Florida's English Language Learners Face Tough Literacy Challenges

Summary

---

"The ELL population is growing rapidly across the country, and these are students at serious risk of dropping out of high school," says Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. "They require support and resources that reflect their language challenges, their diversity, and the fact that they are having to work even harder than native English speakers to achieve a high school diploma. They have unique challenges that call for special solutions. We know how to help them - now we have to do it."

Three times more ELLs fail to graduate from high school - 31 percent - than students who speak English at home. Only 4 percent of eighth-grade ELLs and 20 percent of students classified as "formerly ELL," scored at the proficient or advanced levels on the reading portion of the 2005 National Assessment for Educational Progress. And ELL students score poorly on standard measures of academic performance, such as high school exit exams.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Florida's English Language Learners Face Tough Literacy Challenges

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A new report released recently by the Alliance for Excellent Education finds that Florida's growing English language learner (ELL) populations, which have increased 94.6 percent between 1995-2005,...

See the full content of this document

---