From the Oregonian article “RAND Corp. to partner with Portland Public Schools for dual-language immersion study” by Nicole Dungca (here):
The RAND Corp., a nonprofit think tank, will study the effects of dual-language immersion on student achievement in Portland Public Schools with a three-year, $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences……
From the funding agency, the Institute of Education Sciences (here):
Purpose: Dual-language immersion programs seek to help the growing number of language minority students learn English and achieve academically, while giving language majority students the opportunity to develop proficiency in another language. These programs differ fundamentally from traditional foreign language programs in two important ways: 1) teachers deliver regular curricular content through a "partner language" (such as Spanish or Russian), but do not generally teach the partner language directly; and 2) students receive instruction in the partner language as early as kindergarten and may continue to receive language instruction through high school. While the primary goal of dual language immersion programs is for students to learn a second language, these programs have potential to improve student achievement across curricular areas. The researchers will examine the effect of the Portland Public Schools' (PPS) dual-language immersion programs on student achievement in English, mathematics, and science, and on student engagement as measured through student attendance and behavior.
And:
Intervention: Portland Public Schools operates ten dual-language immersion programs�seven in Spanish, and one each in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian. Slots in the district's language immersion program are allocated to applicants through a stratified random-assignment lottery system. For the Russian and six of the Spanish programs, up to half of the slots are reserved for native speakers of the language and the remaining slots are for native English speakers (both types are selected by lottery). The other three programs cater primarily to native English speakers. From kindergarten through grade 12, immersion students receive at least half of their content-area instruction (e.g., math, science, social studies, etc.) in the target program language.
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