Chicago in violation of state law on ELL. Charters worst violators.

Most of the worst violators of state law were charter schools. Fifteen were run by the UNO Network of Charter Schools; nine were run by the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Source: Chicago Public Schools

Congrats to Chicago Reporter's Kalyn Belsha whose story on CPS's failure to meet the needs of English learners was named among this week's top education stories by Atlantic Magazine.

Belsha reports on a recent review of CPS records which found that, of the 342 schools audited, nearly 71%, or 242, had bilingual programs that were in serious violation of state law. As a result, English learners go without legally required services, such as books in their native language and teachers who speak that language or have English as a Second Language training.

Most of the worst violators of state law were charter schools. Fifteen were run by the UNO Network of Charter Schools; nine were run by the Noble Network of Charter Schools.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out once again, that it was former schools CEO Arne Duncan who successfully pushed Judge Kocoras to abandon the consent decree. Thousands of the district's English language learners and their families are still paying the price.

Bloomberg's N.Y. charters still excluding Latino & ELL students

Tuesday's New York Times reports that Bloomberg's privately-managed charter schools in N.Y. greatly under-enroll Latino and Spanish-speaking immigrant students. 

Charter schools have proportionately fewer Hispanic students — as well as fewer students learning English, regardless of their ethnicity — than nearby schools, including schools that share the same building.  

 That's not big news. The news is that the equity gap between charters and traditional neighborhood schools continues to grow after a decade of criticism, while most studies find charters performing at about the same or in many cases worse than those same neighborhood schools.

Charter schools in the city have been criticized for not offering enough services for students still learning English, a shortcoming the new law aims to address. Only 5 percent of charter students are classified as English learners, compared with 15 percent of public school students over all.

 What's also astonishing in the Times piece is that the victims of these exclusionary policies are being blamed for the problem. Charter operators, like billionaire Carl Icahn, claim that they have tried to recruit Hispanics but got no response.

The principal of the Carl C. Icahn Charter Schools, Jeffrey Litt, said he and colleagues made efforts to recruit a student body that reflects the schools’ Bronx neighborhoods. But at Icahn Charter School 4 in the South Bronx, for example, slightly more than a third of the students are Hispanic, while a traditional public elementary school two blocks away is three-quarters Hispanic.  

Latest from the Chicago's school 'Renaissance'

No more foreign languages taught here

Did Mayor Daley bring Ron Huberman over from CTA to manage the complete and total dismantling of public education in the city? It's beginning to look that way.

The latest target of Daley/Huberman is the district's World Languages program. In short, it's a goner. Elementary school students will no longer have a chance to learn a foreign language at their neighborhood public school under a decision to dump "world languages" to save $3.5 million, according to this report in today's Sun-Times.

Late Tuesday, CPS Budget Chief Christina Herzog released a list of 27 affected schools and said all world language magnet program positions were being closed -- a total of 40 jobs -- for a savings of $3.5 million.

Keeping ELL grad rates a secret

Even though NCLB requires states to report graduation rates of English Language Learners (ELL), many don't or won't, according to EDWEEK's Mary Ann Zehr. She quotes an Arizona bureaucrat for example, who says that the state doesn't consider ELL grad rates important and has no expectations that ELL students will graduate on time, so they don't bother to report them.

One bright spot in Zehr's report is a group of N.Y. small schools that that have a mission to serve English-learners and helping to improve the city’s overall ELL graduation rate.

Among those small schools are 10 that are part of the Internationals Network for Public Schools. They enroll ELLs who have been in the country for less than four years. The average graduation rate for the seven graduating classes from those schools was 73 percent in the 2007-08 school year—higher than the city’s overall rate. And many students stay in school and receive a diploma after an additional year or two.