"Thank you for correcting my English, which stinks"

The Nashville English First website was down for a while today (or at least I couldn't access it), and it looks like the wait has paid off as they've updated it with their special patriotic July 4th edition (okay, it looks exactly the same as the pre-patriotic July 4th edition).

Merry Independence Day, English speakers everywhere, even though English is said to unite us even more than independence!

And now for your English language learner fact of the day, which is intended to correct popular misconceptions about ELLs:

A Pew Hispanic Center analysis of public school data from key states finds that English language learners (ELL) students tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students.

These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics associated generally with poor standardized test performance--such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments and high levels of students living in or near poverty.

When ELL students are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gap in test score results is considerably narrower, according to the analysis of newly available standardized testing data for public schools in the five states with the largest numbers of ELL students.

UPDATE: More positive PR for and scant investigative reporting of Eric Crafton at the Nashville City Paper. They simply relay what he feeds them.  He's playing them like a cheap Strativarius knock-off.  They're so mastered.