Initiatives - DLI Alliance - Team and Our Partners

About The Researcher-Practitioner Alliance

The Alliance is administratively housed at the American Councils Research Center (ARC) at American Councils for International Education. ARC brings years of experience in education research, second language learning pedagogy and assessment, and education policy. ARC's parent organization, American Councils (a nonprofit organization), brings 40 years of experience in developing and administering programs in international education, academic exchange, language acquisition, and assessment and research. Our model is simple and straightforward. It is designed to facilitate and encourage collaboration among researchers and collaborators and to ensure that everything we learn is effectively disseminated throughout the education community.

The Alliance is led by ARC's Co-Director Dr. Robert Slater, a highly experienced researcher and project director who recently co-directed a major Institute of Education Sciences-funded grant project on dual language and academic performance in Portland, Oregon Public Schools.

Under Dr. Slater's direction, ARC will work closely with the Alliance's researchers and participating practitioners to identify teams to address specific research questions and issues. Each team will be unique in its composition of researchers and practitioners.

To ensure that the Alliance addresses a wide spectrum of research and policy questions that reflect the needs and concerns of school districts, we have identified a Steering Committee that works toward setting the agenda and future of the partnership.

Steering Group Members

• Mr. Michael Bacon, Assistant Director, Department of Dual Language, Portland (OR) Public Schools
• Dr. Donna Christian, Senior Fellow and President, Emeritus, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C.
• Dr. Dylan Conger, Associate Professor of Public Policy Trachtenberg School of Public Policy, George Washington University
• Ms. Lynn Fulton-Archer, Education Specialist, Delaware State Office of Education
• Dr. Jennifer Li, Management Scientist and Senior Linguist, The RAND Corporation
• Dr. Margaret Malone, Director, Center for Assessment, Research and Development, American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)
• Ms. Rosa Molina, President, Association of Two-Way and Dual Language Education (ATDLE)
• Mr. Gregg Roberts, World Languages Specialist, Utah State Board of Education
• Ms. Sylvia Romero-Johnson, Executive Director, Office of Multilingual and Global Education, Madison (WI) Public Schools
• Dr. Robert Slater, Co-Director, American Councils Research Center (ARC)
• Dr. Johanna Watzinger-Tharp, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Utah
• Mr. Jon Valentine, Director, Foreign Language Programs, Gwinnett County (GA) Public Schools

Our Practitioner Partners

We are joined in this initial effort by a group of founding practitioner partners. These partners already represent more than 450 dual language programs, approaching and likely to soon surpass 70,000 students enrolled in these programs. An overview of each of these school systems is provided separately.

• Cave Creek Unified School District, Scottsdale, AZ
• Delaware Department of Education, World Languages and International Education
• District of Columbia Public Schools
• Gwinnett County (GA) Public Schools
• Los Angeles Unified School District
• Madison (WI) Metropolitan School District, Office of Multilingual and Global Education
• North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
• Portland (OR) Public Schools, Department of Dual Language
• Utah State Board of Education, World Languages
  

Our Research Partners

The Alliance is built to facilitate collaboration among our nation's best researchers and practitioners. More importantly, the Alliance is designed to ensure an effective laboratory for communications between researchers and practitioners, particularly a milieu where practitioners bring problems to the Alliance. We have gained commitments from established researchers and will continue to expand this list as we progress and as projects require. Our researchers encompass a diverse range of disciplines and professions including education policy, second language learning, assessment, econometrics, and linguistics. See our section on Researcher Partners for biographies of those already committed to the Alliance:

Dr. Beatriz Arias, Vice President, Center for Applied Linguistics. Dr. Arias, formerly Associate Professor at Arizona State University, is CAL's Chief Development Officer and director of professional development and online educational activities. Her research deals with educational policy, teacher preparation, and programs for English learners. She has provided expertise in school desegregation cases across the nation, focusing on programs that promote equity for English learners, including bilingual/dual language programs.

Dr. Richard Brecht, Co-Director, American Councils Research Center, American Councils for International Education. Dr. Brecht is an internationally recognized expert on second language learning. He brings five decades of leadership in language research and policy on behalf of education, government, heritage communities, private business, and NGOs. He has been a founder and leader of more than a dozen national language organizations and projects, including the National Foreign Language Center and the Center for the Advancement of Language at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Donna Christian, Senior Fellow, Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). Dr. Christian held the position of President of CAL from 1994-2010. For over 20 years, she has been involved in research, professional development, and technical assistance related to two-way bilingual immersion, including a study for the National Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE), funded by the US Department of Education.

Dr. Dylan Conger, Associate Professor, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy, George Washington University. Dr. Conger's research concerns disadvantaged, immigrant, and minority youth with a focus on education policies and urban areas. Current projects include examining the effects of public policies and programs on the educational outcomes of undocumented immigrant and English Language Learners from early schooling through post-secondary; estimating the effect of Advanced Placement and other advanced high school courses on educational outcomes, and identifying the sources of gender disparities in secondary and post-secondary educational outcomes.

Dr. Dan Davidson, President, American Councils for International Education. Dr. Davidson has focused much of his professional life on the development, oversight, and support of international initiatives in educational development, training, and research, primarily through the work of American Councils and its partner organizations in the US, Eurasia, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Dr. Davidson also holds the rank of Professor at Bryn Mawr College.

Dr. Patricia Gandara, Research Professor and Co-Director, The Civil Rights Project, UCLA. Dr. G ndara is Professor of Education at UCLA. Her professional interests in graduate teaching include education policy/education reform, the social context of learning, learning and assessment, and educational equity/bilingual and multicultural education. She is currently the co-director of the Civil Rights Project.

Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, Private Consultant. Dr. Lindholm-Leary is currently Professor Emerita of Child and Adolescent Development at San Jose State University. Her research interests focus on understanding the factors that influence student achievement, with a particular emphasis on culturally and linguistically diverse students. Dr. Lindholm-Leary has one of the most comprehensive longitudinal data on bilingual students, particularly students in two-way programs, in the country.

Dr. Jennifer Li, Management Scientist, The Rand Corporation. Dr. Li conducts research on language education, language policy, organization development, training, and workforce issues. Dr. Li led the qualitative component of the study of dual language education in Portland, Oregon and conducted the analysis of implementation practices across the district. Other past projects have addressed school leadership, charter schools, language assessment, and the retention of heritage languages among children of immigrants.

Dr. Margaret Malone, Director, Center for Assessment, Research and Development, ACTFL. Dr. Malone served as Associate Vice-President of World Languages and International Programs at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). The author of numerous publications on assessment, she brings extensive experience in language test development, data collection, survey research, and program evaluation. She is also Co-Director of the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) at Georgetown University.

Ms. Myriam Met, Private Consultant. Ms. Met works K-12 with language programs and teacher professional development. She was Acting Director of the NFLC and a senior research associate prior to her retirement. Ms. Met was also a supervisor of foreign language instruction for major urban and suburban school districts for over 25 years. In that capacity, and as a consultant to educational agencies, she planned, implemented, and evaluated language programs K-12 including elementary and secondary programs.

Dr. Trey Miller, Economist, The Rand Corporation. Dr. Miller is an economist at RAND whose research focuses on education policy. Dr. Miller has lead quantitative and mixed methods research projects with multi-disciplinary research teams and a combined budget of over $10M for clients including the Institute of Education Sciences, the Lumina Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the Spencer Foundation, and the US Department of Defense.

Dr. Robert Slater, Co-Director of the American Councils Research Center. Most recently he co-directed a US government-funded study examining the impact of dual language immersion programs on K-12 academic performance. Dr. Slater served as Director of the National Security Education Program (NSEP) where he established the highly successful Boren Scholarship and Fellowship programs, the Language Flagship program and the National Language Service Corps. He is an accomplished political scientist and methodologist and has published in major scholarly journals.

Dr. Jennifer Steele, Associate Professor, School of Education, Teaching and Health, American University. Dr. Steele was the Co-Principal Investigator on the recently completed Department of Education (Institute of Educational Science) study of the impact of Dual Language Immersion on Academic Performance in Portland (OR) Public Schools. Her research, which emphasizes quantitative methods that support causal inference, focuses on urban education policy at the K-12 and postsecondary levels.

Dr. Johanna Watzinger-Tharp, Associate Professor of Linguistics, College of Humanities, University of Utah. Dr. Watzinger-Tharp's research focuses on language pedagogy, sociolinguistics, dual immersion, and teacher education and has been published in a variety of scholarly journals. As co-chair of Utah's World Language Council, she was involved in the creation of Utah's language roadmap and dual language immersion. Since then, she has worked with public and higher education to advance dual immersion in Utah and the US and was instrumental in passing legislation to establish Utah's DLI bridge program for high school students.

Dr. Gema Zamarro Rodriguez, Endowed Chair in Teacher Quality, College of Education and Health Professionals, University of Arkansas. Dr. Zamarro has performed research on applied econometrics in the areas of education, health, and labor. She has completed studies on heterogeneity in returns to education, on the relationship between teacher quality and student performance, and on the effect of school closing policies on student outcomes. In addition, she is researching the properties of value-added methods for estimating teacher quality,

Dr. Conor Williams, Senior Researcher, Education Policy, New America. Dr. Williams is the founding director of the Dual Language Learners National Work Group at New America. He is also a senior researcher in New America's Education Policy program. His work addresses policies and practices related to educational equity, dual language learners, immigration, and school choice.

Our Organizational Partners

The Alliance is also structured to build on the considerable foundation of organizations already established in critical areas of education policy and dual language learning in the US Collaboration with each of these organizations is a cornerstone to the Alliance's efforts to ensure that our work reflects the expertise of the nation's best researchers and policy experts. Among those organizations committed to participating in the Alliance are:

• American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)
• Association of Two-Way and Dual Language Education (ATDLE)
• CARLA, University of Minnesota
• Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL)
• New America
• The RAND Corporation
• The University of Utah