Culturally competent teaching is a pathway to bridge language and cultural gaps—it allows educators to acquire new teaching strategies that connect to their students’ varied cultural, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, which is critical to student success. The most effective educators understand that cultural competence in education is as basic for living in today’s world as reading, math and computer literacy.

From teacher preparation to teacher professional development, there are concrete efforts underway to do a better job in our classrooms of engaging all students. Sweeping recommendations from an NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel require beginning teachers to have more cultural understanding – cultural competency remains one of the areas that is inadequately taught at schools of education. Once in the classroom, teachers need practical, research-based information, resources and strategies to teach and nurture students from diverse backgrounds. NEA has developed an important resource: C.A.R.E.: Strategies for Closing the Achievement Gaps. This publication offers ways to improve curriculum and classroom practices by addressing the C.A.R.E. themes of cultural, economic and language differences; unrecognized and undeveloped abilities; resilience, effort and motivation.

Educators must be aware of and use knowledge about different students, including an understanding and appreciation of the different cultures, to help close achievement gaps. Time and again, the most successful schools embrace students' cultures, histories and languages by making them core components of teaching and learning – actively engaging students’ families and communities.

How to best serve English language learners (ELLs) has long been debated in states with historically large immigrant populations. In California, one-third of all elementary children are from households in which English is not the primary language.

In an attempt to address these concerns, Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley software engineer, decided the answer was simply to teach students exclusively in English. As evidence, he cited his mother who had come to the U.S. speaking no English and who had done quite well through immersion. In 1998, he convinced over two-thirds of the California electorate of this approach through the passage of Proposition 227.

This proposition mandated that ELLs entering California be placed in structured English immersion for a period “not normally to exceed one year” before being transferred to mainstream classrooms taught “overwhelmingly in English.” The fact that over ten years later California students score near the bottom on the National Assessment of Education Progress suggests that this approach to educating California students, many of whom are ELLs, was not the simple answer that was hoped for or expected.

Soon after the passage of Proposition 227, AIR responded to a state legislative mandate to conduct a five-year evaluation of the proposition’s implementation and impact. Because some schools were able to continue long-standing bilingual programs through a parent-requested waiver process, this study examined the academic outcomes of English learners in California schools that predominantly featured bilingual as well as English immersion approaches.

This study identified a number of schools showing strong success in English acquisition and content knowledge using instructional approaches characterized as bilingual as well as immersion. In addition, the large-scale analysis found no significant differences in the English language or content knowledge acquisition between schools using these two approaches. A five-year randomized control study conducted for the federal Institutes for Education Sciences in six locations throughout the US found the same thing. The IES study concluded that by the time these two sets of students -- immersion and bilingual --reached fourth grade, “differences in English reading and language skills between the groups were all statistically insignificant.”

Does this mean that it doesn’t matter what educators do to help ELLs? AIR’s Proposition 227 study attempted to focus specifically on that question. If bilingual versus immersion approaches are not the difference in ELL performance, what is? Identifying and studying schools showing much greater success than predicted, we found that what works for ELLs is largely what works for all students. These approaches include a well defined plan for ELL performance articulated with strong expectations, the use of student performance data to guide policy and instruction, and a strong program of professional development for teachers.

In an earlier study, AIR also documented the marginally small financial investment in ELL instruction in California. It is time to invest in ELLs commensurate to their supplemental needs to ensure that they receive the best teachers and the strongest instructional leaders, as well as the supplemental instructional time needed to become fully proficient in English as they master the content knowledge that will allow them to reach their full potential.

Mr. Kress is correct when asserts that our work with ELL students should begin with an understanding of the instructional research base, and that we have good guidance in this regard from IES.

The IES practice guides, and the research they cite, are useful. They offer high-level conceptual guidance to schools and districts about the nature of known educational practices that have been found, through legitimate formal research, to be generally effective. In my experience, however, most educators have a hard time deriving effective classroom-level practices that fit these recommendations. As a result, very little ELL instruction that I have seen seems to me to be research-based—or very effective.

We certainly need to know our research, and IES has accessible resources to help us with this. But at the classroom level, we still have a huge challenge: creating effective practice for daily use by specific teaching communities work with specific groups of kids.

I encountered this challenge while working with dozens of ELL teachers and 25,000 students in an all-high school district in the Southwest. The district had a large population of students who were classified by the state as English Language Learners. The goal was to help kids move out of the ELL classification altogether and up into what most teachers called “regular” English. We also needed to dramatically reduce the number of students falling into Band I on the state summative assessment.

Our company worked with 50-75 ELL teachers (and another 100 or so “regular” English teachers as well). We taught, observed in classrooms, and helped teachers plan units and review data. We also conducted regular training sessions. What we discovered working in classrooms was teachers using a wide range of practices—a seemingly infinity variety of techniques—little of which we could trace back to any research base we were familiar with. Furthermore, few teachers seemed to be getting good results.

Over a three year period, we created our own set of “classroom level” practices based on our own model of literacy instruction as derived from research in linguistics, language acquisition, and information theory. With the help of some excellent lead teachers in the district, we put many new practices into play.

Some practices didn’t work as well as we had hoped. But most did. Over a three-year period, we created, implemented, and identified 42 specific and well-documented practices that had clear correlational and causal relationships to improved student achievement.

While we couldn’t tie a single practice to a unique result, we were able to understand—by including ELL teachers in many practice review sessions and by disaggregating results based on extent of implemenation—how the full “repertoire” of practices affected positive change using several qualitative measures mostly related to increased student productivity and two quantitative measures. Overall, in high-implementation classrooms, students read about 400% more than usual and wrote about 500% more; writing quality and complexity improved, and inr reading, kids reaches new levels at rates of two- and three-years' growth to one year of schooling. When it came to better test results, the number of students moving up out of the ELL classification (via a state standardized English proficiency test) increased as did the number of ELL students moving up out of Band I and into Band II and Band III (Proficient) on the state summative test.

Strictly speaking, our practices were not “research-based”. No studies had been conducted on them and they were not strictly derived from IES guidelines. They were created specifically for the teachers and students of that district, and there was no research study component of our contract. It was clear, however, especially to those teachers who had the strongest implementations, that this set of techniques was far superior to what they had been doing before. Best of all, once the “repertoire” was validated and agreed upon by teacher leaders, it was easy to replicate more broadly across the district, as teachers themselves lead the push for wider use. Including teachers in the process of creating and assessing the practices, and giving them ownership for bringing along their colleagues, seemed to improve the degree to which new ideas were accepted. In the end, we left behind a dedicated core "literacy leadership team" of teachers who finished out the summer training 40 of their peers.

The takeaway for me in this experience is that knowledge of research is necessary but it is not sufficient. To improve student achievement, we need knowledge of research plus the ability to derive classroom-level practices that can be implemented effectively by a specific community of teachers serving a specific community of kids.

It’s common sense that we would want to provide instruction that was based on sound science. But sometimes, we need to combine the science of teaching with the art of newly-derived practice—much of which may not yet have been rigorously studied. This is the essence of innovation, and innovation is the key to moving past current levels of performance and reaching the goals to which we aspire.

While the letter of the law is clear, we must also hold fast to the spirit of the law. A set of practices that consistently produces good results across a reasonable population of teachers and kids creates, in a way, it’s on research base, at least within the context where that set of practices is begin used. This doesn’t meet even the minimum threshold for IES standards, but I believe it is significant and useful nonetheless, especially when the set of practices is well-documented and easily passed along, through training and support materials, from teacher to teacher.

A set of practices that show clear and positive results may not have been studied in sufficient detail to meet IES standards. In this case, the “research-based” requirements of the law should not be used to hinder innovation. Conversely, a set of practices easily connected to a successful research study may not be effective for a given community of teachers and kids. And if it isn’t effective, it shouldn’t be used, regardless of its scientific status.

What matters most is that we educate our kids. In this sense, results at a given point in time may be a better indicator of quality practice than links back to a research base. For one thing, the research base cannot move as quickly as the best practice of the best individuals working in the field at any time. For another, many strong practices are simply never studied. Finally, we recognize that knowing research is necessary but not sufficient. We need to know how to use research to derive specific classroom practices that specific communities of teachers can use to raise the achievement of specific groups of kids.

As we move forward with reform, we will surely hold onto the notion that instructional practice must be based in good science. But we shouldn’t overlook a key link in the learning supply chain: the ability of district- and building-level educators to derive effective classroom-level practice from high-level research-based conclusions such as those provided in the IES practice guides. Until we begin to pay more attention to the actual practices used by highly-effective classroom teachers, such high-level advice—even advice as good as that provided by IES—will not help us reach our full potential.

The focus on research-based practice in NCLB is correct. The work that remains to be done, however, may be work at a level lower than that of a formal research base. The true work may be about training teachers in effective ways of deriving new practices, validating those practices using multiple measures of effectiveness, and packaging a “repertoire” of successful practices for replication by other teachers. In a sense, we must begin in some way to train teachers to be their own researchers and to produce their own practice guides.

At the same time, we must expand our notion of what a “research base” is in classroom teaching. IES has set excellent standards for formal research. But the pace of formal research is very slow relative to the pace of innovation in our nation’s best classrooms. Rather than waiting for someone to decide to study a particular idea, we might do better to identify our most successful teachers, watch what they do, ask them why they do it and how they know it works, and document this for broader distribution.

We may not derive a true research base from this approach. But I think we can derive a “repertoire” of highly-optimized and easily-implemented practices that can be matched to the abilities and inclinations of specific teaching communities and the needs and affinities of specific groups of kids. Strictly speaking, we may not end up with something that is considered formally scientific. But we might end up with something that works.

Sadly, even when we care enough about such problems to get past the pure politics that surrounds all problems these days, our inclination is often to throw money, fads, and unproven approaches at them, as if simply acting will do the job.

Surely, we can do better, and now we can.

We have an increasing body of scientific research that offers real help to practitioners in the field. This is so, thanks, in part, to the leadership of Russ Whitehurst, who so ably led the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) during the Bush years. One of the many fine practice guides published by the IES offers superb, quality research-based guidance regarding instruction of English language learners. Let's start there.

Do recall that IES standards are high, so that all their recommendations (including those dubbed "low" level) have significant proof of efficacy. Here's the link:


http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practiceguides/20074011.pdf