In Canadian schools, immigrants catch up to native English speakers within three years, reports Education Week correspondent Kavitha Cardoza in a video that aired on PBS NewsHour.

Thirty percent of Canadian students are immigrants or the children of immigrants, compared to 23 percent of U.S. schoolchildren, writes Cardoza.

Yet Canada has one of the highest performing education systems in the world as ranked by the Program for International Assessment, or PISA, test that 15-year-olds from more than 70 countries take. The United States’ rankings, by contrast, are mediocre.

Part of Canada’s success is connected to its strong track record on educating immigrants. Within three years of arriving in Canada’s public schools, PISA tests show that children of new migrants do as well as native-born children.

U.S. educators believe it takes four to seven years — some say up to 10 years — for an English Learner to do as well as native speakers.

Canada admits more immigrants based on education, English fluency and job skills rather than focusing on family reunification, notes Cardoza. In addition, schools receive more funding to educate English learners.

Similar to what happens in American schools, English-learners in Canada are assessed when they enter school. Most can read and write in their home language but have limited English skills. They might be placed in regular classes with additional one-on-one language instruction. But a growing number of children arriving in Canada have had interrupted schooling and are not at grade level in their home language either. Since 2014, the province of Ontario has accepted more than 10,000 refugees from Syria, half of them children.

. . . In Toronto, they are in a special program called the Literacy Enrichment Academic Program, or LEAP. Students are expected to make two academic years of progress each year so they can catch up with their English-speaking peers quickly and be in mainstream classes full time within three years.

LEAP students are taught in English, with vocabulary help and visual explanations, in the morning. In the afternoon, they join mainstream classes with native English speakers.

Santa Clara County (California) schools should emulate Canada, which teaches grade-level academic content while immigrants “intensively learn their new language,” writes Bill Conrad in San Jose Inside. Here, schools prolong “language learning from six to eight years using the soft rationale of preserving native language and culture.”

Tracy Dell’Angela remembers when affluent suburban schools had to “worry about whether all their students made the grade — not just some of them, not just the White ones and the middle-class ones.”

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools had to report the performance of vulnerable subgroups, such as students with disabilities, English-language learners and low-income kids. “If the vulnerable students were failing, then the whole school was considered failing,” she writes on Education Post.

NCLB had many faults, writes Dell’Angela. In addition to narrowing the curriculum, “it encouraged states to set their passing standards low so that big numbers of students could pass without really learning what they needed for high school, college and beyond.”

Furthermore, remedies such as tutoring and transfer to better schools didn’t work. Neither did restructuring of chronically low-performing schools.

But the law shined a very bright light on how all students were progressing academically—not just in urban districts where test-based accountability took hold long before NCLB, but also in suburban and rural districts that never had to report their progress to parents or the taxpaying public.

That light has dimmed, she concludes.

Oregon’s Liberty High School must respect a student’s free-speech rights to wear a “Donald J. Trump Border Wall Construction Co.” T-shirt, reports Maxine Bernstein on Oregon Live.

“A federal judge Tuesday granted a temporary restraining order, barring Hillsboro’s Liberty High School from preventing senior Addison Barnes from wearing his pro-border wall T-shirt to school for the rest of this school year, writes Bernstein.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman said the district didn’t show the shirt could “substantially disrupt” the school.

School officials had argued the shirt would contribute to a “hostile learning environment” at a school where a third of students are Latino.

In a post on the “right” not to be offended, my guest-blogger Darren Miller pointed out that the ACLU defended Barnes’ right to wear the shirt to express his political beliefs. ACLU Oregon Legal Director Mat dos Santos told KGW-TV. “This shirt is mean spirited, but it isn’t a ‘disturbance’ under First Amendment case law.”

Silicon Valley imports technical talent from around the country and around the world, but the kids who grow up in the Valley’s working-class neighborhoods, “the children of groundskeepers, janitors, cooks and construction workers,” rarely get a shot at high-paying, high-tech jobs,” I write on Mind/Shift. (The story also is on the Hechinger Report.)

Preparing working-class students to take advanced math and science classes isn’t enough. I write about programs that expose first-generation-to-college students — mostly from Latino immigrant families — to high-tech opportunities.

“Half our kids don’t know what’s out there or what it means to be an engineer,” said Chris Funk, superintendent of the East Side Union High School District, which serves San Jose’s majority Latino and Vietnamese immigrant neighborhoods. “They drive past the tech buildings, but they don’t know what’s going on inside.”

East Side, other districts and charter schools are working with the nonprofit Genesys Works to place 12th-graders in nine-month internships at high-tech and other companies. During the summer before senior year, Genesys Works trains them in technical and “soft skills.” Once school starts, students spend their mornings in class and their afternoons at work, averaging 20 hours a week at minimum wage or above. Nearly all enroll in college.

At San Jose’s Downtown College Prep Alum Rock High, which primarily enrolls students from Mexican immigrant families, 55 percent of students now take a computer science or engineering course.

Kateryn Raymundo, who interned at SalesForce, a cloud-computing company, as a 12th-grader, is finishing a marketing degree at San Francisco state while working full-time as a data analyst at SalesForce. Photo: Pedro Raymundo

This year, teams of students created an experiment that was run on the International Space Station via Quest for Space, designed a “tiny house” for the homeless, competed in robotics, rocketry and engineering competitions and worked with students in China to design an electricity-free air-cooling and filtering system, which they presented at a UNESCO conference. In a BUILD entrepreneurship class, students develop product ideas and pitch them to Silicon Valley professionals.

Once they try engineering, “our students totally get it,” says Katie Zazueta, community engagement director for Downtown College Prep, which runs two high schools and two middle schools. As immigrants, “they come from a culture of tinkering, building, making things work.”

Some students have worked in research labs at Stanford, Berkeley and other universities over the summer. The charter network is trying to get students into a variety of summer internships and enrichment programs. For young people who’ve grown up in heavily Latino neighborhoods and gone to heavily Latino schools, “it’s beneficial to realize that not everybody looks like them and to have that experience before they go to college,” says Kelly Neal, DCP’s partnership manager.

I also got to interview Patricia Villegas, a graduate of DCP’s first class, who recruits contract workers for Google. I met her when she was a bubbly sophomore on the Mock Trial and girls’ basketball team. She’s in my book, Our School. Now she’s a confident, articulate adult who’s found her calling. “I get people jobs,” she said. “Everybody needs a job.”

It was wonderful to meet so many smart, engaged young people. Fernando Lopez, a 2018 graduate, spent last summer working at a civil engineering company, building a network of contacts. A leader of the “tiny house” team, he plans to earn a civil engineering degree, with a credential in Building Information Modeling,  at University of California Irvine.

“In Engineering Design and Development, we think of a problem and find a solution,” he told me. “Working in construction with my dad, I saw a lot of people have back problems because they have to work in awkward positions.” He redesigned a tool called an angle grinder extension to prevent back injuries. His father will try it and give him feedback.

I asked if he would try to manufacture the tool, if it works. “I’m thinking of getting a patent,” said Fernando. It’s Silicon Valley.

Destini Williams and Amrose Bhujel test vehicles they’ve made from trash at Woodward Park Middle School in Columbus, Ohio. Photo: Maddie McGarvey/Education Week

Middle-schoolers in Ohio are learning math, science and programming — and competing in contests such as MakerMinded to expose them to careers in advanced manufacturing reports Ed Week‘s Benjamin Herold.

Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow, or LIFT, and partners across the Midwest are developing learning activities and competitions.

At Woodward Park Middle School in Columbus, eighth-graders build machines, seventh-graders code apps and sixth-graders take part in a “trash slider challenge,” writes Herold. “The goal is to use recycled materials to build a vehicle that can transport a two-liter bottle of fluid down a ramp without spilling anything.”

The school uses the Project Lead the Way curriculum, which was developed by a national non-profit to interest students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Students are encouraged to identify a community problem and design a solution.

I wrote about a San Jose high school that uses PLTW in a story on preparing first-generation, college-bound students for high-tech careers. (Go, read it and leave a comment, please.)

Carlos Huerta, a Downtown College Prep Alum Rock High engineering student, works on a robot to compete in the Silicon Valley Tech Challenge. Photo: Joanne Jacobs

This year, Downtown College Prep Alum Rock High students created an experiment that was run on the International Space Station via Quest for Space, designed a “tiny house” for the homeless, competed in robotics, rocketry and engineering competitions and worked with students in China to design an electricity-free air-cooling and filtering system, which they presented at a UNESCO conference. In a BUILD entrepreneurship class, students develop product ideas and pitch them to Silicon Valley professionals.

Most students come from Mexican immigrant families. Once they try engineering, “our students totally get it,” says Katie Zazueta, community engagement director for Downtown College Prep, which runs two high schools and two middle schools. As immigrants, “they come from a culture of tinkering, building, making things work.”

Fernando Lopez, a 2018 graduate, spent last summer working at a civil engineering company, building a network of contacts. A leader of the “tiny house” team, he plans to earn a civil engineering degree, with a credential in Building Information Modeling,  at University of California Irvine.

“Working in construction with my dad, I saw a lot of people have back problems because they have to work in awkward positions.” He redesigned a tool called an angle grinder extension to prevent back injuries. His father will try it and give him feedback.

I asked if he would try to manufacture the tool, if it works. “I’m thinking of getting a patent,” said Fernando. It’s Silicon Valley.

Gang graffiti on a fence in suburban Long Island, where police blame MS-13 for 30 murders in the last two years. Photo: Sarah Garland/Hechinger Report

MS-13 gang members have turned a Maryland middle school into a “ticking time bomb,” reports Michael E. Miller in the Washington Post.

Gang-related fights are now a near-daily occurrence at Wirt, where a small group of suspected MS-13 members at the overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County throw gang signs, sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students. Most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.

Although administrators deny Wirt has a gang problem, the situation inside the aging, overcrowded building has left some teachers so afraid that they refuse to be alone with their students. Many said they had repeatedly reported incidents involving suspected gang members to administrators, only to be ignored — claims supported by documents obtained by The Washington Post.

“Teachers feel threatened but aren’t backed up. Students feel threatened but aren’t protected,” one educator said. “The school is a ticking time bomb.”

MS-13, founded in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants, “has been linked to a string of grisly killings throughout the country,” reports Miller. “The gang’s growth has been fueled by a wave of 200,000 teens who traveled to the United States alone to escape poverty and gang violence in Central America.”

Most stay out of trouble. “A small percentage” are recruited into MS-13.

At the start of the year, administrators ignored complaints about students shouting obscenities, throwing things in class and bullying and sexually harassing classmates, an educator told Miller. Then “the behavior spread to other students.”

Credit: JooHee Yoon/New York Times

The son of tiger parents, lawyer Ryan Park wants to raise his daughters to be “happy, confident, and kind,” he writes in the New York Times. They don’t have to be academic superstars.

His parents pushed him to achieve — or else. After graduating from Harvard Law, he clerked for two U.S. Supreme Court justices. His wife, also Asian-American, is a physician.

. . .  like many second-generation immigrant overachievers, I’ve spent decades struggling with the paradox of my upbringing. Were the same childhood experiences that long evoked my resentment also responsible for my academic and professional achievements? And if so, was the trade-off between happiness and success worth it?

Immigrants’ children tend to be driven to succeed, writes Park. But that zeal fades by the third generation.

When he became a parent, he decided that his children “will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.”

Most second-generation Asian-Americans parents aren’t tiger parents, writes Park. “Rather, studies show that we’re largely abandoning traditional Asian parenting styles in favor of a modern, Western approach focused on developing open and warm relationships with our children.”

That may mean “fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons” in the next generation, he concedes.

Immigrant adults are taking summer jobs once done by U.S. teenagers, writes Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner.

“Immigrants — legal and illegal — are crowding out U.S.-born teenagers in the labor market,” according to  Center of Immigration Studies report by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler.

Why did the colonists fight the British? Most Americans don’t know, according to a new survey.

When was the U.S. Constitution ratified? Which countries did the U.S. fight in World War II? Asked multiple-choice questions from the U.S. Citizenship Test, only 36 percent of Americans passed, according to a national survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Sixty percent is a passing score.

While 74 percent of those 65 and over passed, that fell to 19 percent for those under 45.

The survey also found that:

• • Seventy-two percent of respondents either incorrectly identified or were unsure of which states were part of the 13 original states;
  • Only 24 percent could correctly identify one thing Benjamin Franklin was famous for, with 37 percent believing he invented the lightbulb;
  • Only 24 percent knew the correct answer as to why the colonists fought the British.

Most knew the cause of the Cold War. Only 2 percent said “climate change.” And I’d bet most were kidding.

Some the questions are trivial. Does it matter if Americans know how many justices serve on the U.S. Supreme Court? But immigrants seeking naturalization manage to pass the exam.

What should every American know? Aspen’s Citizenship and American Identity program is asking. The video features four immigrants talking about America.

Measuring high school success by the four-year graduation rate is unfair to schools with high-need students, argues Julie Kessler on the Learning Policy Institute blog. Give students five years to earn a diploma, she writes.

Welcome signs are posted inside the main doors of San Francisco International High School in 2017. Photo: Jessica Christian/SF Examiner

For seven years, Kessler was principal of San Francisco International High School, which serves newly arrived immigrants. Many of her students had missed years of school, spoke little English, worked to support their families and cared for younger siblings.

With “credit recovery, a modified schedule, and extended learning supports,” students can be persuaded to stay for a fifth year to graduate, writes Kessler. If only four-year graduates count, the school will be penalized for giving students more time to truly earn a diploma.

Some urban charter schools have low four-year graduation rates because they give unprepared ninth graders five years to complete college-prep classes. Those students earn a more valuable diploma than they could complete in four years.

Faisal got a crooked pine tree from the Yemeni guy at the tree lot, but couldn’t bring it home to his Muslim family. So he dragged it into the classroom of his English Language Development teacher, who blogs as Education Realist, and said he wanted to make it into a Christmas tree.

Without a child still at home, the teacher had stopped decorating a Christmas tree years ago. But there were lights and ornaments sitting unused in the garage.

Students “oohed and ahed over” the hand-blown glass and hand-made ornaments,” Ed Realist writes. Faisal selected his favorites from the collection. Classmates decorated the tree and kept it watered.

The school is “wildly diverse,” Ed Realist writes, but Christmas is celebrated openly. Students “sell mistletoe messages and Christmas wreaths through December.”

Four of my nine ELD students are either Muslim or Hindu, and they haven’t been here that long. I carefully explained “secular” as opposed to “religious”, reassuring them that the tree was in celebration of the former. The other half of the class is Catholic, either Guatemalan or Filipino, so were surprised to learn that not everyone celebrated Christmas as a religious event. My math students needed no clarification.

“I have treasured the shared cheer of my classroom tree,” Ed Realist writes. It’s a hit with students too.

I wonder if Julia Ioffe can possibly conceive of a Muslim Palestinian American  begging for a free tree, lugging it into his most familiar teacher’s room, simply because he wants to be a part of one of the best holidays ever created. Would she demand that he, too, see Christmas entirely in terms of Christ? Could she not see it as assimilation of the best sort, appreciation for what American culture has to offer?

When school ended for the year, the teacher took the tree with its strands of lights home for the holidays. “I’m looking at it now, shining brightly in the front window,” Ed Realist writes. “Maybe next year I’ll have two trees – one for school, one for home.”

Tracy Dell’Angela remembers when affluent suburban schools had to “worry about whether all their students made the grade — not just some of them, not just the White ones and the middle-class ones.”

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools had to report the performance of vulnerable subgroups, such as students with disabilities, English-language learners and low-income kids. “If the vulnerable students were failing, then the whole school was considered failing,” she writes on Education Post.

NCLB had many faults, writes Dell’Angela. In addition to narrowing the curriculum, “it encouraged states to set their passing standards low so that big numbers of students could pass without really learning what they needed for high school, college and beyond.”

Furthermore, remedies such as tutoring and transfer to better schools didn’t work. Neither did restructuring of chronically low-performing schools.

But the law shined a very bright light on how all students were progressing academically—not just in urban districts where test-based accountability took hold long before NCLB, but also in suburban and rural districts that never had to report their progress to parents or the taxpaying public.

That light has dimmed, she concludes.

Repeating third grade helps English Learners succeed in middle and high school, concludes a new study of 40,000 Florida students, reports Ed Week‘s Corey Mitchell.

Credit: Pixabay

Those who repeated 3rd grade learned English faster and took more advanced classes in middle and high school than similar students who moved on to 4th grade, concludes An Extra Year to Learn English?, which has been published as a working paper.

Florida requires third graders who fail a reading test to repeat the grade “with extra support, including extended blocks of daily reading instruction and summer school classes,” reports Mitchell. Those passed on to fourth grade don’t get extra support.

English Learners who scored just below the threshold to pass, and were retained, outperformed those who scored just above the passing line and were moved on.

Repeating third grade helped immigrants more than U.S.-born English Learners, notes Hechinger’s Jill Barshay. (Most English Learners in U.S. elementary schools are born in the U.S. to immigrant families.)

Those with higher third-grade math scores — an indicator that the kids were otherwise good learners — also benefited more from retention. Retention worked better for kids in wealthier elementary schools than schools with high poverty. In other words, retention may be a more potent solution for young kids whose families are relatively recent arrivals and haven’t endured multi-generational poverty in a low-income neighborhood.

. . . One theory for why repeating a grade works is that the human brain can only learn so many things at one time. And perhaps it is easiest for kids to focus on basic language acquisition before we start asking them to tackle the challenges of long division and metaphors in fourth and fifth grades.

“Making struggling students repeat third grade is an increasingly popular idea,” reports Barshay, but it remains controversial.  “One 2014 study found that kids who were held back when they were young were less likely to graduate from high school,” compared to similar students who were promoted.

Tracy Dell’Angela remembers when affluent suburban schools had to “worry about whether all their students made the grade — not just some of them, not just the White ones and the middle-class ones.”

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools had to report the performance of vulnerable subgroups, such as students with disabilities, English-language learners and low-income kids. “If the vulnerable students were failing, then the whole school was considered failing,” she writes on Education Post.

NCLB had many faults, writes Dell’Angela. In addition to narrowing the curriculum, “it encouraged states to set their passing standards low so that big numbers of students could pass without really learning what they needed for high school, college and beyond.”

Furthermore, remedies such as tutoring and transfer to better schools didn’t work. Neither did restructuring of chronically low-performing schools.

But the law shined a very bright light on how all students were progressing academically—not just in urban districts where test-based accountability took hold long before NCLB, but also in suburban and rural districts that never had to report their progress to parents or the taxpaying public.

That light has dimmed, she concludes.

In Canadian schools, immigrants catch up to native English speakers within three years, reports Education Week correspondent Kavitha Cardoza in a video that aired on PBS NewsHour.

Thirty percent of Canadian students are immigrants or the children of immigrants, compared to 23 percent of U.S. schoolchildren, writes Cardoza.

Yet Canada has one of the highest performing education systems in the world as ranked by the Program for International Assessment, or PISA, test that 15-year-olds from more than 70 countries take. The United States’ rankings, by contrast, are mediocre.

Part of Canada’s success is connected to its strong track record on educating immigrants. Within three years of arriving in Canada’s public schools, PISA tests show that children of new migrants do as well as native-born children.

U.S. educators believe it takes four to seven years — some say up to 10 years — for an English Learner to do as well as native speakers.

Canada admits more immigrants based on education, English fluency and job skills rather than focusing on family reunification, notes Cardoza. In addition, schools receive more funding to educate English learners.

Similar to what happens in American schools, English-learners in Canada are assessed when they enter school. Most can read and write in their home language but have limited English skills. They might be placed in regular classes with additional one-on-one language instruction. But a growing number of children arriving in Canada have had interrupted schooling and are not at grade level in their home language either. Since 2014, the province of Ontario has accepted more than 10,000 refugees from Syria, half of them children.

. . . In Toronto, they are in a special program called the Literacy Enrichment Academic Program, or LEAP. Students are expected to make two academic years of progress each year so they can catch up with their English-speaking peers quickly and be in mainstream classes full time within three years.

LEAP students are taught in English, with vocabulary help and visual explanations, in the morning. In the afternoon, they join mainstream classes with native English speakers.

Santa Clara County (California) schools should emulate Canada, which teaches grade-level academic content while immigrants “intensively learn their new language,” writes Bill Conrad in San Jose Inside. Here, schools prolong “language learning from six to eight years using the soft rationale of preserving native language and culture.”

Dual-immersion bilingual education is wildly popular — with educated, English-speaking parents, if not with less-educated immigrants.  In 2016, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 58 which essentially repealed a 1998 anti-bilingual measure, also overwhelmingly approved by voters.

Is bilingual ed back in California? There’s a hitch, I write in Education Next. There aren’t enough bilingual teachers.

Nearly all the new programs use the dual-immersion model, and some existing programs are switching to dual immersion.  To achieve the goal of biliteracy, schools need teachers who can teach reading, writing, math, science and social studies in a second language from kindergarten through high school. Some teachers with old bilingual credentials are retraining and trying to improve their language skills. Others say bilingual teaching is too much work without extra pay. (Some districts are paying stipends or signing bonuses.)

Nearly everyone I talked to said they didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past: When nearly all students came from low-income and working-class immigrant families, expectations were low. It was common for teachers’ aides to teach reading in Spanish because the teacher wasn’t really bilingual.

Because so many dual-immersion students come from educated, affluent families, there’s lots of pressure to do it right, with qualified teachers. But that will constrain the growth of dual immersion for years to come.

Immigrant parents also are not sold on the cognitive benefits of learning in two languages: They set a very high value on English mastery for their children. Some programs are having trouble recruiting enough English Language Learners.

In addition, a number of bilingual education advocates are concerned that programs will cater to the needs of the least-needy students, becoming enrichment for the affluent.

Dual-immersion bilingual programs, which teach English Learners (ELs) and native English speakers in two languages, are wildly popular among educated, affluent, English-speaking parents. They’re sold on the cognitive advantages of learning in two languages and see dual immersion as enrichment. Immigrant parents need to be persuaded: They see mastery of English as a necessity.

I wrote about California’s push to bring back bilingual education — nearly all new programs use the dual-language model — in Education Next. The shortage of bilingual teachers is limiting expansion.

For all the enthusiasm about dual immersion, a number of advocates worry that the needs of ELs will come second to the needs of classmates with advantaged, assertive parents.

“We have to understand the equity issue,” said Anya Hurwitz, director of the Sobrato Early Academic Language program. “Who is the program serving?”

The Austin Independent School District followed the progress of English Learners in dual-language, late-exit bilingual and English as a Second Language classrooms through seventh grade, comparing their test scores to those of non-ELs. Non-ELs in dual-language programs did very well. However, English Learners in dual programs did worse in reading in seventh grade than those taught in English or in late-exit bilingual programs.

In math, ELs did about the same by seventh grade, regardless of the program.

The report also includes a set of non-ELs matched by economic disadvantage to ELs and taught in mainstream classes. They scored slightly better than the ELs in reading, the same in math. They did much worse than the non-ELs in dual programs.

Everyone peaked in fifth grade, then slid in middle school.

It’s likely the native English speakers in dual-language programs are the children of educationally ambitious parents. I’d expect them to do well, even if the cognitive advantages of learning in two languages are modest. But where’s the dual-language advantage for the neediest kids?

Tracy Dell’Angela remembers when affluent suburban schools had to “worry about whether all their students made the grade — not just some of them, not just the White ones and the middle-class ones.”

Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools had to report the performance of vulnerable subgroups, such as students with disabilities, English-language learners and low-income kids. “If the vulnerable students were failing, then the whole school was considered failing,” she writes on Education Post.

NCLB had many faults, writes Dell’Angela. In addition to narrowing the curriculum, “it encouraged states to set their passing standards low so that big numbers of students could pass without really learning what they needed for high school, college and beyond.”

Furthermore, remedies such as tutoring and transfer to better schools didn’t work. Neither did restructuring of chronically low-performing schools.

But the law shined a very bright light on how all students were progressing academically—not just in urban districts where test-based accountability took hold long before NCLB, but also in suburban and rural districts that never had to report their progress to parents or the taxpaying public.

That light has dimmed, she concludes.

In Canadian schools, immigrants catch up to native English speakers within three years, reports Education Week correspondent Kavitha Cardoza in a video that aired on PBS NewsHour.

Thirty percent of Canadian students are immigrants or the children of immigrants, compared to 23 percent of U.S. schoolchildren, writes Cardoza.

Yet Canada has one of the highest performing education systems in the world as ranked by the Program for International Assessment, or PISA, test that 15-year-olds from more than 70 countries take. The United States’ rankings, by contrast, are mediocre.

Part of Canada’s success is connected to its strong track record on educating immigrants. Within three years of arriving in Canada’s public schools, PISA tests show that children of new migrants do as well as native-born children.

U.S. educators believe it takes four to seven years — some say up to 10 years — for an English Learner to do as well as native speakers.

Canada admits more immigrants based on education, English fluency and job skills rather than focusing on family reunification, notes Cardoza. In addition, schools receive more funding to educate English learners.

Similar to what happens in American schools, English-learners in Canada are assessed when they enter school. Most can read and write in their home language but have limited English skills. They might be placed in regular classes with additional one-on-one language instruction. But a growing number of children arriving in Canada have had interrupted schooling and are not at grade level in their home language either. Since 2014, the province of Ontario has accepted more than 10,000 refugees from Syria, half of them children.

. . . In Toronto, they are in a special program called the Literacy Enrichment Academic Program, or LEAP. Students are expected to make two academic years of progress each year so they can catch up with their English-speaking peers quickly and be in mainstream classes full time within three years.

LEAP students are taught in English, with vocabulary help and visual explanations, in the morning. In the afternoon, they join mainstream classes with native English speakers.

Santa Clara County (California) schools should emulate Canada, which teaches grade-level academic content while immigrants “intensively learn their new language,” writes Bill Conrad in San Jose Inside. Here, schools prolong “language learning from six to eight years using the soft rationale of preserving native language and culture.”