DC’s English Language Learners out-scoring Others on 4th Grade NAEP

You may e surprised to discover that since 2007, English-language learners, or ELLs, have been doing better than their counterparts in other big cities or in the nation as a whole.

A normal definition of English-language learners is students whose first language is not English; most are recent immigrants, and had either no English ability whatsoever when they enrolled in their school, or only very limited English ability. There are other terms: ESL (English as a second language), ESOL (not sure what the “O” is for”, LEP, NEP, and so on.

Here is the graph. You may notice that some of the lines are fuzzy because I went over them with an airbrush in MSPaint. That’s on purpose. I was trying to show the standard deviation, that is, the range of possible real scores that NAEP statisticians say that the real score falls between.

Unfortunately, since Michelle Rhee took over, it appears that our 4th-grade ELLs aren’t doing as well as they did in 2007.