Thursday, April 26, 2007
Educational Alternatives
The best practice that I can see for closing the achievement gap would have to be increasing funding for economically disadvantaged or limited English proficiency students. I chose this practice mainly because if you can not read what you are looking at, how can you even begin to learn. I have wintessed this first hand at my job as a para at a local high school. I help a lot of hispanic students take tests and the level of reading they have is very poor a lot of the time. I have to read a lot of the test questions to these students because they have not learned to read english very well. We only have one ESL teacher at our high school, which is kind of sad considering that 1/3 of Vally High School is hispanic. These students come from low-income homes and their parents most likely know very little English as well. By increasing the funding for new and inproved ESL-type programs, we could start to close this literacy gap.
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1 comment:
So very true. It's the inability to read that keeps so many students from learning, whether they are ELL students or students who have just fallen through the cracks. Adolescent Literacy is a new movement we are seeing in secondary education. In fact the Colorado Department of Education is sponsoring a new program to support the development of Adolescent Literacy reading programs. So many kids get to high school and they haven't developed the fluency to make sense of the words they are reading.
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