[lg policy] Illinois Board of Ed. votes to require public preschools to provide transitional bilingual education

[Harold Schiffman]

Illinois Board of Ed. Sets the Record Straight
By Mary Ann Zehr on June 28, 2010 10:38 AM | 1 Comment

A comment from a reader prompted me to double-check with the Illinois
state board of education whether I'd gotten the news right in Friday's
blog post that the Illinois state board of education voted to require
public preschools to provide transitional bilingual education. I was
right about that, according to Matthew Vanover, a spokesman for the
state board of education.

But Vanover did have a few corrections to my blog post.

He said that the new rules adopted by the board do not call for the
state superintendent to identify the screening mechanism for preschool
students. He wrote in an e-mail message: "In fact, we specifically
sought to avoid the state identifying a screener for this group of
students since the research is not clear on any particular screening
procedures being better than others for such a population. School
districts will have the latitude to select their own screening
procedures, as long as they meet the qualifications set forth in the
definition of 'screening procedures.' "

Second, Vanover said I chose the wrong verb to describe the action
that the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules will take on the
rules. I had said the joint committee would need to "approve" them to
go into effect. Vanover explained that the joint committee can either
issue an objection to the rules or not object. If the committee
doesn't object, the state board of education will file the rules with
the Illinois secretary of state and they go into effect.

Lastly, Vanover said that my post should have pointed out that the
Illinois state legislature made a change in state law, effective Jan.
1, 2009, that extended the category of "children of
limited-English-speaking ability," or ELLs, in regular public schools
to include 3- and 4-year-olds. That's what prompted the state board of
education to create rules that clarified how that change in the law
should be implemented.

If you'd like to know more about the details of the new rules in
Illinois, join the free Web chat that EdWeek is hosting tomorrow
afternoon, June 29, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern time, about the
education of preschoolers who speak a language other than English at
home. The chat will feature two guests from Illinois: Barbara Bowman,
the chief early childhood education officer for Chicago Public Schools
and a founder of the Erikson Institute, and Reyna P. Hernandez, the
research and policy associate for the Chicago-based Latino Policy
Forum. If you can't participate in the chat live, you can read a
transcript of it afterward at the same link that I've posted above.

Earlier, I had said that one of the guests would be Margo Gottlieb,
the lead developer for the World-Class Instructional Design and
Assessment Consortium, housed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Gottlieb had to bow out. Thus, Hernandez will be the second guest for
the chat.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2010/06/illinois_board_ed_provides_a_f.html
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