Search

Background/Context: There is a growing need for schools to examine the best ways of working with immigrant and multilingual families, as it is ever more likely that all teachers will work with multilingual newcomers and their children during their career. However, teachers often view multilingual families in deficit ways, and many teachers lack experience in designing culturally responsive school–family partnerships. Although professional development (PD) has been shown to positively impact teachers’ beliefs regarding actively engaging culturally and linguistically diverse families, it is not clear from the literature how such PD is taken up across different district contexts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question or Focus of Study: This article explores teachers' perceptions of multilingual family engagement across four distinct school districts involved in a PD project. We specifically asked: (1) How have teachers’ perceptions of immigrant/multilingual family engagement changed over the first year of a PD program? (2) How do teachers’ perceptions of multilingual family engagement differ across district contexts? Research Design: In this mixed-method study, we examine teacher survey responses, reflections, and researcher field notes from our first cohort of teachers ( n = 25) participating in our National Professional Development (NPD) grant project. We completed descriptive statistics to address our initial research question before exploring how context could be shaping the ways teachers implemented ideas from the PD. Next, teacher reflections and researcher field notes were analyzed following an ethnographic approach. Conclusions/Recommendations: We found that power-sharing approaches to family engagement were conceptualized by teachers along a continuum of relationship-building and power-sharing across districts. While PD can support teachers to develop family engagement beyond common and traditional practices, buy-in by teachers can be limited by district context and opportunities. Researchers providing PD need to recognize that discussions around power-sharing will look different depending on district context. Furthermore, providing this type of PD will require relationship-building with districts/teachers, ongoing support, and different amounts of time specific to the context(s) they are serving.

Immigrants to the USA continue to grow more diverse by country of origin, and in location of settlement. Newcomers often settle in concentrated patterns, and questions remain about the ability of schools to provide the academic, language, and social resources these students may need for integration into American society. Many school districts in the Midwestern United States have seen an increase in the diversity of children from multilingual backgrounds as the result of immigrant and refugee settlement. Since immigrant groups settle within enclaves, there may be factors relating immigrant language background, school district quality, and upward mobility that are spatially correlated. This article uses geographic weighted regression (GWR) to examine the spatial relationship between multilingual students and indicators of opportunity structure in the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan region. St. Louis was chosen because of its rich history of European immigration, Bosnian refugee resettlement, and intense racial segregation. Results suggest that multilingual students in the St. Louis metropolitan region are spatially concentrated, but only certain language groups are located within school districts that provide resources for possible integration and upward mobility. This analysis demonstrates the importance of examining the local context of settlement for multilingual students and the opportunity structure available to them through their school district.

Empirical studies in first language (L1) research support the use of inserted adjunct questions to facilitate L1 reading comprehension. The status of this comprehension technique for second language (L2) readers, however, remains unclear. Given the possibility that adjunct questions augment the cognitive demands of the task, the current study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and text adjuncts, as well as the effect of inserted adjuncts on L2 reading comprehension. Seventy learners of intermediate Spanish read two texts that contained either targeted segment (“what”) questions inserted into both passages, elaborative interrogation (“why”) questions inserted into both passages, or no questions in either of the two passages. Participants were administered an L1 working memory (WM) test—the Reading Span—and three comprehension assessments. Although the “why” questions were slightly more facilitative than the “what” questions and no questions, results indicate no significant effect of adjunct condition. When interactions with WM surfaced as significant, the pattern was apparent: the greater the WMC, the more beneficial the adjunct questions were for L2 readers. These findings suggest that, for intermediate learners of Spanish, there is no advantage to including inserted adjuncts in L2 expository texts, but that WM may explain performance differences in some cases.

The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language is a reprint of Alastair Pennycook’s oft-cited 1994 seminal text. Branded as a Routledge Linguistics Classic, it is hard to deny that i...

Education policy has historically been viewed as having an influential part in crafting the roles of immigrants in American society. However, while policy makers continue to push their own agendas on English language learners (ELLs), ELLs continue to push back to create their own sense of what it means be an American. This article analyzes how formal and informal language policies have historically driven the instruction of ELLs and argues that despite attempts to enculturate and/or assimilate ELLs into American schools through strict English instruction, students employ a variety of cultural resources to act agentically in their acculturation.

There would be a watershed of students from the city and from Riverview Gardens just descending upon all St. Louis County schools, and we would have no ability to turn them away.-Chris Tennill, Chief Communications Officer, Clayton Public Schools (Adolphy, 2010, para. 11)School accreditation is granted by states to local districts to certify their competency and authority to provide a K-12 education. An unaccredited school district does not have state authorization to offer a K-12 education. In Missouri, the process of accrediting school districts is mandated by state law and by State Board of Education regulation. In October 2012, the Missouri Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (Missouri DESE, 2012) reported that 506 of 520 school districts in the state were accredited. This article focuses on four of the 14 school districts that are classified as provisionally accredited or unaccredited. All four of these districts are in metropolitan St. Louis. In 2012, over 30,500 Black students attended schools in St. Louis, Normandy, Riverview Gardens, and Jennings school districts (Center for the Study of Regional Competiveness in Science & Technology, CSRCST, 2014). All four of the school districts are predominantly Black with three of the districts serving over 97% Black students. In terms of poverty, at least 75% of the students attending schools in the four districts receive free or reduced price lunch.The accreditation status of these four school districts will influence students' inter-district school assignment options. In the state of Missouri students from unaccredited schools are legally able to attend schools in nearby districts. The purpose of this article is to provide a case study of two local student transfer cases (Turner v. Clayton, 2010 and Breitenfeld v. Clayton, 2013, hereafter referred to jointly as the transfer cases) with a particular focus on inter-district school assignment. The guiding research question for this case study is how do the student transfer cases relate to prior desegregation and current accountability policies in the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan region?The case study is important because it offers insight into education accountability policy and civic responsibility. The student transfer cases in Missouri reflect a shift in philosophy about access to K-12 public education. Two different conceptions of neighbor provide insight into the change. One conception of neighbor involves geographic proximity, and it is defined as "one who lives near another" (Webster, 2000). In Missouri and throughout the United States, this conception of neighbor is associated with the construction of K-12 school district attendance boundaries. The borders restrict the educational service beneficiaries to residents living within their limits. The link between residential boundaries and property taxes, a primary revenue source for schools, is direct. If an individual pays local property taxes, then he or she benefits. Prior to the transfer case litigation, this residential conception of neighbor was an important influence on Missouri's approach to oversight of local school districts. Local school districts were granted authority by the state to determine student access to their services. A majority of the districts restricted access to educational services to residents living within specific political boundaries. A few exceptions included students participating in the voluntary desegregation transfer programs and those whose parents arranged special tuition agreements with neighboring school districts.For a majority of Missouri, the residential conception of school district attendance boundaries remains intact. However, in the St. Louis metropolitan region, the student transfer case shifted the guiding conception of neighbor to another definition of "anyone who needs help, or to whom we have an opportunity of doing good" (Webster, 2000). Loss of accreditation is a signal that one's neighbor in an adjoining school district needs help. …