Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report - S23

Andrew Archuleta, a 4th grader at Emerson Elementary School in Albuquerque, N.M., raises his hand to ask a question about a writing assignment. Teachers at his school are piloting ways to help English-learners master new reading and writing standards.

Building Bridges for ELLs
By Lesli A. Maxwell

Albuquerque, N.M. n Yolanda Medrano’s class here at Emerson Elementary School, hands shoot into the air to answer questions she is asking about women and professional baseball. These 4th grade students—most of them still learning English—have just finished reading and listening to a story about Jackie Mitchell, a 17-year-old girl who struck out baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig when she pitched in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees in 1931. Noting one expression in the story, Ms. Medrano asks the students to tell her what “throws like a girl” means. “It means you don’t throw good,” a boy answers. “It means that no one thought she should play with boys,” says another one. “It means that girls aren’t good at baseball, but that isn’t true,” offers a girl. Ms. Medrano checks with a few other 4th graders to make sure they understand the insult, which is common in English but doesn’t exist in Spanish, the first language for most of them. This reading lesson is part of Emerson Elementary’s, and the entire Albuquerque school system’s, foray this year into the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics in the primary grades. The district piloted the new

A New Mexico school focuses on making standards accessible to everyone—including English-learners

standards in 4th and 8th grades last school year, and this year, it is rolling them out in every kindergarten through 3rd grade classroom. The new English/language arts standards demand that students sharpen their skills at reading, understanding, and analyzing a variety of complex texts. For teachers of English-language learners like Ms. Medrano, using strategies and supports (such as clarifying unfamiliar words and expressions) have long been crucial tools in effectively teaching ells, but they are even more critical for all teachers who work with English-learners now that the new standards expect that ells will be able to read and comprehend complex texts across all content areas despite their unfamiliarity with English. At Emerson—a long-struggling school of about 500 students in one of the poorest sections of Albuquerque—the focus on effectively teaching the common-core standards to English-language learn-

ers is the centerpiece of a new strategy to drive up academic achievement. Nearly 50 percent of students at Emerson are English-learners. After years of sluggish test scores and the discovery of a troubling pattern that showed very few ells were progressing, even modestly, in their English-proficiency over the course of a school year, leaders in the district and the local teachers’ union agreed last spring to overhaul the school. District leaders and Ellen Bernstein, the president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, worked together to select a new principal and vice-principal, and agreed that teachers would be invited to reapply for their jobs or transfer to different schools. About three-quarters of the teachers who were hired came from other city schools; only a handful reapplied and were selected to stay. Most significantly, the district agreed to pay for an extra hour of work time each day that would be spent

READING IN THE COMMON-CORE ERA

> www.edweek.org/go/common-reading
EDUCATION WEEK
•

November 14, 2012

| S23

Photos by Kitty Clark for Education Week

http://www.edweek.org/go/common-reading

Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - November 14, 2012 - Special Report