The Internationals Network for Public Schools: Educating Our Immigrant English Language Learners Well

The education of English learners (ELs) is a pivotal issue in education in the United States. As many of our nation’s schools serve ever-increasing numbers of ELs,  we must continue to find ways to support these students and their learning. With this goal in mind, education leaders must question whether a better education model exists for English learners in the United States.

The Internationals Network for Public Schools (the Network) now supports 21 schools and 6 academies in seven states and Washington, DC. These schools and academies are open only to immigrants who have lived in the United States for less than four years and score in the lowest brackets of their state’s English exam. The Network serves students from more than 90 countries who speak more than 55 different languages.

This model greatly increases the number of recent immigrant ELs who stay in high school, graduate, and attend and complete college. These schools successfully teach and assess ELs as well as train mainstream teachers—both individually and as a collective—to teach ELs and to support other schools with EL populations. What is the secret to this success? How do they organize instruction, develop the curriculum, support language learning, and develop teachers? How do they create bridges for recent immigrants to their new society and to their futures? And how have the schools been able to replicate success from one school to the next?

This study seeks to answer these questions. It describes how the Network has achieved such marked success with immigrant youth entering the United States in their high school years. Authors discuss the curriculum, classroom instruction, assessment, professional learning, and governance practices that contribute to this success, and they take a close look at several classrooms to provide a glimpse of how teachers and students teach and learn together. Documenting the Network’s approach offers insights into what characteristics enable schools to increase recent immigrant ELs’ achievement and close the achievement gap between ELs and native English speakers.

Posted with permission, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.