act, a law that
requires states and districts to provide students with appropriate aid to overcome language barriers.
The appellate court's three-judge panel
rejected that argument, writing in its opinion that no evidence exists to prove that the
state is shortchanging ells.
"The record does not contain enough years
of ell performance data after the implementation of the four-hour model to be certain
of the model's effectiveness at teaching English or of its long-term impact on overall
academic success," the judges wrote in their
opinion.
Tim Hogan, a lawyer who represents the
plaintiffs, has filed a petition for a new hear-

ing. While the appeals court ruling could
bring an end to the Flores case, the struggle over Arizona's mandatory English-only
classes will continue to be conducted through
other channels.
The U.S. Department of Education's office
for civil rights and the U.S. Department of
Justice have been investigating districts
since 2010 to address a complaint that the
four-hour block of daily English instruction
illegally segregates students-one of the central issues addressed in the appellate court
ruling.
"The program has all kinds of things
wrong with it," said Mr. Hogan, the executive
director of the Arizona Center for Law in the
Public Interest. "The state is saying, 'If you
spend more time learning English every day,
you'll learn faster.' But the research shows
that's not the case."
In the years since the case began, English-only programs have fallen out of favor
nationally as scholars unearthed further
evidence that other instructional models
are more effective. State education officials
did not comment on the court ruling, but a
spokesman for Diane Douglas, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, said the
schools chief "hopes that this issue is now
resolved."
"The superintendent is committed to ensuring that all Arizona students, including
ell students, receive an excellent education,"
said spokesman Charles Tack.

Federal Demands
In their latest probe of Arizona's ell program, federal officials want the state to use
testing to determine when students no lon-

ger need four hours a day of English-immersion classes. They also want to require the
state to hire a monitor for its English-only
program.
But the state wants teachers to decide a
student's progress and when it is time to reduce the amount of instruction.
Both the state and federal education department officials declined to discuss how

teach them?" Ms. Combs said. "The ruling
was not surprising because a court is not
particularly interested in those questions."
Ms. Combs' report makes recommendations
for improving education for ells, including:
conducting a study to determine appropriate
funding; granting districts more instructional
flexibility; and disbanding the state's English
Language Learners Task Force.

Guarded Optimism?

What's missing in this
whole [legal] discourse
is the kids. What is the
best way to teach them?"
MARY CAROL COMBS
University of Arizona

the court's ruling could affect the investigation and negotiations.
With an estimated 86,000 ells in its public
schools, Arizona has been in court, legislative, and ballot-box battles spanning more
than 20 years over how to teach English to
children who enter school speaking another
language.
Mary Carol Combs, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, in Tucson,
co-authored a 2013 report on Arizona's longrunning English-learner saga.
"What's missing in this whole [legal] discourse is the kids. What is the best way to

The federal oversight and legislative wrangling over the state's ell policies give Mr.
Hogan hope that opponents of the state's
approach to educating English-learners will
find another avenue to overturn it. In December, the state board of education voted
to allow schools to cut the mandatory four
hours of instruction in half for second-year
students who are improving.
And the U.S. Education and Justice departments reached a series of agreements with
Arizona education officials over the last five
years, brokering deals that ell advocates
celebrated.
As part of a settlement reached in 2012,
Arizona agreed to offer targeted reading and
writing instruction to tens of thousands of
students who were denied services. That resolved a complaint that students had been
incorrectly identified as fluent in English or
prematurely moved out of language-assistance programs.
The ocr found in 2010 that Arizona's
home-language survey, used by schools to
identify students to be tested for ell services, and the process the state uses to reclassify students as fluent in English, both
violated federal law.

Ed. School Critic Levine, MIT Partner to Launch Teacher-Prep 'Lab'
By Stephen Sawchuk
Former Teachers College, Columbia University, President Arthur E.
Levine is widely known as a critic
of teacher education programs. So it
may be an example of chutzpah-or
potentially hubris-that under an
initiative launched last month, he'll
be helping to create one from the
ground up.
"Basically, the reason for doing it
is that today's programs, even the
top programs, are outdated. They
were built for different times," said
Mr. Levine, the president of the
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which kicked off
the $30 million initiative in partnership with the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology on June 16.
The project, which will focus on
preparing secondary mathematics
and science teachers, has ambitious
plans to experiment with some of
the most high-profile-and controversial-ideas in higher education
delivery, including digital learning,
open-source curricula, competencybased education, and simulations.
As envisioned, the Woodrow
Wilson Academy for Teaching and
Learning will dispense with credit
hours and seat-time requirements. Candidates will progress
through the program at their own
pace as they master a set of teaching competencies.

The academy will also encompass
a research component designed to
study variables affecting preparation quality, such as candidate
selection, curricula, and lesson sequencing.

Customized Curriculum
Mr. Levine released a series of
scathing reports in the 2000s on
the quality of the preparation of
teachers, school leaders, and education researchers. His subsequent
work at the Wilson Foundation, in
Princeton, N.J., has centered on
improving existing teaching programs at some 28 colleges across
five states.
Rather than tinkering with existing programs, however, the new
effort will begin from scratch. Each
candidate will be given a customized plan of study, much of it to be
delivered through digital-learning
modules.
In addition to the modules, the
candidates will complete studentteaching assignments. Candidates'
specific academic plans will be adjusted based on regular assessments
by a corps of master teachers.
The teaching competencies will
be developed by instructionalpractice expert Charlotte Danielson and adapted by mit researchers to specific math and science
disciplines. The university also will

6 | EDUCATION WEEK | July 8, 2015 | www.edweek.org

help develop and pilot the curriculum and simulations to help the
candidates practice their skills.
M i t currently has a small
teacher-preparation program of
its own that prepares about a
dozen teachers a year. But the
new partnership offers the university the opportunity to work
with far more candidates and
craft a strong model for teacher
development, said Eric Klopfer,
an education
professor at
mit and a lead
researcher on
the project.
The academy is scheduled to launch
in 2017-18,
and after its
ARTHUR E. LEVINE:
shakeout year
A critic of teacher-prep
will cost apprograms now enters the proximately
$15,000 for a
arena with a venture
candidate who
starting from a blank
slate.
completes it
within a year.
Once the program is approved by Massachusetts, graduates would earn a master's degree
through the foundation.
In addition to preparing teachers, the initiative will double as a
laboratory for conducting research
on teacher preparation, with the

goal of improving the field's fragmented research base.
The academy's curriculum modules will be created as open-source
products that can be adopted by
other teacher-preparation programs
nationwide.

Experimental Approach
Mr. Levine pointed to the opportunity to experiment as the most
appealing benefit of starting with a
fresh slate.
"We don't have to fix something;
we have the opportunity to build
something that doesn't exist yet,"
he said.
That will also mean both successes and misfires as the program
matures, the officials said, one reason why the first cohort of teachers
won't owe tuition.
"I think the challenge will be
working with these models that
don't have a lot of background or
history," Mr. Klopfer said. "How
closely will we be able to hold to
them? If someone's almost all the
way finished with the program, but
not quite, do we push them along?
How do we mediate this mix of hybrid and face-to-face learning?"
The Wilson Foundation-mit effort
comes during a period of experimentation in teacher preparation.
Charter school management
organizations have launched a

variety of homegrown teachertraining approaches; some, like
the Relay Graduate School of Education, in New York City, have
been permitted to grant their own
degrees.
Wi t h r e s p e c t t o r e s e a r c h ,
teacher-educators at the Teaching
Works project at the University of
Michigan are studying and isolating beginning-teacher competencies. And a newly formed organization of education deans also
has plans to define core teaching
practices.
"It's exciting to see new entrants
in this space, particularly one led
by someone who sees the need to
prepare teachers to make use of
technology and data to foster student learning," said Ben Riley, the
founder of that Austin, Texas-based
group, Deans for Impact.
The academy's early financial
supporters include the Seattlebased Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the Carnegie Corporation
of New York; the Simons Foundation, a New York City-based
philanthropy that supports math
and science research; and the
Amgen Foundation, a corporate
philanthropy located in Thousand
Oaks, Calif.
(Gates and Carnegie provide support for coverage of academic standards and innovation, respectively,
in Education Week.)

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Education Week - July 8, 2015

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