Latinos comprise a significant portion of the total school enrollment in the U.S., and an increasing share of Latinos are pursuing higher education today. However, Latino students still face many educational barriers, and research has repeatedly demonstrated that Latino children lag their peers in terms of their academic achievement. In addition,…

This study reviews orientations toward educating multilingual students with a focus on recent policies and initiatives in California. It includes data and findings from a study investigating the linguistic and cultural resources that English learners bring to school as funds of identity. The research site was a public elementary school in an urban…

The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), since 2010, has led to a growing concern among education scholars and practitioners about how the new standards will impact the educational trajectories of students from minoritized linguistic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds (Bunch, Walqui, & Pearson, 2014; Hakuta, Santos,…

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching--or "Spanglish"--among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students' everyday use of "Spanglish" and the skills…

Historically, and continuing to the present, children in the primary grades receive the lion's share of attention and resources in learning to read. This makes sense: Young, early readers have a head start in achieving well not only in literacy skills, but in school in general. However, as inner-city, middle-grade teachers will readily attest,…

The purpose of this working paper is to review current literature on literacy programs for parents of English language learners (ELLs). The paper includes a summary of five literacy programs for ELL parents throughout the United States of America. Four of these were system-wide interventions affecting more than one school or classroom. Each…

The Latino student presently faces many obstacles to achieve educational equity and excellence at the high school level. This article examines academic programming for Latino middle and high school English language learners (ELLs) and provides recommendations for addressing programming that promotes biliteracy policy and programming as a valued…