Californians Together and the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) are proud to launch two complementary $5M Educator Workforce Incentive Grants awarded by the California Department of Education. Both grants are designated to support implementation of the visionary and comprehensive California English Learner Roadmap Policy.
In recognition of the need to build capacity throughout the state in order to implement the recent comprehensive CA English Learner Roadmap policy, the California legislature earmarked $10 million in Educator Workforce Incentive Grants that were awarded by the California Department of Education in March 2020 just before COVID-19 became a grim reality for our state. The result is a pivotal moment for English learner/dual language learner education in California – a moment of elevated needs resulting from lost schooling and access for English learners due to COVID-19, an urgent crossroads for groundbreaking English learner policy in a state lacking capacity to implement, and an opportunity to bring resources and research-based responses into the hands of educators as tools to address both the educational harms resulting from the pandemic and to simultaneously pursue a vision of powerful dual language schooling for our state.
CABE’s Multilingual California Project, is an effort of the Multilingual California Alliance involving five County Offices of Education (San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Fresno and Butte) and Diego State University along with at least 20 statewide LEAs. An Advisory Council comprised of renowned experts in the field of Biliteracy and English Learners will collaborate and support this effort.
Californians Together’s EL RISE! (English Learner Roadmap Implementation for Systemic Excellence!) is a collaboration with two other lead agencies: Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL) and Loyola Marymount University’s Center for Equity for English Learners (CEEL), the National Resource Center for Asian Languages, and 20 County Offices of Education.
Together, these sister grants will reach educators throughout the state, engaging counties serving 94% of the English Learners in California schools.
EL RISE! And Multilingual California build on many decades of a close relationship between Californians Together and CABE as leading voices for English Learner and bilingual education in California. We are committed to sharing lessons learned and resources developed across the two grants.
While Multilingual California and EL RISE! differ in specific strategies and offerings, they share the goals of preparing educators to enact the vision and principles of the CA English Learner Roadmap and of building system mechanisms to centralize the needs of English Learners, thus dramatically accelerating academic and multilingual opportunities and outcomes of English Learners across California.
Our two grants will do this by:
- Building widespread awareness and foundational understanding of the EL Roadmap policy’s vision, mission and principles.
- Developing the capacity of county offices of education to support LEAs to improve programs and services for English Learners PreK-16 and to work with LEAs in data-driven, locally designed, research-based continuous improvement processes.
- Designing delivery mechanisms and special content to support educators in the need to build capacity for distance learning, hybrid instructional delivery, and new configurations of schooling required to address public health urgencies of schooling during a pandemic, and provide approaches to educational recovery and socioemotional learning in response to harms resulting from COVID-19.
- Emphasizing and addressing the preschool through higher education vision of the EL Roadmap involving partners and directing professional learning across that spectrum.
- Avoiding one-size-fits-all approaches to implementing the EL Roadmap by facilitating local planning processes and shaping professional learning options to build capacity addressing the different contexts and priorities and needs of schools across the state.
- Focusing on local planning efforts through which cross-role teams and leadership, inclusive of parents and families, develop shared understanding of the EL Roadmap, understanding of their English Learner student needs and develop local plans for professional learning and implementation.
- Providing coherent professional learning across roles that is assets-oriented, role-specific, supported through coaching and/or communities of practice, and builds upon the most recent research consensus on dual language development, effective instructional pedagogy for English Learners in both English-instructed and dual-language programs contexts.
- Building skills and strategies for implementing EL Roadmap-aligned evidence based instructional practices that effectively develop academic content knowledge, discipline-specific practices, academic language, integrated and designated English language development, and multilingual and multiliterate proficiency.
- Supporting the development of strengthened data and progress monitoring systems to provide transparency into English Learner/dual language achievement, and to serve as the foundation for continuous improvement.
- Creating professional networks across the state to share resources.
TIMELINE: May 2020-June 2023
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