Overview

Date: January 15, 2008 - January 16, 2008

Location: Princeton, New Jersey

The Language Acquisition and Educational Achievement of English-Language Learners

English-language learners are the fastest growing student population in U.S. public schools. In addition to a growth in numbers, federal policy outlined by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires each state to identify and be accountable for the instruction and performance of English learners on both measures of English-language acquisition and academic subjects.

States, districts and individual schools are searching for tools and strategies to support the education and knowledge attainment of their English-language learner population. In addition, organizations, including ETS, are constructing ways to assist states, districts and individual schools to provide fitting instruction and assessments for these students.

The 2008 English-Language Learners Symposium, sponsored by ETS and co-convened with the National Council of La Raza, will address issues related to the instruction and assessment of English-language learners and research that begins to lay a foundation to craft educational solutions. Among topics to be addressed at the symposium are the following:

• Preschool education and English-language learner literacy development
• Characteristics of classrooms, schools and districts that employ promising teaching and learning strategies for English learners
• Research on the assessment of English learners
• English-language learners with special learning needs
• Innovative policies for preparing teachers to teach English learners
• English learners, a linguistic resource for a global economy

Participants included elementary and secondary school educators, administrators, researchers, representatives from educational organizations and others who have an interest in this growing student population.

English-Language Learner Fact Sheet

Status of Policies and Trends of English Language Learners in the U.S. K-12 Student Population

ETS Policy Notes — Addressing Achievement Gaps
The Language Acquisition and Educational Achievement of English-Language Learners

Video Clips

Video clips from selected presentations have been posted for viewing under the Agenda tab above.

Agenda

Speakers

• Joseph A. Aguerrebere
• Leonard Baca
• Jeanne Batalova
• Margarita Calderón
• Laurene Christensen
• Richard Duran
• Kathy Escamilla
• David J. Francis
• Ellen Frede
• Eugene E. García
• Kenja Hakuta
• Kurt M. Landgraf
• Michael T. Nettles
• Rose Payán
• Margarita Perera Pinkos
• Mary J. Pitoniak
• Delia Pompa
• Charlene Rivera
• Claire E. Sylvan
• Martha L. Thurlow
• Guadalupe Valdés
• John W. Young

Joseph A. Aguerrebere

Joseph A. Aguerrebere is President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards® (NBPTS), an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

NBPTS advances the quality of teaching and learning by establishing high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do along with a national, voluntary system for certifying experienced teachers who meet these standards.

Prior to joining the NBPTS, Aguerrebere was Deputy Director in the Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program at the Ford Foundation in New York, where he had been a program officer since June 1994. In addition to his management responsibilities at the foundation, his grantmaking work focused on education reform and the development of quality teachers and school system leaders. He supported a long-standing national initiative, working with key national organizations to strengthen the quality of teachers and leaders in education. He also supported the advancement of community service in educational settings.

Aguerrebere was born and raised in East Los Angeles, California. After graduating from Garfield High School (the school made famous by Jaime Escalante and the movie, "Stand and Deliver"), he attended the University of Southern California where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science, and master's and doctorate degrees in educational administration.

He began his education career as a high school teacher in Southern California and ultimately worked in 5 very diverse school systems as an assistant principal, principal and central office administrator in elementary, middle and high schools.

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Leonard Baca

Leonard Baca has been a professor of education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, since 1973. He has taught courses in bilingual special education and served as the program chair. Baca is founder and director of the BUENO Center for Multicultural Education, which has been in operation for 30 years and has generated nearly $55 million of external funding. BUENO projects involve teacher training, as well as research and community outreach in the areas of bilingual and multicultural education.

Baca is a member of several professional organizations including the National Association of Bilingual Education, Teachers of English as a Second Language, the Council for Exceptional Children, the National Association for Multicultural Education and the American Educational Research Association. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Bilingual Research Journal, Multicultural Perspectives and Remedial and Special Education.

He is the author of The Bilingual Special Education Interface, Merrill Prentice Hall, (2004) and several other articles dealing with English-language learners with disabilities. In 2007, Baca was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Business Social Responsibility Award for his work as director of the campus BUENO Center. The BUENO Center was established by Baca in 1976 to improve educational opportunities for culturally and linguistically diverse students through teacher training, research projects and staff development and training.

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Jeanne Batalova

Jeanne Batalova is a Policy Analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, where she focuses on the impacts of immigrants on social structure and labor markets; integration of immigrant children and elderly immigrants, and the policies and practices regulating immigration of highly skilled workers and foreign students.

She also serves as Manager of the MPI Data Hub, a one-stop, web-based resource that provides instant access to the latest U.S. and global immigration and immigrant integration facts, statistics, maps and other data.

Batalova is author of Skilled Immigrant and Native Workers in the United States: The Economic Competition Debate and Beyond (2006) and Competing for Global Talent: The Race Begins with Foreign Students (2006).

She also co-authored a paper on estimations of unauthorized youth eligible for legal status under the DREAM Act (PDF), a review of the literature on economic impacts of immigrants in the United States (PDF), and a study on children with limited English proficiency and their academic literacy outcomes (PDF). She also co-authored a study on characteristics of elderly immigrants in the United States. As a Russian-speaking migration specialist, Batalova participated in the discussions of legal and illegal immigration in the United States and Russia organized by the Russian Service of the Voice of America.

She has a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Irvine; an MBA from Roosevelt University; and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Academy of Economic Studies, Chisinau, Moldova.

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Margarita Calderón

Margarita Calderón, a native of Juárez, Mexico, is a Professor and Senior Research Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

She serves on the National Research Council’s Committee on Teacher Preparation, the National Literacy Panel for Language, Minority Children and Youth, the Carnegie Adolescent English-Language Learner (ELL) Literacy Panel, the International Reading Association (IRA) ELL Literacy Panel, the California Pre-School Literacy Panel, the Professional Advisory Board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, and the ETS Panel on Research.

Calderón is the principal investigator in a 5-year study, called Expediting Comprehension for English-Language Learners (ExC-ELL), among middle and high schools. The study focuses on professional development of science, social studies and language arts teachers of English-Language Learners in New York City schools. The study is funded by the Carnegie Corp. of New York. In addition, she’s a co-principal investigator with Robert Slavin on a 5-year randomized evaluation of English immersion, transitional and two-way bilingual programs funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

Calderón’s recent publications are: Teaching Reading to English-Language Learners, Grades 6-12: A Framework for Improving Achievement in the Content Areas and Reading Instructional Goals for Older Readers (RIGOR), a reading series for Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE) and long-term English-Language Learners.

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Laurene Christensen

Laurene Christensen is a Research Fellow in the area of assessment accommodations for English-language learners and students with disabilities. Prior to her work at the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO) Christensen worked for nearly 15 years teaching English to speakers of other languages. Her teaching experience includes work in secondary, post-secondary and adult education contexts; her students have ranged in age from 10 to 65. In addition to teaching English-language courses, Christensen has also taught college composition, introductory linguistics, foundations of second languages and culture, culture in the language classroom, and cross-cultural leadership.

Recent projects at NCEO include synthesizing state policies on assessment participation and accommodations, reviewing federal peer-review comments for issues related to accommodations, and developing materials for states to monitor accommodations. At NCEO, her interests are in policy analysis, adaptive technology accommodations, and leadership for system change with regard to accessible assessments.

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Richard Duran

Richard Duran is a Professor at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara in 1984, he served as a Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service. At ETS, he conducted studies on the validity of the SAT® for use with Latino students and on the validity of the TOEFL® test given emerging models of communicative competence.

Duran specializes in assessment and education policy, with a focus on education strategies that draw on cognitive research to serve English-language learners. He has served as a member of the National Research Council (NRC) Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA), and the BOTA/NRC Committee on Appropriate Test Use that authored the report, High Stakes Assessment. He serves on the New York, Texas and Washington State assessment national technical advisory committees and as a member of the editorial board for the Latino Journal of Education.

Duran has authored or co-authored 23 research papers, including: Assessing English-Language Learners’ Achievement (In press, 2007); A Sociocultural Perspective on Mediated Activity in Third Grade Science (with J. Reveles and G. Kelly, 2007); State Implementation of NCLB Policies and Interpretation of the NAEP Performance of English-Language Learners (2006); The Role of Verbal Guidance and Individual Differences in Multimedia Mathematics Learning (with R. Moreno, 2004); and Assessment of English-Language Learners in the Oregon Statewide Assessment System: National and State Perspectives (with C. Brown and M. McCall, 2002).

Duran received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Kathy Escamilla

Kathy Escamilla is a Professor of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She received a doctorate from UCLA in curriculum and the study of schooling, with an emphasis on bilingual education; a Master of Science degree in education, with an emphasis in bilingual-bicultural education from the University of Kansas; and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish and education from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Escamilla has been a bilingual elementary teacher in Johnstown, Colorado, and in inner city Los Angeles. She has also worked as a bilingual Head Start teacher, a director of bilingual programs for the Tucson Unified School District, and a professor of bilingual education. Escamilla has more than 35 years of experience in the field of bilingual/ESL education.

She authored Instrumento de Observación de los Logros de la Lecto-Escritura Inicial, a book that focuses on the reconstruction of English Reading Recovery into Spanish. The book is in its third printing. Escamilla has also authored more than 32 articles in research journals and book chapters.

Her research has examined the impact of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) on Colorado children who are learning English as a second language. Escamilla is currently involved in a five-year, longitudinal research project. It examines the development of biliteracy in elementary Spanish-speaking children in a reading intervention titled "Literacy Squared."

Escamilla is active in the bilingual/ESL community in the United States. She served two terms as president of the National Association for Bilingual Education. Escamilla has also served on the National Panel for Early Literacy and on the National Hispanic Advisory Council for the National Center for Family Literacy. Her life’s work and passion are to work for social justice for Spanish-speaking children and their families in U.S. schools.

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David J. Francis

David J. Francis is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he also serves as Director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics.

Francis is the Director of the National Research and Development Center for English Language-Learners at the University of Houston. His areas of interest include applied statistics, especially multilevel, latent variable and individual growth models. His areas of substantive interest include reading acquisition and educational outcomes for at-risk and disabled children, with specific interests in children who are English-language learners.

He received a doctorate from the University of Houston. He was one of three faculty recipients of the University of Houston’s 2007 Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship.

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Ellen Frede

Ellen Frede is an Associate Professor at The College of New Jersey and Co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). She is a developmental psychologist with experience in early childhood teacher education, program implementation, research and policy.

Prior to joining NIEER, she served as an Assistant to the Commissioner for Early Childhood Education in the New Jersey Department of Education.

Frede began her career teaching in a wide variety of early childhood classrooms, including Head Start, employer-sponsored child care and a federally funded model inclusion program. She served as a professional development specialist at the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, where she assisted teachers and program development specialists throughout the United States and abroad.

Her research has been published in national research journals, and she has served as an editor on the review boards of national journals. One of her current projects involves co-editing a research volume with Eugene Garcia on Enhancing the Knowledge Base for Serving Young English-Language Learners.

She has a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in human development from Pacific Oaks College and a doctorate in developmental psychology from Utah State University.

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Eugene E. García

Eugene E. García held the position of Dean at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University (ASU) from 2002 to 2006. In 2003, he was also named Vice President for University-School Partnerships at ASU, where he focused on strengthening K-12 education in the state of Arizona by linking together the University and private sector for distribution of fiscal and human resources. In 2006, García stepped down as dean and assumed the new role of Vice President for Education Partnerships. This position carries on the goal of his first Vice Presidential position and encompasses coordination of teacher preparation across Arizona colleges and campuses as well as implementation of the university-public school initiative to establish campus schools. Before joining ASU, García was Dean and Professor of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

García has published extensively in the area of language teaching and bilingual development. He served as a Senior Officer and Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs in the U.S. Department of Education from 1993-1995. He is currently chairing the National Task Force on Early Childhood Education for Hispanics funded by the Foundation for Child Development and the Mailman Family Foundation. He is presently conducting research in the areas of effective schooling for linguistically and culturally diverse student populations funded by the National Science Foundation. His most recent books include Hispanic Education in the United States: Raíces y Alas (2001); Understanding and Meeting the Challenge of Student Diversity (1994); and Teaching and Learning in Two Languages: Bilingualism and Schooling in the United States (2005).

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Kenji Hakuta

Kenji Hakuta is an experimental psycholinguist, best known for his work in bilingualism and the acquisition of English by immigrant students.

He has been a professor of education at Stanford University since 1989, except for three years (2003-06) when he helped start the University of California at Merced, as its Founding Dean of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. Previous academic appointments include Yale University (psychology), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (education).

Hakuta is the author of numerous research papers and books, including Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism and In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second Language Acquisition.

He chaired a National Academy of Sciences report, Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children, and co-edited a book on affirmative action in higher education, Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Higher Education.

Active in education policy, Hakuta has testified before Congress and other public bodies on a variety of topics, including language policy, the education of language for minority students, affirmative action in higher education and improvement of quality in educational research. He has served as an expert witness in education litigation involving language of/for minority students.

He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (linguistics and language sciences). He serves on the Board of the Educational Testing Service and is Vice Chair of the Board of the Spencer Foundation.

Hakuta received his B.A., magna cum laude, in psychology and social relations, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard University.

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Kurt M. Landgraf

Kurt M. Landgraf joined Educational Testing Service (ETS) as President and Chief Executive Officer on August 7, 2000, having previously served for the company some three decades earlier as Associate Director of Marketing.

Before returning to ETS, Landgraf had been serving as chair, and chief executive officer of the DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company.

Landgraf previously was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of DuPont and Chair of DuPont Europe. Before that, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company (DMPC) and formerly served as DMPC Executive Vice President with worldwide responsibility for all domestic and international sales and marketing, manufacturing, medical marketing, QC/QA, and multi-source business operations.

Landgraf’s career at DuPont began in 1980, first in the company’s pharmaceuticals division. From 1980 to 1983, he was Manager, worldwide marketing services; from 1983 to 1985, he was Marketing Director, pharmaceuticals, for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, based in Frankfurt, Germany. From 1985 to 1986, Landgraf was Director, pharmaceuticals, for Europe, Middle East and Africa, also based in Frankfurt.

Landgraf returned to the United States in 1986 and was appointed DuPont’s planning manager, Corporate Plans Department, Wilmington, Delaware.  In 1987, he returned to the company’s pharmaceuticals division as Director, Business Development and international division. In 1988, he was appointed Director, pharmaceuticals division, and in 1989 became Director of the pharmaceuticals and imaging agents divisions.

In December 1996, Landgraf became DuPont’s chief financial officer. He was named Executive Vice President on September 1, 1997, and named Chief Operating Officer effective May 1, 1999.

Before joining DuPont, Landgraf was with The Upjohn Company from 1974 to 1980. He held various positions during his career at Upjohn, having responsibility for domestic and international economic analysis, worldwide markets and product research, licensing and acquisition, financial analysis and health economics planning.

Landgraf was Associate Director, Marketing, for ETS in Princeton, New Jersey from 1970 to 1974.  Before that, he was a sales representative and brand manager for Johnson & Johnson, Inc., New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a mergers and acquisitions intern for Kidder Peabody, Inc., in New York City.

Landgraf has been an instructor in economics, sociology, and labor relations in various colleges throughout the United States.

He is a member of the board of directors of IKON Office Solutions, Inc., and Louisiana-Pacific Corporation.  He is also a member of the NJ Commission on Higher Education, on the board of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), and a member of the ACE Washington Higher Education Secretariat. He has chaired the National Pharmaceutical Council, United Way of Delaware, and the Delaware Association for Rights of Citizens with Mental Retardation. He recently completed a term as President of The GEM Consortium (National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Sciences, Inc.). He is on the board of the Delaware CarePlan, serves on the board of trustees of Wagner College, is a member of the board of director’s of Jobs for America’s Graduates (JAG), and is a member of the Rock Institute of Ethics, Pennsylvania State University.

Landgraf received a bachelor's degree in economics/business administration from Wagner College.  He also earned three master's degrees: in economics from Pennsylvania State University, in administration from Rutgers University and in sociology from Western Michigan University. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program.

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Michael T. Nettles

Michael T. Nettles is Senior Vice President of ETS’s Policy Evaluation & Research Center, where he oversees ETS’s public policy research program. He is also responsible for advancing the application of ETS’s research and information to address critical education challenges.

Nettles is ETS’s Edmund W. Gordon Chair for Policy Evaluation and Research, a position created by the ETS Board of Trustees in 2004.

Nettles’ history with ETS dates back to 1984 when he joined as a Research Scientist and was later promoted to Senior Research Scientist in the Division of Education Policy Research. Nettles left ETS in 1989 to assume the position of Vice President for Assessment of the University of Tennessee Systems. Before returning to ETS in 2003, Nettles also served for 12 years as a tenured professor of education at the University of Michigan.

Nettles’ has held several other professional positions. He served as the first Executive Director of the Fredrick D. Patterson Research Institute of the United Negro College Fund from 1996 to 1999, where he published the three-volume African American Education Data Book series and Two Decades of Progress — the most comprehensive reference books ever produced about the educational status and condition of African Americans in the United States. From 1978-1984 he worked as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission where his work included academic program review, and college and university performance funding. 

Nettles is a former Trustee of the College Board on which he served on the Executive Committee, and a former member of the National Assessment Governing Board where he served as Vice Chairman.

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Rose Payán

Rose Payán is a Policy Researcher within the ETS Policy Research & Evaluation Center. Her work focuses on domestic English-language learner assessment and instruction and on Latino education. In her long career at ETS, Payán has worked as a researcher on Hispanic higher education projects and as a government relations manager in California, where she monitored and analyzed legislation and policy affecting education throughout the western region. Payán worked with state teacher licensing commissions in the western United States in her work with ETS’s Praxis® teacher licensing program.

Before coming to ETS, Payán was a speech and language therapist, a school district Bilingual Program Director and Multicultural Coordinator, and a bilingual kindergarten teacher. Payán received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in curriculum and instruction and bilingual special education studying under Leonard Baca. She received an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School and a B.S. in speech and language pathology from the University of Texas at El Paso.

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Margarita Perera Pinkos

Margarita Perera Pinkos joined the Department of Education as a Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary in 2006. She currently holds the position of Assistant Deputy Secretary and Director of the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). In this position, she advises Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on all matters related to Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act, limited English proficient (LEP) and language minority students.

She is also responsible for administering Title VII of the Improving America's Schools Act, which supports high-quality instructional programs for linguistically and culturally diverse students. Her office supports quality foreign language programs for elementary, secondary and postsecondary school students and high-quality professional development programs for language teachers in these fields.

From 1999 to 2006, Pinkos served as Executive Director of the Palm Beach County School District’s Multicultural Education Department. In this position, she managed a $90 million budget that included Federal Title I, Title III and Migrant funding, directly supervised 150 employees and monitored more than 1,500 school-based, full-time employees, including paraprofessionals and administrators. 

Pinkos was born in Cuba and her family emigrated to the United States when was 16.

She earned an associate degree in arts at the Palm Beach Community College. She completed her undergraduate studies in Zoology and has a master’s degree in education both from Florida Atlantic University. She continued to teach education classes as an adjunct faculty member for Florida Atlantic University, while finishing her doctorate in educational leadership there in 2002.

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Mary J. Pitoniak

Mary J. Pitoniak is a Lead Program Administrator in ETS’s Research and Development Division.

In this role, Pitoniak manages research agendas related to operational National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) work, special study requests and conducts her own research. She also directs the activities of the NAEP Technical Advisory Committee.

Pitoniak’s research interests include testing accommodations for students with disabilities and English-language learners, standard setting and computer-based testing. She has analyzed NAEP data for students with disabilities and English-language learners. She has also conducted research on differential item functioning for students with disabilities and English-language learners on a statewide assessment.

She published a comprehensive review article on testing accommodations in the Review of Educational Research, and co-authored the standard setting chapter in the 4th edition of Educational Measurement and the chapter on designing computerized adaptive tests in the Handbook of Test Development.

Pitoniak has served on the Technical Advisory Committee on Standard Setting for NAEP, and co-conducted a workshop on standard setting at the annual meetings of the National Council on Measurement in Education in 2005, 2006 and 2007. She also serves on the American Psychological Association’s Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education. She has also advised education officials in Chile and Malaysia on standard setting issues, and co-conducted an audit of college entrance examinations in Azerbaijan.

Before joining ETS, Pitoniak worked at a licensing and certification testing company for 15 years. She earned a B.A. in psychology, summa cum laude from Smith College and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in psychometric methods and educational psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Delia Pompa

Delia Pompa is Vice President for Education at the National Council of La Raza, where she oversees programs ranging from early childhood education and pre-kindergarten to early college high schools and charter schools. Her work on public school reform has been shaped by more than 30 years of experience leading local, state and federal agencies and national and international organizations. In particular, Pompa’s work focuses on helping academic institutions understand and respond to the needs of underserved children and their teachers. As former Director of the Achievement Alliance, Pompa worked with a coalition of organizations to provide accurate, nonpartisan information about student achievement in the context of the No Child Left Behind legislation. She is the former Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs in the U.S. Department of Education and the former Executive Director of the National Association for Bilingual Education.

Pompa began her career as a kindergarten teacher in San Antonio. She went on to serve as a district administrator in Houston and as Assistant Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency. She is the former Director of Education, Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and Youth Development for the Children’s Defense Fund. Pompa serves on a variety of national boards and committees for a wide range of institutions addressing the educational needs of children. She has represented the needs of Hispanic children in venues ranging from Chris Matthew’s Hardball and testimony before Congress to keynotes at a variety of national conferences.

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Charlene Rivera

Charlene Rivera is a Research Professor and Executive Director of the George Washington University Center for Equity and Excellence in Education. Founded in 1991, the Center’s mission is focused on promoting high student achievement through research, evaluation, technical assistance and professional development. The portfolio of work carried out by GW-CEEE includes policy research in areas such as the assessment of English-language learners, technical assistance in education reform to state departments of education, districts and schools and program evaluations for a variety of clients. In addition to directing GW-CEEE, Rivera serves as the Principal Investigator and Director of several technical assistance, policy and evaluation studies. She has published extensively and recently contributed to a volume published by Erlbaum entitled State Assessment Policy and Practice for English Learners: A National Perspective.

A former teacher for the Boston Public Schools, Rivera is recognized for her work in spearheading the Promoting Excellence series, a project that generated guiding principles and tools for policy makers, educators and community members to help English-language learners reach high academic standards. Active in the educational research community, Rivera has made hundreds of presentations and published extensively on issues related to the inclusion of English-language learners in national and state assessment programs. She holds a doctoral degree in education from Boston University.

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Claire E. Sylvan

Claire E. Sylvan is the founding Executive Director of Internationals Network for Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that has more than doubled the number of cutting-edge International High Schools.

Since founding the organization in 2004, she has addressed the challenge of growing and sustaining a vibrant network of innovative public schools by strengthening support for affiliated schools to ensure their continued success in providing recent immigrant English-language learners with a high-quality education.

Sylvan taught English as a second language to adults and organized community support for minority language rights in education before beginning a 26-year career in the New York City public schools. Her career included 13 years at the first International High School at LaGuardia Community College. She received an Ed.D. from the Teachers College at Columbia University. She is fluent and literate in Spanish and English.

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Martha L. Thurlow

Martha L. Thurlow is Director of the National Center on Educational Outcomes at the University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities at the University of Minnesota. In this position, she addresses the implications of contemporary U.S. policy and practice for students with disabilities and English-language learners, including national and statewide assessment policies and practices, standards-setting efforts and graduation requirements.

During the past decade, Thurlow has been the principal investigator on 15 federal or state projects that have focused on the participation of students with special needs in large-scale assessments. These investigations have placed particular emphasis on how to obtain valid, reliable and comparable measures of the knowledge and skills of these students while ensuring that the assessments truly measure their knowledge and skills rather than their disabilities or language limitations. Studies have covered a range of topics, including participation decision making, accommodations, computer-based testing, graduation exams and alternate assessments.

Thurlow has published extensively on all of these topics and is co-author of several books, including Improving Test Performance of Students with Disabilities (2005); Testing Students with Disabilities (2002); Alternate Assessments for Students with Disabilities (2001); and Critical Issues in Special Education (2000).

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Guadalupe Valdés

Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University and holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Working in the area of applied linguistics, much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities.

Valdés specializes in language pedagogy and applied linguistics and works extensively with schools and organizations to serve the needs of young English-language learners. Her research has focused on Latino students in elementary, middle school, high school and college leading to five books and more than 70 articles.

Her books include Con Respeto: Bridging the Distance Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools; Learning and not Learning English, Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background; Developing Minority Language Resources: The Case of Spanish in California: and, Bilingualism and Testing: A Special Case of Bias.

Among her recent articles on English-language learners are Enhancing the Development of Students' Language(s) in Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do and Between Support and Marginalisation: The Development of Academic Language in Linguistic Minority Children in the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education.

Since the 1970s, Valdés has carried out extensive work on maintaining and preserving heritage languages among minority populations. Much of this has focused on the teaching of Spanish to college and university Hispanophone students in this country. Her publications in this area include an edited volume of articles, Teaching Spanish to the Hispanic Bilingual: Issues, Aims and Methods and numerous articles.

Her work in the last several years in this area produced a new book, The Development of Minority Language Resources; Case of Spanish in California, with Joshua Fishman, Rebecca Chavez and William Perez as well as a number of articles.

Valdés is also the co-author of a best-selling Spanish language textbook, Español Escrito that focuses on the teaching of Spanish to Hispanic bilinguals and is now in its sixth edition.

For the past three years, Valdés has been involved in the design and implementation of Ravenswood English, a model volunteer-preparation program that will enable college students and adult volunteers to assist K-3 elementary school students in developing oral English-language proficiencies in "linguistically isolated" schools largely populated by other Spanish-speaking students.

Valdés is also closely involved with both charter schools currently run by Stanford University at the K-8 and 9-12 levels. She has worked closely with school personnel in designing optimal solutions for educating English-language learners.

An active member of a number of professional associations, she has served on the Committee on the Role and Status of Women of the Modern Language Association, the American Educational Research Association and the Task Force on National Standards in Foreign Language Education. She serves on the editorial boards of Review of Educational Research, Bilingual Review, Written Communication, Modern Language Journal, and Hispanic Journal of the Behavioral Sciences. In May 2000, Valdés received an honorary doctorate from the University of Arizona for her work on the use of Spanish in the United States.

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John W. Young

As a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Validity Research at ETS, John W. Young co-directs the research initiative on assessments and products for English-language learners.

Prior to returning to ETS in 2006, he served for 17 years as a faculty member in the Educational Statistics, Measurement, and Evaluation program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Young earned a doctorate in educational measurement from Stanford University in 1989. In 1999, he received the Early Career Contribution Award from the American Educational Research Association's Committee on Scholars of Color in Education for his research on academic achievement and minority students.

Young has published in the following academic journals: Applied Measurement in Education; Assessment in Education, College & University; Journal of College Admission; Journal of Educational Measurement; Research in Higher Education; and Review of Educational Research.

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Contact

For more information on the 2008 English-Language Learners symposium, please contact Laura Plemenik:

• Phone: 1-609-734-5641 during normal business hours (ET).
• E-mail: bklish@ets.org