Announcing the Texas Early Childhood English Learner Initiative

Texans Care for Children and the Texas Education Grantmakers Advocacy Consortium (TEGAC) are pleased to announce the Texas Early Childhood English Learner Initiative!

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To ensure more Texas children are successful inside and outside the classroom and to maximize the impact of the historic education investments in HB 3, we are partnering with a variety of stakeholders to develop a coordinated, bipartisan, and collaborative effort to strengthen Texas early childhood systems — including child care, Head Start, pre-k, and kindergarten through third grade— for English Learner (EL) children. 

This work is particularly urgent now. During the coronavirus pandemic, closures of schools and child care, as well as broader social isolation, have disrupted English Learners’ access to effective and equitable bilingual education during the critical window of early childhood.

Drawing on our experience working on early childhood education policy, we are convening community voices and experts on English Learners, early childhood, and education policy through a Steering Committee and series of larger workgroup meetings throughout 2020. The Initiative will produce recommendations in late 2020. During 2021 and subsequent years, we will work on those proposals with legislators, state agencies, school districts, child care centers, and other stakeholders.This Initiative is made possible by the generous support of TEGAC, the Rainwater Foundation, and the Alliance for Early Success.

Learn more about the Initiative’s Steering Committee, vision, rationale, scope, and invitation for you to stay involved:

Who is Leading the Initiative

The Initiative is led by the following Steering Committee:

  • Texans Care for Children 

  • Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) 

  • Dr. Dina Castro, UNT Denton

  • Texas Association for the Education of Young Children (TxAEYC)

Our Vision

We envision a Texas in which:

  • More students are ready for school, strong readers by third grade, and fluent in both English and their home language.

  • More teachers, principals, child care directors and educators, and parents have the tools they need to support ELs during early childhood.

  • More families of ELs feel valued and invited to participate in their child’s education.

  • Texas maximizes the success of HB 3, the school finance bill the Legislature passed in 2019 that:

    • Made clear that developing strong readers by third grade is a top state goal;

    • Made a smart, historic commitment to pre-k as a vehicle for student success, funding full-day pre-k programs for eligible children; and  

    • Recognized the importance of improving education opportunities for ELs, taking an initial step by boosting funding for dual language models.

Why Focus on Early Childhood Care and Education for English Learners

English Learners are key to the success of education efforts in Texas:

  • English learners, who have always made up a significant portion of the Texas public school population, account for a particularly large share of enrollment in early grades. ELs account for 38 percent of pre-k students and 27 percent of students in kindergarten through second grade.* Across all grades, one in five Texas students is designated as an English Learner. 

  • We have a significant opportunity to boost educational achievement in Texas by ensuring EL children succeed. The state’s recent approach has proven inadequate, with just 35 percent of ELs on grade level in third grade reading in 2017-2018 compared to 46 percent of non-ELs.

  • Helping students become bilingual has well-documented cognitive benefits for children and strengthens the ability of the state to compete in a global, multilingual economy.  When young children develop their literacy skills in their home language, it speeds up their ability to learn English and other subjects. Fortunately, early childhood teachers can cultivate English skills while ensuring that the first language continues to flourish.

Early childhood is key to English Learners’ success:

  • A child’s experiences during the first few years of life are key. Early childhood experiences — in the home, child care, pre-k, and other early grades — provide the foundation for success in later grades and later in life.

  • The early years of life are the optimal time to develop skills in a child’s home language and a second language. Research shows this is the age range when the brain is most ready and able to acquire two or more languages. That’s why school districts and communities nationwide are updating their approaches to early education to make the most of the developing brain’s capacity to gain fluency in multiple languages.

Policy Areas We Will Address

The Initiative will focus on Texas children from birth to age eight who are considered English Learners, defined by the state of Texas as “a student whose primary language is not English and whose English language skills are such that the student has difficulty performing ordinary classwork in English.” Their home languages may be Spanish, Vietnamese, or any of the other 130-plus languages spoken by Texans.

We will consider the effectiveness of: early childhood classroom and program strategies, assessments and how children are referred to the appropriate programs, teacher preparation, professional development, workforce gaps, data collection challenges, and more.

Our recommendations will address policies and practices set by the Texas Legislature, state agencies, school districts, child care and Head Start programs, and others.

How You Can Get Involved

We invite all interested Texans to sign up to receive updates on the Initiative.

We are also creating a statewide Advisory Group to help assess what Texas is doing well to educate young EL children and outline where we need to go from here. Potential Advisory Group members include advocates, teachers, education administrators, academic researchers, state agency staff, philanthropic foundations, child care directors, community leaders, parents of EL children, current or former EL students, and other leaders from across the state. 

If you are interested in potentially serving on the Advisory Group, know someone we should connect with, or have questions about the Initiative, please contact David Feigen, Early Childhood Policy Associate at Texans Care for Children, at [email protected].

* All the data above is based on reporting from the Texas Education Agency on the 2017-2018 school year.