Exploring Policies to Support EL Students

While English learner (EL) classification is designed to protect and ensure the rights of students learning English to equal educational opportunity, far too often the EL label is associated with stigma and access barriers. At the secondary level, these barriers, often in the form of academic tracking, can have high-stakes consequences for students’ high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment. In this talk, Dr. Ilana Umansky will present recent and ongoing work conducted through the National Research and Development Center to Improve the Education of Secondary English Learners. Designed and conducted in partnership with state education agencies, this work tackles critical questions including: To what extent are EL-classified students in middle and high school excluded from accessing core curricular content? What are the implications of curricular exclusion on students’ graduation outcomes? And what are school systems doing to remedy constrained curricular access? Drawing on statewide data from partner states, and examining largescale trends over time, Umansky will detail malleable levers to support course access, including the prevalence and effects of providing extra instructional time to EL-classified students. 

Speaker Bio

Ilana Umansky is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. Her work explores how education policy impacts the educational opportunities and outcomes of immigrant, multilingual and English learner-classified students often using largescale data and longitudinal and quasi-experimental methods. She holds a PhD from Stanford University in Sociology of Education and is particularly interested in topics such as labeling, tracking, and language policy as she focuses on partnership-centered research to support equitable school systems for immigrant and multilingual students. Her work appears in journals including the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Educational Policy, and Exceptional Children. Her work has received funding and awards from institutions including the Institute of Education Sciences, AERA’s Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group, the Jacobs Foundation, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation. 

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