R.I. Foundation, education officials announce $480K in ESL training grants

RHODE ISLAND FOUNDATION President & CEO Neil D. Steinberg said said ESL students’ futures depend on closing achievement gaps and that will happen with more teacher training.
 / COURTESY STEW MILNE
RHODE ISLAND FOUNDATION President & CEO Neil D. Steinberg said said ESL students’ futures depend on closing achievement gaps and that will happen with more teacher training. / COURTESY STEW MILNE

PROVIDENCE – A $480,000 initiative was announced Thursday by the Rhode Island Foundation, in partnership with state and local education officials, aimed at closing the achievement gap for English as a Second Language learners, according to a release by the organization.

Through the initiative, 60 public school teachers from the Central Falls, Cranston, Pawtucket, Providence and Woonsocket school districts, those in the state with the most ESL students, will receive 18 months of training as ESL tutors.

ESL training will be undertaken by Rhode Island College and the University of Rhode Island, which received a combined $160,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation and, together, added an additional $160,000 in partial scholarships for participating teachers.

The final $160,000 was funded through a combined effort by the participating school districts.

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Two thirds of the teachers will take classes led by RIC faculty at schools in Providence and Central Falls while the remaining 20 teachers will enroll in an online curriculum through URI.

Gov. Gina M. Raimondo emphasized the need for investment in the public school system, especially in ESL, in order to have a more skilled and educated future workforce.

She added: “As our newly arrived children and their families acquire proficiency in English, they will become bilingual or even multilingual – a tremendous advantage for students preparing for success in postsecondary education and in the diverse, global economy of the 21st century.”

According to the foundation, 9 percent of English learners who took the 2016 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers assessment met reading and writing expectations, whereas 38 percent of all students who sat for the exam met the same standards.

The need is great in these school districts as 27 percent of students in the Central Falls district and 14 percent of Pawtucket district students are ESL learners.

Neil D. Steinberg, Rhode Island Foundation’s president and CEO, said ESL students’ futures depend on closing achievement gaps and that will happen with more teacher training.

“One of the best investments we can make is in the professional development of teachers and school leaders,” who will help these students reach their goals, he said.

Ken Wagner, state commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said achieving ESL certification can be a great boost for Rhode Island’s public school teachers.

He said: “By earning these certifications these teachers will expand their professional credentials, improve the lives of hundreds of our students and invest in the future of our state.”

The Rhode Island Foundation is the largest and most comprehensive funder of nonprofit organizations in Rhode Island. In 2015, the Foundation awarded $41.5 million in grants to organizations.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Tom, your comment suggests that you misunderstand who English Learners are, and that you are making sweeping generalizations about what their families believe and act on. English Learners bring rich cultural and linguistic diversity to the classes that are lucky enough to have them, and schools should celebrate, develop and maintain the languages that they are bringing from home.

    Our governor and commissioner in this state both recognize the benefits of multilingual citizens, as do other decision makers in RI. Local and national education organizations advocate for students to continue practicing languages other than English at home, if they are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do so. Studies consistently show that students who learn in multiple languages outperform their age-matched, education-matched, socio-economic-matched peers.

    Our US Department of Education hosted a Multiliteracy and Dual Language Symposium less than a week ago, at which Secretary of Education John King spoke of students’ home languages as assets, not deficits, and opportunities, not obstacles– a message that echoes statements made by Commissioner Ken Wagner in his State of Public Education in Rhode Island address this past March. For these important messages coming from decision makers near and far, I am grateful. For sentiments like the ones shared in your comment, I am disappointed, because they show that we still have a lot of work to do in re-framing the conversation about English Learners in our state.

    The notion that students are refusing to “assimilate” and “learn our language” is an outdated and misinformed one. We should be thanking the leadership at RI Foundation, the superintendents of the districts with the highest numbers of ELs, and the professors and administration at RIC and URI for working together to keep growing the number of teachers who will be equipped to celebrate and support the unique assets and needs of ELs in RI.

  2. Dear Mr. Letourneau,

    In your recent comment you wrote that the initiative to educate ESL and Dual-Language teachers aimed to help, “..students that are not getting the help they should be getting at home because of parents that refuse to assimilate, also learn our language, and speak it within their homes.”

    Actually, parents who speak their native language(s) at home are doing their jobs extremely well. Jim Cummins, language acquisition theorist, teaches us about Common Underlying Proficiency. You can educate yourself on his research in Multicultural Students with Special Language Needs by Roseberry-McKibbin, C. (2008). Common Underlying Proficiency is a model that explains how a learner’s development of first and additional languages are interdependent. As children develop their first languages, they are also developing the cognitive strategies to learn additional languages.

    Consider the age at which your first language was fully developed. In my case, I’m still learning new vocabulary, idioms and structures! Now imagine if your first language development was suddenly cut off at a young age because someone told your parents to stop speaking it to you and you moved to a country where you were discriminated against for using your first language. According to Cummins, this could have impeded your development not only in speaking your first language, but also in literacy and cognition in all languages.

    Limited bilingualism is proven to have negative cognitive-linguistic effects. This is where the role of an informed ESL teacher becomes very important. With proper instruction, even students who are sadly discouraged from continuing to develop their first languages at home have a chance to achieve unbalanced bilingualism without any negative effects.

    In the case of additive bilingualism, where two or more languages are developed to proficiency, there are opportunities abound. Cummins found that children who speak two or more languages fluently outperform monolingual children in various cognitive and linguistic tasks (p. 230). Bilingual and multilingual people are not only better learners, but also very valuable members of our society. The children who benefit from this incentive to train teachers and are nurtured by caring parents who speak and read to their children in their first language will grow up to be our next leaders, public service workers and hopefully, Dual-Language or ESL teachers.