U.S. Department of Education invites applications for NPD competitive grants
Authors: Beatriz Ceja, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), and Loredana Valtierra, Policy Advisor, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development (OPEPD)
With more than 5 million students enrolled in public schools being English learners (ELs), the need for bilingual and multilingual teachers is more important than ever. The Raise the Bar (RTB): Lead the World initiative is the U.S. Department of Education's call to action to transform everything from preschool to postsecondary learning and unite around what really works. The National Professional Development (NPD) Program, run by the Office of English Language Acquisition, is ready to answer that call. Investing in programs that promote academic excellence to boldly improve teaching and learning will increase our global competitiveness.
The NPD program provides funding to support the implementation of pre-service and in-service professional development activities aimed at improving instruction for ELs and supporting educators in working with ELs to meet high professional standards. This is a competitive grant program. This competitive grant with new rulemaking focuses on the development and support of bilingual and multilingual teachers. The Call for Applications notice, recently published in the Federal Register on March 12, 2024, addresses the Biden-Harris administration's education priorities and ensuring that ELs have access to well-prepared educators and increasing the number of educators. This is consistent with the Ministry's goal to increase Expanding the availability of bilingual programs requires qualified bilingual and multilingual educators. The $8.4 million initiative supports pre-service training programs for aspiring educators, including teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators, and high school students who want to earn full certification as bilingual or multilingual educators. It is intended to.
For both Beatriz Ceja, deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Language Acquisition (OELA), and Loredana Valtierra, policy advisor in the department's Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, this work is underpinned by personal experience. I am.
Beatrice said as she recalled her experience. “I remember walking into the classroom on my first day of kindergarten, ready to study. I didn't speak English at the time, and my kindergarten teacher didn't speak Spanish. She was nice, though. , sat me down with other students who didn't speak English, and together we tried to make sense of this new experience. I felt unseen and embarrassed that I couldn't speak English. Back then, I was taken out of the classroom for hours with other Spanish-speaking students to learn English. At some point, I learned enough English to join a larger group. Years later, as a bilingual teacher, I realized the importance of making families, especially EL students, feel welcome in school by having their native language acknowledged and valued. I realized my gender.”
Loredana expressed similar sentiments. “When I was in sixth grade, I was a bilingual kid in a predominantly white school district. Until one day a new student came in from Honduras, who only spoke Spanish at the time, and I was speaking another language at home.” It was irrelevant and went unnoticed. None of the adults who told us could talk to her and I ended up being her translator. We shared the same schedule. We sat next to each other in every class, and all of a sudden the eyes and ears of our white peers were on us. Sometimes they weren't kind, but my new classmates didn't understand that. felt alienated and disappointed in their “very good school district.” How did we live in America when no one was ready to take in a student like her? I still think of her and know that every time I had her feelings of loneliness, she would have felt more of hers too. ”
This reimagined NPD recognized that while an increasing number of public school students speak a language other than English at home, there is a shortage of multilingual teachers and a gap in federal policy to specifically address their needs. was born from. We hear about this need from so many school communities. The education sector has often overlooked or overlooked the growing talent among bilingual paraprofessionals and young people as a population of bilingual and multilingual future teachers. This is a potential educator talent that we need to tap into, inspire, and support.
We need to enhance the assets that bilingual communities bring to schools, including their traditional languages and cultures. The hope is that students like Loredana's classmates and children like Beatriz will be able to participate and have access to truly high-quality educational opportunities.
