Past Issues - November/December 2002

November/December 2002

Abstracts

Beefing Up Professional Development
Chicago's latest efforts aim to make teachers' learning opportunities more relevant to their classroom work
By Alexander Russo

Like a lot of school districts, Chicago's efforts at professional development have often been characterized as fragmented, incoherent, inconsistent, and ineffective. But that appears to be changing under a new school-system administration, reports Russo. The new approach aims to balance previous efforts at improvement through decentralization and high-stakes testing with greater attention to building the skills of teachers and administrators with increased professional development offerings, an increase in school-based reading specialists, and a shift in budget priorities.

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Canadian Second-Language Immersion
What It Does—and Doesn't—Suggest for American ESL Students
By Karen Kelly

The debate in the United States over bilingual education is seen as something of a curiosity in Canada, where bilingualism is an integral part of education. The so-called "Canadian model" of language learning, which immerses children in a second language for the first few years of their schooling, has inspired about 240 such programs in the United States as well as programs in Japan, China, and a number of European countries. But, Kelly reports, the success of this kind of language instruction is contingent on factors that do not exist in many American classroom contexts.

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New and Noteworthy: Do Alternative Assessments Give a Clearer Picture of Bilingual Students' Reading Comprehension?

This short report highlights a study about efforts in California's West San Francisco Bay district to develop a performance-based assessment in reading during 5th grade for those in transition out of the K-4 bilingual program—an assessment that would give teachers a more accurate picture of students' reading skills and suggest ways of improving their instruction.

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