This policy brief focuses on a specific subgroup of ELL students: newcomers who enter a school district in the ninth grade knowing little or no English. Many of these immigrant students also have interrupted or limited formal education. In this brief we address two issues within the control of local school districts: 1) how to define and track…

This report is part of a long-term collaboration of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd with the Fort Worth Independent School District. The focus of this report is on comparisons between ninth grade newcomers and other groups of English language learners (ELLs). Analyses compare newcomers to 1) long-term ELLs who were…