In the United States, bilingual education in schools has been an afterthought for decades. But demographic changes in the student population, and new research out of Chicago, demand that it occupy a more meaningful role in how we measure success in serving these students, as well as other groups of learners. Today, as a policy analyst with decades of experience, I am encouraging a new approach to accountability that places a value on bilingual skills.
The catalyst was a 2019 study published by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. The study followed 18,000 English learners from kindergarten through eighth grade and found they outperformed native English speakers on various benchmarks when given the proper resources. From higher attendance rates to better performance on eighth-grade English Language Arts PARCC exams, the study suggests that longitudinal data is not only a more accurate way to capture the academic success of English learners, it could also apply to other groups of students as well...