Yesterday the Pew Hispanic Center released a study (do these people ever sleep?) that examined the particular role schools play in the achievement gap among students with limited English skills, otherwise known as English language learners.

After analyzing the test results of public schools in Arizona, California, Florida, New York, and Texas, which collectively educate more that 70 percent of the country’s ELL students, the report revealed: nothing really new. At least not to me.

Among their key findings: The schools in which ELL students are the most concentrated, tend to be in urban areas, have higher enrollments, higher student-to-teacher ratios, and higher poverty levels.

I could have told them that. This is a generalization, of course, but non-English speaking families typically will migrate to areas where there are more opportunities to land a job, secure housing, obtain social services, and be part of a familiar community. All things that, because of historical trends and sheer numbers, are most likely to be found in central cities.

Unfortunately, that kind of concentration or cultural and linguistic isolation has some unintended and harmful outcomes as the report pointed out, including lagging academic achievement among ELL students, especially when they occupy a majority of the school, and interestingly enough, poor performance for other minorities and even white students when both are outnumbered by ELL student population.

While ELL students’ language skills clearly represent a challenge for many educators, especially when it comes to standardized tests, the bigger factor, in my opinion, is the high percentage of lower income students in many of these schools, as poverty is a proven predictor of student and school success. Add to that large class sizes and overwhelmed teachers and, well, you get the picture.

And to me, the picture shouldn’t be so much about what these schools look like and have in common, but how we can change the focus to create a new image.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor