ESL Education in US Public Schools: Best Practices for a Demographic in Need

Immigrant and refugee students, or English Language Learning students, face the education and policy communities alike with a unique problem. There is little legislation regarding the issue, so ideas for how to education these students were illuminated by education scholars. Throughout my research, I sought to answer the following question: To what extent are the education policies directed towards immigrant students adequate for those they are applied to? The answer to this question was analyzed through the use of a two part pattern matching framework, which attempted to match the needs of this demographic of students with proposed educational solutions from members of the education and English as a Second Language scholarly community. I hypothesized that the current public school system in the United States does not adequately fulfill the needs of immigrant students. Ultimately, this hypothesis was supported and found to be true. It was also found that improvements can be made to the system if more personalized education practices and more consistent educator standards are put in place