Conor Williams

You wouldn’t know it from cable news, the newspapers, or most of the rest of the national media outlets, but the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is getting very, very close to replacing No Child Left Behind. The new bill reflects conservative reticence about a strong federal role in education: it gives states considerable flexibility […]

Education policy is fertile turf for jargon. And that poses a real problem for efforts to improve policies for underserved kids—because it can be hard to cut through all the terminological jumbles to explain to non-educators what those policies actually do. Take “reclassification policy,” for instance. “Reclassification” sounds like the result of a particularly good […]

Traditionally, educating dual language learners (DLLs) has largely been the purview of English as a Second language (ESL) and/or bilingual teachers. But as the population of DLLs grows, and many schools focus on inclusion models, all educators need to be prepared to instruct students who are in the process of acquiring English. In fact, there […]

As we’ve been showing in our DLL Reader blog series, researchers have come to consensus on a variety of issues related to dual language learners (DLLs). We know, for instance, that well-implemented instructional models that support DLLs in their native languages are probably the best model for supporting these students’ linguistic and academic development. We […]

I’ve written before about how languages serve not just as communication tools, but as profound sources of unique meaning through which individuals build and maintain their identities. It’s no accident that “communication” and “community” have etymological roots in common (along with the word “common,” for that matter). To communicate in a common tongue is to […]

Remember immigration? Or, rather, remember the politics of immigration reform? How it was an issue whose political time had finally arrived? The Republicans were supposedly reeling from their Romney-fueled realization that they needed to be more than obstructionists on immigration reform if they were ever to attract new, non-white voters under the age of 65. […]

There’s been a lot of interest in the past few years in how public investments in high-quality pre-K can serve—or not serve—young dual language learners (DLLs) and children of immigrants. We’ve done some writing and thinking about this at the DLL National Work Group (here, here, here, and here, to flag just a few posts). […]

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously posited that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. That is, by the time you go back for the second dip, the water you touched the first time is long downstream. This makes it challenging to get clear understanding of the river: is it full of […]

During the 1980s and 1990s, I lived in a corner of Michigan that was particularly buffeted by the pressures of globalization. Our area’s auto plant closed and the local pharmaceutical company gradually left town through a series of buyouts and corporate mergers. Our town was nothing unique in this regard—just another Rust Belt community at […]

Republicans in the House of Representatives spent a chunk of the end of last week trying to pass the Student Success Act, their party’s rewrite of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal government’s core PreK–12 education law. But after hours of debate and a pile of amendments, well, things didn’t quite come together. At […]