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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
Sentences Of The Week geralt / Pixabay
I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful. Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful. And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education. I may also include my own comments or related links. This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts. Here are this week’s sentences: “It isn’t essential that they need to have three years of instruction about phonics in 128 sessions,” [Mark Seidenberg] offered by way of an example in an interview with Education Week. “There’s opportunity costs, and if you do it too much, it’s going to take away from other things that kids need to learn.” There’s a strong positive relationship between income and gifted identification, which is reversed when looking at special education. More than a third of boys (36%) participated in gambling activity in the past 12 months, according to the report, which draws from a nationally representative sample of 1,017 boys ages 11 to 17 in the United States surveyed in July 2025. See The Best Resources For Using “Reactance” With Students To Help Them Learn About How Corporations Try To Manipulate Them. This recent push for “AI” is yet another grandiose and grotesque experiment on children – one that no one asked for and few want. Looking at the averages for Dimension 2 surveys, they tell us that only around four in ten students feel their teacher knows when something is upsetting them. This statistic is from the UK, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s similar in the U.S. See THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING HOW TO PROMOTE A SENSE OF “BELONGING” AT SCHOOL In fact, private schooling is the most expensive placebo in America. “The movement — that’s the hero.” Most states maintained or slightly increased school funding levels from 2022 to 2023, but more than 10 reduced the percentage of money allocated to high-poverty districts — reversing a decade-long trend, according to an Education Law Center analysis of the most recent data available. They found that the number of teens getting insufficient sleep, defined as seven hours or less a night, rose from 69% in 2007 to 78% in 2023, the most recent year for which data was available. See The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep If you’re a teenager in crisis, you don’t need to seek out dark material; the algorithms study what you linger on and serve you more content like it. Surprising studies show young people are doing better than previous generations in many ways “Power hates being mocked more than it hates being challenged,” he said.
     “10 Ways to Scaffold Instruction for English Learners”10 Ways to Scaffold Instruction for English Learners is the headline of one of my recent Education Week columns. Keep scaffolds for students learning English simple—and temporary. Here are some excerpts:
 Three Accessible Ways To Search For & Find My “Best” Lists
(Note: I am going to publish this same post regularly to remind regular readers and inform newer ones about how to access my “Best” lists)
As regular readers know, I have about 2,500 categorized and regularly updated “Best” lists. You can find all of them in broad categories here. The link to that page can also be found at the top right of my blog: My Best Of Series I also have them all on another page where they are listed in the chronological order in which I originally posted them. You can find that link at the top of my blog by first clicking on About and then scrolling down to Websites of the Year. Over two thousand “Best” lists are a lot of best lists! Of course, Control + F on PCs and Command + F on Macs are great ways to search for keywords on those lists when you’re looking for something. In an effort to make them both further accessible and to update many of them, I began posting “Best Lists Of The Week.” In those lists, I attempted to break my lists into more narrow categories while completely revising and updating them at the same time. I’ve created about fifty of them so far and they encompass a several hundred “Best” lists. It will probably take a year-or-two to create ones that include all two-thousand, especially since I add new ones all the time. You will find these newly categorized lists on a page titled My Best Of The Week, and they’ll be shown as “buttons” (you can see what they look like at the top of this blog post) listed alphabetically (more-or-less). You can also click on a link on the top right of the homepage of my blog. It says: My Best Of Week I hope you find the lists, and the way they’re organized, helpful!  Are State English Tests For ELLs Like WIDA & ELPAC Actually Valid? For What It’s Worth, Here’s What Google Gemini & ChatGPT Say HtcHnm / Pixabay
Many educators of English Language Learners, including myself, are dissatisfied with the tests various states use to determine English proficiency for English Language Learners. I recently put this question out on social media: What is the best research out there discussing state English tests for English Language Learners (WIDA, ELPAC, ELPA21, etc.), comparing them and exploring how valid or not valid they are? No one had any suggestions for research but, boy, teachers had a lot to say about the tests – all negative! I didn’t have a lot of extra time, so I took a lazy way out and asked both Google Gemini and ChatGPT the same question. Here are their answers – note, I have not doublechecked their responses or confirmed that their citations exist. I didn’t want to publish a super-lengthy post, so here’s a PDF summary from ChatGPT. Here’s what Gemini said: When it comes to the “Big Three” of English Language Proficiency (ELP) assessments—WIDA (ACCESS), ELPAC, and ELPA21—the research is a mix of high-level psychometric data (from the test makers) and critical analysis from independent sociolinguists. The consensus in the field is that while these tests are technically “reliable” (they produce consistent scores), their “validity” (whether they actually measure a student’s ability to succeed in a classroom) is a subject of intense debate. 1. The Comparison: WIDA vs. ELPA21 vs. ELPACBecause different states use different tests, “apples-to-apples” comparisons are rare, but the following distinctions are frequently cited in research:
2. Is the Research “Valid”? (The Great Validity Debate)Validity in testing means: Does this test measure what it claims to measure? The Argument for Validity (The Psychometric View): Annual technical reports (like the WIDA Annual Technical Report, 2024-2025) consistently show high internal consistency. This means the tests are very good at ranking students by their command of “Academic English.” If a student scores a 5.0, they almost certainly have more academic vocabulary than a student who scores a 2.0. The Argument Against Validity (The Sociolinguistic View): Independent researchers (notably Jamal Abedi and Kenji Hakuta) argue that these tests often suffer from Construct-Irrelevant Variance. In plain English:
3. Key Resources to FollowIf you want to read the “best” sources, look for these specific bodies of work:
 I Think It’s Okay Not To Teach Whole Novels In High School
There’s been a lot of discussion recently lamenting the fact that students are reading fewer novels in class these days (see The NY Times article, Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class). I talked with some of my old high school colleagues, and we all agreed that we didn’t think it would work very well in most of our classes to teach novels. I think it would be fine in my old International Baccalaureate classes, and I believe they do that in IB English (I only taught IB Theory of Knowledge). But my old colleagues and I can’t imagine trying to teach a whole novel to our regular ninth-or-tenth-grade classes and ensure that they actually read it. I would guess at least half of the class would use AI/Cliff Notes, instead. And I don’t think this is a recent development – I believe I felt the same way twenty-three years when I first began teaching high school. One of my colleagues suggested that it might work with with a shorter, very well-chosen one that was read in class with audio support and a lot of discussion. But this doesn’t mean that our students don’t/didn’t or won’t read whole novels or books – independent reading was/is a mainstay of our school’s English classes, and our students read a lot of books. And when I was teaching, many of my students also participated in self-run book discussion groups. More power to teachers who can make it work in their classrooms, though.
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