Ever talked to a precocious elementary schooler? Then you know all about collective nouns. What do you call more than one dog? A pack! A group of cattle? A herd! And, of course, sheep hang in flocks, fish swim in schools, and — best of all — those noisy birds on the roof are a murder of crows.

Get together a bunch of policy researchers, though, and what do you have? It’s one of the less well-known ones. When we gather, we’re a “fracas” of policy wonks. Not an ounce of cohesion in the bunch. This is most fully true at the most focused levels: the more specific the topic, the more fractious the fracas.

It’s certainly the case in my field, English learner policy, where years of serious research and debate have not yielded anything recently like a coherent manifesto or policy agenda to guide federal education leaders. Our work is too often vague and detached from English learners’ real needs.

To that end, I spent much of the past year sharing a short draft of policy recommendations with more than 100 folks who know and care about English learners’ success — educators, researchers and advocates — to collect feedback and develop a slate of concrete reforms to significantly improve how the country and its schools serve these students. The result, A New Federal Equity Agenda for Dual Language Learners and English Learners, was published at The Century Foundation today. It provides a much-needed starting point for overhauling the Every Student Succeeds Act and other federal policies governing English learners’ education.

Above all, the report calls for a significant expansion in federal English learner investments. In the field of education policy, it’s not exactly fashionable to be direct about this. Policy wonks generally earn their way in this work by creatively reimagining existing systems, not simple, direct calls for resources. But in a moment when nearly one-quarter of U.S. children speak a non-English language at home, it’s clear that English learners deserve more federal funding. Much more.

Read the full article about helping English learners thrive by Conor Williams at The 74.