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From https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/library/publications/1603

The Internationals Network for Public Schools: Educating Our Immigrant English Language Learners Well
By Julie Kessler, Laura Wentworth, and Linda Darling-Hammond
Published by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

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

The Internationals model greatly increases the number of recent immigrant ELs who stay in high school, graduate, and attend and complete college. The Internationals successfully teach and assess ELs and also, individually and as a collective, train mainstream teachers to teach ELs and to support other schools with EL populations. What is the secret to the Internationals’ 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. The authors discuss the curriculum, classroom instruction, assessment, professional learning, and governance practices that contribute to this success, and they take a close look at a number of classrooms to provide a glimpse of how teachers and students teach and learn together. Documenting the Internationals’ approach provides insights into what characteristics enable schools to increase recent immigrant ELs’ achievement and close the achievement gap between ELs and native English speakers.

Access the report at https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/International%20Network%20v2.pdf