WA schools want more students to be bilingual; is that goal possible?

To better serve Indigenous students, Durango School District 9-R has created an advisory council for Native American parents, designated specific staff to help support Native students, and developed an Indigenous language course where they can reconnect to their culture by learning Diné Bizaad. Students report that the course is more engaging than learning about Navajo history via a textbook, and the district has shown progress in closing opportunity gaps for Indigenous students, with all of its Indigenous seniors graduating last year.

Los Angeles Community Colleges are now offering subject-matter courses taught in students’ native languages, including Spanish, Russian, and Korean. The tuition-free vocational classes allow students to earn certificates in a trade or work toward a GED, all while learning in the language they’re most comfortable speaking.

At Su Casa Preschool in Memphis students are taught the usual curriculum plus second language development. The program focuses on helping Spanish-speaking immigrant children access quality education.

A school district in New Mexico is finding success with a dual language education program. A regular school day for an elementary school student in a Gadsen school district school might entail reviewing their math or history in Spanish or English, depending on the assigned language that week. “Our bilingual programs are not just for English learners, they’re for all of our students," Mayra Valtierrez, the director of language and culture at the New Mexico Public Education Department, said. "That’s something that’s unique to our state."

In California, half of school-aged children are the children of immigrants. Among many other initiatives in the city, a community-wide training project in Fresno aims to improve how adults in the city work with students of immigrant families. One of the challenges of the renewed push for a bilingual approach - finding sufficient bilingual teachers after years of the state's English-only education policies.

Gus the Bus, Magic Bus, El Busesito, and other traveling classrooms are working to fill the persistent preschool gap in Colorado's childcare deserts. Most days the mobile preschools park near apartment complexes or mobile home parks and offer instruction to neighborhood children. In the coming years, providers hope to be able to use the same quality ratings as stationary schools and expand from rural areas into Denver and other urban centers throughout the state.

The Migrant Education Program, which offers educational and social services to migrant worker families in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, is growing in popularity among the valley’s migrant worker population, and has recently begun to focus on getting migrant students geared up for college .

Boston professors visit countries and homes of foreign students to better understand their culture and gain insights about how to better teach them. The goal is to reach across cultural divides to help a big part of the student population — emigres from faraway lands — that is plagued with low standardized test scores and high dropout rates. Accompanying photojournalism: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/09/12/seeking-cultural-connections/L3mIQAQM3v9YT9A2K4JliL/story.html

Students who learn English as a second language often struggle in school, but at International High, diversity is the model. Out of its 350 students, 40 countries are represented. Founded in 2005, the high school curriculum was modeled for ELL students who were struggling in traditional classrooms. It seems their strategy is working, their graduation rate was 61 percent for ELL learners, twice the rate than the rest of New York.

The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools, and is now producing some of the highest graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and average test scores in public schools in the nation.