Multilingual learners (MLs) are the country's fastest-growing student population: One in five students speak a language other than English at home, and 10 percent of the student population across the country is identified for language development services in school. Despite these students' growing presence nationwide, relatively few best practices…

The time between the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, marked a period of unprecedented policy-driven education reform. Unfortunately, the major objectives of the policy were not achieved, and the very problems it sought to fix still exist. One reason for this was an…

This article addresses language allocation policies in what is increasingly called "Dual Language Education" (DLE) in the U.S., offering a challenge to the strict language separation policies in those programs and a proposal for flexibility that transforms them into "Dual Language Bilingual Education" (DLBE). The article offers…

More than 7.4 million U.S. children ages 5 and under live in a household where a language other than English is spoken by a parent or caregiver. But despite the size and growth of this Dual Language Learner (DLL) population, and these children's distinct linguistic assets and learning needs, standardized policies for identifying them and…

Nationwide, one-third of children ages 5 and under have at least one parent who speaks a language other than English. These Dual Language Learners (DLLs) are an incredibly diverse and growing group of young children, and with the right support these preschoolers have the potential to develop as multilingual and multiliterate individuals. Yet…

Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools--whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"--are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators,…

Around 30 percent of families across New York State now speak a language other than English at home, resulting in 240,000 English language learners (ELLs) in the state's primary and secondary schools who speak nearly 200 different languages. This report looks at New York State's redesign of policies and practices to better support the education of…

Although educational policies for emergent bilinguals in New York City schools have historically supported the provision of bilingual education, the past decade has borne witness to a dramatic loss of bilingual education programs in city schools. This study examines the factors that determine language education policies adopted by school…

"No Child Left Behind" is federal education legislation consisting of implementation programs intended to reconcile the goals of insuring equality while promoting competition in public education in the United States. Immigrant students whose primary languages are not English are included in the mandate of "NCLB," categorized as…

This article is a summary of a longer report, completed under the direction of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society and the doctoral program in Urban Education at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York (CUNY) with funding provided by the New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (NYSIEB). It…

This fact sheet provides demographic information for the young Dual Language Learner (DLL) population in New York State, based on Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis of U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) data pooled over the 2011-15 period. DLLs, defined as children ages 8 and under with at least one parent who speaks a…

To examine the ways in which high schools in New York City attend to second language acquisition is to consider everyday actions in schools, government dealings, localized policy responses, and disparate discourses on bilingualism. It is to position the circumstances of learning and teaching English in an American high school within the problems…

Since 2002, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) has attempted to reverse the city's severe drop-out crisis through a large scale restructuring of high schools, focused mainly on closing large, comprehensive high schools and replacing them with small high schools that offer a more personalized learning environment. Unfortunately, this…

This article challenges 20th century ways of conceptualizing bilingualism, arguing that they are no longer applicable to the linguistic heterogeneity of the 21st century. Using case studies of two small high schools in New York City, this article re-imagines the possibilities of bilingual education to more accurately reflect the realities of…

This booklet contains guidelines to assist school districts in developing programs that meet the requirements of the New York State Bureau of Bilingual Education. The guidelines are presented in six parts: (1) an explanation of part 154 of the regulations, the purpose of which is to establish standards for the use of funds made available by the…