TechGuruindia
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Thinking back to her days as a bilingual teacher to fourth graders, Crystal Gonzales recalls that some of the suggestions offered by curriculum materials to adapt lessons for English learners were downright insulting.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
“They were very simplified,” she says. “They were like, ‘Show them a picture.’ Not very rigorous at all.”
Instead, Gonzales stayed for hours after school translating and developing her own materials for her students. Now as executive director for the English Learners Success Forum, she’s part of the growing push for the creation and adoption of learning materials that are inclusive of multilingual students.
But federal data on the academic outcomes of English learners reveals how Gonzales says they have long been considered: an afterthought.
While the education field continues to grapple with how to reverse that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, results from the National Assessment of Education Progress — also called the Nation’s Report Card — show that an alarming rate of English learners have been performing below the basic mastery level in reading and math. In some cases, the numbers have hardly budged in the last 20 years.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
“They were very simplified,” she says. “They were like, ‘Show them a picture.’ Not very rigorous at all.”
Instead, Gonzales stayed for hours after school translating and developing her own materials for her students. Now as executive director for the English Learners Success Forum, she’s part of the growing push for the creation and adoption of learning materials that are inclusive of multilingual students.
But federal data on the academic outcomes of English learners reveals how Gonzales says they have long been considered: an afterthought.
While the education field continues to grapple with how to reverse that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, results from the National Assessment of Education Progress — also called the Nation’s Report Card — show that an alarming rate of English learners have been performing below the basic mastery level in reading and math. In some cases, the numbers have hardly budged in the last 20 years.