Experts Available to Discuss Concern Over English Language Learning Students and Testing.

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TOPIC: A Government Accountability Office report says 5 million students who are learning English as a second language do not get sufficient training to pass assessment tests that have become crucial to school budgets since the No Child Left Behind Act, according to an article by Arizona Daily Star. The report found although only 32 percent of English-language learners in grades three through eight in Arizona were able to pass the math portion of the 2004 assessment test. Government officials stated the Bush administration is expected to address the problems outlined in the report during an August conference.

EXPERTS: ExpertSource can offer several highly qualified experts to comment on this story:

Carlos A. Garcia is Vice President of National Urban Markets for McGraw-Hill School Education Group. Prior to his appointment, he served as superintendent for five years at the 5th largest and fastest growing school district in the nation, Clark County School District located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Under his leadership, the district grew by over 12,000 students per year, and he averaged opening a new school every month. Mr. Garcia was raised in Los Angeles and is proud to be a product of Los Angeles Unified School District. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Claremont Men's College in Claremont, California. He earned a master's degree in education from Claremont Graduate School and an administrative credential in educational administration from California State University at Fullerton. Prior to coming to Las Vegas, Mr. Garcia's experience was centered in California where he taught in Rowland Unified School District, La Puente, California and Chaffey Joint Union High School District, Ontario, Canada. He also worked as a principal at several schools in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, Watsonville, California, and San Francisco Unified School District. While in San Francisco Unified School District, he had the privilege of serving as the principal of a National Blue Ribbon School, Horace Mann Academic Middle School. Additionally, Mr. Garcia served as the superintendent of Sanger Unified School District and as the area superintendent and then the superintendent of Fresno Unified School District. Carlos has been married for 26 years and has two children. He is known for being a student advocate who truly believes that his job is to work for kids. He has been a K-12 educator for 30 years and has a reputation of being a catalyst for change. Wherever he has worked, he has always instituted major changes that have resulted in increased student achievement. He serves on numerous boards and foundations and is aggressively sought after as a speaker known for his innovative ideas on change theory and education. Last year, Mr. Garcia was recognized as the State of Nevada's Superintendent of the Year for his outstanding leadership in unifying the entire K-12 community under one statewide educational master plan. Mr. Garcia believes that the achievement gap is the greatest challenge facing American education and therefore instruction and curriculum must be the driving force to address achievement, access and accountability.

Steve Peha, president of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., is well qualified to provide insightful commentary and thoughtful opinions on the state of education in America, including teacher quality and retention, best-practice instruction, testing and No Child Left Behind. He has taught thousands of kids and hundreds of teachers in the United States and Canada. An avid researcher, he also can speak authoritatively on current best practices, how kids learn and what teaching methods are truly effective. His in-school work with teachers and kids, real-world orientation from his years as an entrepreneur, and in-depth investigation of education issues and current research enable him to offer an informed and unique perspective on what we're doing right -- and wrong -- in education in America. Peha's straightforward views undercut the prevailing wisdom and get right to the heart of what matters. He is the author of "Be A Writer: Your Guide to the Writing Life," a book for 12- to 18-year-old kids and their parents.

Dr. Steven Ritter, Chief Product Architect and co-founder of Carnegie Learning (www.carnegielearning.com), is a leading authority on how students think, learn, and apply new knowledge in mathematics. Ritter focuses on developing and evaluating intelligent teaching systems and other models of instruction, which help children to learn more effectively. As a postdoctoral associate and research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Ritter was instrumental in the development and evaluation of the Cognitive Tutors(R) for mathematics. He is the author of numerous papers on the design, architecture and evaluation of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and served as chairman of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee working group on tool/agent communication. In 1998, he helped to co-found of Carnegie Learning. Ritter guided the development of the Problem Situation Authoring Tool (pSAT), which is an intelligent authoring environment for encoding word problems in the Cognitive Tutor for Algebra. He has also been responsible for some of the earliest and most complete internet-based intelligent tutoring systems. He is co-author of one of the few educational evaluations to be awarded the highest rating from the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse. Ritter's current funded research projects include: Improving prediction of students scores on state exams (with CMU and WPI, funded by the U.S. Department of Education); Educational data-mining and in-class experimentation (with CMU and Pitt, funded by NSF); Authoring tools for Cognitive Tutors (with Southern University, funded by NSF); Evaluating the effectiveness of Cognitive Tutor Geometry (with RAND, funded by U.S. Department of Education); Evaluating the effectiveness of teacher professional development (funded by the Heinz Endowments). Dr. Ritter earned his Sc.B. in Cognitive Science from Brown University in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. Dr. Ritter regularly shares his commentary on the state of education and educational technology as the Cognitive Blogger at http://www.cognitiveblogger.blogspot.com/. Dr. Ritter is a Board member of the Software and Information Industry Association, Education Division. In addition to his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Ritter received his Sc.B. in Cognitive Science from Brown University.

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