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Nearly half in top 5 U.S. cities don’t speak English at home, record 67 million Nearly half of the residents in the nation’s five biggest cities do not speak English at home, choosing instead their native language, according to the latest Census Bureau data that details the impact of a decade of soft immigration policies. Overall, a record 67 million do not speak English at home, said the bureau. That is nearly double in 27 years. In its just-released analysis of the Census data, the Center for Immigration Studies said, “As a share of the population, 21.8 percent of U.S....

WASHINGTON, DC - The Department of Education today announced a new program to raise awareness of racial diversity among students. The program, Rap As A Second Language, translates rap music into a form understandable to students from all socio-econimic backgrounds. The Department released this training video, which is targeted for suburban students...

WASHINGTON -- Prince William County's illegal immigration crackdown appears to be spurring some families to send their children to schools elsewhere in northern Virginia. According to the Prince William school system, enrollment in English as a Second Language classes dropped by 759 students from September through March. During that same period, 623 ESOL students from Prince William enrolled in Fairfax County schools, compared with 241 in the same period the previous year. Eighty-three enrolled in Arlington County, 75 enrolled in the city of Alexandria and 23 signed up in Loudoun County. Prince William Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart...

Hundreds of foreign-born families have pulled their children from Prince William County public schools and enrolled them in nearby Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria since the start of the school year, imposing a new financial burden on those inner suburbs in a time of lean budgets. The school-to-school migration within Northern Virginia started just as Prince William began implementing rules to deny some services to illegal immigrants and require police to check the immigration status of crime suspects thought to be in the country illegally. ... According to the Prince William school system, enrollment in the English for speakers...

WASHINGTON - Prince William County's crackdown on illegal immigration could be having a chilling effect in some local schools. "It certainly is an anomaly that we would have a little more than 600 fewer students in the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) program than what we had at the beginning of the year," says Prince William County school spokesman Ken Blackstone. "We are always concerned when there's anything that would create an apparent anomaly like this, a drop in enrollment." Many of the students who left the school system left after the county's crackdown on illegal immigrants started...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell announced today that the U.S. Department of Education has awarded Georgetown College a $75,567 federal grant. The money will be used to develop a Center for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, which will provide professional development to teachers to help prepare them to work with students learning English. “These funds will enable Georgetown College to prepare future educators to use relevant methods to teach students to learn English,” said McConnell. “This project is important to Kentucky and to the students and faculty at Georgetown College, and I was pleased to have helped secure...

An Interview with Christina Asquith: About “The Emergency Teacher” Tuesday, November 8, 2005 EducationNews.org Suzi Cottrell Michael F. Shaughnessy Eastern New Mexico University Portales, New Mexico 1) You have recently written a book about “The Emergency Teachers” What prompted you to write this book? Literature is a powerful teaching tool. When I started my first year teaching in a low-income, urban school, I searched for books by other new teachers to use as a model for myself. But I couldn’t find anything that was realistic and written by a teacher. So, when my year ended, and I had learned so...

"Stop! Police!" These are two simple words that are easy to understand if you speak English. But in a region where the Hispanic population has exploded over the past 10 years, the meaning may not be as clear. "ÁAlto! ÁPolic’a!" might make a difference if you speak Spanish. But in the case of the lethal March 5 shooting of a Hispanic suspect, law enforcement officials and residents say that whether the deputies knew Spanish would not have made a difference. Running from or attacking police is, or should be, a known wrong among all cultures, said Hendersonville Police Chief Donnie...

HARTFORD — Nazanin Hibodi is from Iran, has attended school in Germany, and has only been living in the United States for two years. But not long after she arrived at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, she was forced to take a high-stakes exam, the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, in a language she could barely understand. She was allowed to use a dictionary, but it took too long on a time-limited test. "It’s really hard for students who are coming to another country not knowing any English," said the teenager. "If I were in my country and I would...

WARNING: Anger Management Needed! Schools with large populations of immigrant students will soon get some breathing room from testing requirements under reforms announced Thursday by federal and state education officials. Educators have complained that the current testing system too often labels as failures children with limited English skills and the schools where they are concentrated. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are held accountable for the test scores of various subgroups of students, including those with limited English skills. Long article but a necessary read

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 2, 2004 Contact: Rob Toonkel (202) 833-0100 Not Guilty By Reason of Limited English Proficiency Pennsylvania case illustrates a dangerous future of justice In a terrifying blow to the future of law enforcement and criminal proceedings, Bucks County [Pa.] prosecutors were forced to drop drug charges against a man after a Pennsylvania Superior Court declared a search void due to the accused's inability to understand English. After Pennsylvania police pulled over New York resident Miqueas Acosta for driving with an expired safety sticker in June 2000, a subsequent search of his vehicle found a kilo of...

<p>Three months after Massachusetts public schools launched voter-approved English immersion classes for thousands of immigrant children, reality is hitting home for their teachers: Many students will have to remain in immersion classes longer than the one-year time limit specified by the new law.</p>

Foreign language spoken in 20% of U.S. homes October 9, 2003 WASHINGTON -- Nearly one in five Americans speaks a language other than English at home, the Census Bureau says, after a surge of nearly 50 percent during the past decade. Most speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, with Russian rising fast.

<p>Nearly one in five Americans speaks a language other than English at home, the Census Bureau says, mostly speaking Spanish, followed by Chinese, with Russian rising fast.</p> <p>About 47 million Americans age 5 and older used a language other than English in 2000, the bureau said. That translates into the nearly one in five, compared with roughly one in seven 10 years earlier.</p>

<p>Tomorrow morning, Principal Oliver Smith will gather a group of 25 newly arrived immigrant students at Wright Middle School and tell them, through interpreters, that they have to take the state's annual achievement tests — in English.</p> <p>Under previous test-taking rules, the students would have been exempt.</p>