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Only 5 states have policies in place for strong, bilingual public pre-K programs 9/9/2019
Karla Medina-Gomez was worried as she prepared to enroll her two oldest children in a state-funded pre-K program around eight years ago.“One of my first questions when I went to register them was: ‘Well, what’s going to happen? They don’t know how to speak English,’” recalled the mother of four, born and raised in Newark, New Jersey.bilingual teacher qualification

Medina-Gomez, whose parents emigrated from Ecuador, said her two oldest, grew up in their home speaking only Spanish. But she also knew the importance of exposing them to English-language instruction at an early age.

Her two oldest, now 12 and 13, were fortunate — their pre-K had bilingual teachers and aides, and the classroom included objects labeled in English, Spanish and Portuguese (commonly spoken in Newark), which helped ease their linguistic transition. She ******* the pre-K for her children's current academic success.

“Had they not gone to preschool and maybe started kindergarten, I’m sure they probably would have been more ESL,” said Medina-Gomez, referring to English as a Second Language instruction.

Children who attend pre-K are more ready for school at the end of that year, particularly in literacy and math, than those who don’t got to pre-K, according to a 2017 report by a task force from the Brookings Institution, the Washington think tank, and Duke University.For bilingual learners like Medina-Gomez’s two children, the gains can be especially noticeable. According to the report, pre-K enrollment enables children to “make progress in English language proficiency and in their academic skills, each of which likely supports growth in the other.”

But policies across the country that support bilingual students in state preschool programs vary widely, both in quantity and quality, according to a recent report for the 2016-17 year from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University in New Jersey.Of the 35 state pre-K programs in the report with such policies, only five states — Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada and Texas — employed at least seven of the nine policies surveyed, which include permitting bilingual instruction, providing extra funding, and screening and assessing children in their home language.

And while research has shown that a highly qualified teacher is one of the most important factors in raising student achievement, only six programs in five states required lead teachers to have qualifications or training related to educating preschool bilingual learners.

“This is the second time we’ve surveyed states on policies that support dual-language learners,” Steven Barnett, NIEER senior co-director and founder, said during a conference call with reporters. “Unfortunately, not much has improved.”Recent changes in federal policy have shown that progress in early education depends more than ever on states, Barnett said.

That includes the Every Student Succeeds Act, an Obama-era re-authorization of a federal law passed in 1965. The reauthorization, which received bipartisan support in Congress, cedes more control and authority to states and local districts.

The NIEER report — which surveyed 60 state preschool programs that are funded, controlled and directed by the state, and reached at least 1 percent of the state’s 3- or4-year-old population — said just over 1.5 million children attended state-funded preschool in the 2016-17 school year. Nationwide, around 23 percent of preschoolers were bilingual learners, defined as speaking another language at home besides English.

While 43 states, D.C. and Guam provide publicly funded pre-K, only three states — Alabama, Michigan and Rhode Island — met all 10 new benchmarks for minimum preschool quality standards in the report, which include staff professional development and whether teachers have a bachelor of arts degree.

Nine states — including some with the largest numbers of children in poverty — had fewer than half the benchmarks.The survey found that state spending on pre-K more than tripled from 2002 to 2017, rising from $2.4 billion to over $7.6 billion. When adjusted for inflation, it represented an increase of almost $4 billion.

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