The Policy Roadmap contains recommendations to the Legislature, the Texas Education Agency, the Texas Workforce Commission, schools, child care programs, and others for implementing smart strategies for English Learners in pre-k, other early grades, and child care.
The recommendations will help Texas respond to learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic and reach the goals state legislators articulated when they supported early education as part of HB 3 during the 2019 legislative session.
In particular, the Initiative aims to ensure more English Learners:
- become strong readers by third grade;
- become fluent and literate in both English and their home language; and
- learn in settings where educators, principals, child care directors, and parents have the tools they need.
The Initiative is led by a Steering Committee composed of Texans Care for Children; Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA); Philanthropy Advocates, a collaboration with Educate Texas; Texas Association for the Education of Young Children (TAEYC); and Dr. Dina Castro of the University of North Texas at Denton.
Here’s a small sample of the recommendations — which were developed by working with educators, experts, and other stakeholders across Texas throughout 2020:
Recommendations to the Legislature include creating a state strategic plan to cultivate biliteracy across all early learning systems; adopting a uniform process across early childhood systems to identify English Learner children and collect data; creating a teacher certification in Bilingual Special Education; and updating school finance formulas to reflect the cost of educating English Learners.
Recommendations to TEA and other state agencies include continuing to identify English Learners in the state’s education database after they exit a bilingual education or ESL program in order to better track their progress and evaluate the efficacy of different strategies.
Recommendations to school districts, charter schools, and child care providers include recognizing bilingualism and biliteracy as strengths and implementing research-based teaching practices that support their development; and working to recruit, hire, retain, and promote bilingual and multilingual staff.
Recommendations to school districts and charter schools include expanding the use of Dual Language Immersion programs, which have proven more effective than other programs and models for English Learners, and instituting student progress monitoring that goes beyond measuring English proficiency.
Read more about these and our other recommendations here:
