Posts By Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro

By Alaynah Rose Garibay, Senior Consultant Latino Policy Forum and Dr. Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro, Education Director Latino Policy Forum

Nearly one in four children in Illinois speak a language other than English in their homes. In 2019-20, there were 261,454 students classified as English Learners, roughly 11.7%. In addition, 655 school districts across the state offered English learner instructional programs to support the unique learning needs of those students. 

Until now, there has not been a sustained series of training designed to build the skills of school leaders responsible for student outcomes in those programs. There are unique factors that impact the learning trajectories of English learners over the long term, and administrators... Continue Reading

By Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro PhD and Karen Garibay-Mulattieri

Test scores are not the end-all be-all when it comes to predicting college success. Nor should they be the only data used to evaluate school performance. Studies conducted by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research have shown that attendance and grades in core subject areas are more reliable indicators of high school graduation and success thereafter. Yet, the national rhetoric and federal law remain firmly focused on student growth and subject area mastery as demonstrated by annual testing. This practice is troublesome for subgroups such as English learners and the newcomers who are a part of this group (newcomers are those students who are in their first year of... Continue Reading

In Partnership with the Ounce of Prevention, the Latino Policy Forum convened a group of experts to craft recommendations to help boost the number of early childhood professionals who can serve children from diverse language and cultural backgrounds.  CLICK HERE to read recommendations.

Projected student growth in Illinois from 2005-2020 will largely come from the children of immigrants.  Preliminary findings from the Illinois Early Childhood Workforce Hiring Survey (2017) highlight that the most difficult position to hire is a lead teacher licensed by Illinois State Board of Education. Forty-two percent of respondents indicated a need for bilingual staff with 15 percent needing more than two bilingual staff. More than half of respondents (55%) state there is a limited pool... Continue Reading

An imperative question guiding my work at the Latino Policy Forum is not if all Illinois teachers and educational leadership should be prepared to meet the spectrum of linguistic and cultural diversity in their classrooms, but how to implement plans that improve their linguistic and cultural responsiveness.  This question is motivated by two significant changes in education: newly minted intensified academic standards and a greatly changing student demographic. 

To address this issue of teacher preparedness, part of my ongoing work at the Forum involves convening a pre-service and in-service teacher preparation work group to review, reflect on, and make suggestions to developing a statewide approach to fortify teacher preparation for linguistic and culturally diverse students. 

Dr. Samina Hadi-Tabassum is a... Continue Reading

A vital question guiding my work at the Forum is not if all Illinois teachers and educational leaders should be prepared to meet the spectrum of linguistic and cultural diversity in their classrooms, but how to implement plans that improve their linguistic and cultural responsiveness.  This question is motivated by two significant changes in education: newly minted intensified academic standards and a greatly changing student demographic.  

The advent of the Common Core State Standards heightens the need for all students to master the academic language of the classroom.  For the growing number of English language learners (ELLs), to achieve this requires a new level of expertise for educators on how to support and integrate... Continue Reading

As student-of-color demographics reach the “majority-minority” tipping point across the nation, building diversity within the teacher workforce has become increasingly urgent.  In response to that urgency, I’ve begun to develop a database to encourage educators and administrators to consider the myriad of ways to diversify the teacher candidate pool, provide linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy, and offer rich field experiences in diverse settings. You can find the Teacher Diversity Database on the Latino Policy Forum’s website here.

A growing body of research shows students who have teachers from diverse cultural, ethnic and racial background stand to reap additional benefits from the experience, not just academically, but socially and emotionally as... Continue Reading

Posted In: Leadership

Illinois’ student population is rapidly growing more linguistically and culturally diverse. Close to one in every 4 public school children speak a language other than English in the home, according to Illinois census data.  And the number of students who identify as English Language Learners (ELLs) statewide—now close to one out of every 10 students— has grown an astonishing 83 percent over the last 15 years.  As these students transition into general education classrooms, nearly every teacher in the state will likely be working with ELLs at some point in their careers. 

The increasing diversity of the Illinois student body stands in stark contrast to teacher demographics—largely white, female, and monolingual. ... Continue Reading

Posted In: Educators

While a “majority-minority” student population has long been a reality in Chicago, 2011 marked the first time that minority students were the majority in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade classrooms across all of Illinois. A driving force behind this demographic shift are students who come from immigrant families,  hold a range of native- and English-language abilities, and are adapting to the U.S. school system. 

The United States’ increased use of standardized testing poses significant conundrums for this emerging student population. While there is no shortage of critiques on the overall merits of standardized testing, for those on their way to learning English, the reliability, validity, and fairness of such accountability measures are especially dubious.  After being in U.S. schools... Continue Reading

Posted In: K-3

Illinois is ahead of the curve in promoting educational reforms and supports that value early childhood education.  Relatively nascent advocacy efforts endorse a more expansive continuum approach, especially birth-to-age 8 (or third grade), to ensure that early education benefits are thoughtfully and purposefully carried over into the early grades.  Vital to such discussions are the ways in which such continuum reform efforts could benefit the state’s rapidly growing diverse language learner population.

What is perhaps most striking to me is that if children begin the transition to English before they are well-grounded in their native tongue—generally achieved around the third grade benchmark—it can actually limit their English language development.  English-only approaches (or transitions into English instruction before students have a... Continue Reading

Posted In: K-3
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