Conor P. Williams, Senior Researcher in the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation, writes about “The Correlates of Academic Performance for English Language Learner Students in a New England District.” and says that the report explores how “a large, urban Connecticut district is educating ELL students—and checks for correlation between particular language support models and student achievement.

“As I’ve pointed out in recent posts, there are considerable limits to what education research can do on its own—because of political realities and implementation challenges. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we should stop researching education, or that we should ignore existing research findings. It just means that we should: 1) be mindful of the limits of what research can do for politics and policy, and 2) even the best research usually has limited prescriptions for policy reforms.”

Read the complete text here.