Talkin' shop

On Saturday, I spoke to English teachers at a seminar organized by the Association of Teachers of English in Finland and the U.S. Embassy. I presented an overview of policies and programs for English language learners, along with demographics, legal precedents, and some basics of No Child Left Behind. It's not hard to baffle Finnish teachers when explaining some of the more confounding aspects of NCLB, which American teachers take for granted after ten years working under the law. I clearly remember sitting in some of my first staff meetings as a new teacher in 2001 as NCLB terms like "sanctions" and "safe harbor" were being used to explain our mission as educators. I thought, am I fighting in some kind of war?

In the ensuing ten years my schools have avoided sanctions, but we haven't avoided spending precious time and energy on scheduling, preparing for, and of course administering standardized tests to be in compliance with NCLB. I'm not sure how much we got out of it, to be honest. But I digress.

Acquiring my ESOL endorsement and preparing for three Title III audits have taught me a lot about policies and practices for English language learners. In many regards, we are clearly better positioned than FSL programs are here in Finland: we have systematic ways of identifying and monitoring ELLs in Oregon. More and more attention is being placed on appropriate instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Finnish schools fumble somewhat with their non-native Finnish speakers, but they are aware that their schools and classroom are seeing more and more students who need language support.

When I talk about American education in Finland, I remind myself and my colleagues that we are really talking about 50 different education systems. You might compare Maryland, for example, with Finland, as they have about the same size populations. How can you have 50 different education systems in one country? the Finns wonder...How can 50 systems look so different and still fall under the same federal guidelines? How can bilingual education be illegal in some states and curriculum look so different from Oregon to Connecticut to Texas? We had some good discussions about their observations, and I am reminded that there is more than one way to think about our work, and we can only grow from engaging with each other and our different perspectives and experiences.

Here are some of the data that I presented to the English teachers which prompted our discussion:


Some interesting, semi-recent data about who, where, and when




Oregon's math scores from grade 3+, English language learners compared to all students




The same, for reading




Oregon drop out rates