Drawing on successes observed in the Central Valley, Ensuring a Multilingual‑Ready Universal Pre‑Kindergarten Workforce, a recent report from Californians Together, offers a glimpse at promising workforce development strategies to support multilingual learners.
Fifty-nine percent of California children age 5 and younger are multilingual, according to the report, and bring linguistic and cultural assets to their classrooms and communities. “However, systemic barriers often impede their access to high-quality education and the opportunities it affords. Addressing these barriers is essential to ensuring the success of both young multilingual learners and the educators who serve them,” the report states.
The English Learners Workforce Investment Initiative (EL-WIN) gives philanthropic resources to local educational agencies (specifically those serving small and rural communities in the Central Valley and Los Angeles regions) to help facilitate the recruitment, preparation and early support for universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) teachers. Ideally, these educators reflect the diversity of local 3- and 4-year-olds and get support and guidance to pursue a career in PK-3 education and give back to their communities, ultimately entering the field equipped to provide instruction that celebrates and sustains students’ home languages and cultures while setting them up for long-term academic success.
Working with county offices of education in the Central Valley since 2022, “EL-WIN’s flexible resources are designed to support regional and local partnerships in ways that strategically augment state UPK and workforce funding, explicitly center multilingual learners, and strengthen the bridges between the Pre-K and TK-12 systems that make up early childhood’s mixed delivery system,” according to the report.
Based on promising workforce development practices that have emerged in Fresno, Kern, Merced, Stanislaus and Tulare counties, the report outlines seven policy recommendations to create a stronger educator pipeline and meet the needs of young, diverse learners. Examples include:
- Creating an inter-agency statewide workgroup on early childhood education/UPK multilingual education
- Supporting and funding local inter-agency partnerships “focused on multilingual prepared UPK workforce”
- Expanding the capacity of workforce preparation efforts
- Providing funding for more professional learning opportunities, like those to better integrate the English Learner Roadmap
- Setting standards to recognize relevant experience and education
- Establishing a statewide stabilization fund “to ensure minimum
funding and guaranteed wages for mixed-delivery UPK providers with emphasis on multilingual prepared educators” - Expanding how data on monolingual and multilingual UPK staff and students is used to better inform decisions
The report highlights case studies of promising practices in action, briefs readers on the current landscape of UPK systems, workforce-related challenges and preparation pathways and more.
“By enhancing compensation, strengthening workforce development, expanding data integration, and building educator capacity, California can establish a robust and equitable pipeline of multilingual-ready educators,” the report concludes. “Leveraging the work of the EL-WIN and other initiatives, the state has a unique opportunity to address local and statewide challenges through sustainable policy solutions that ensure every young multilingual learner has the support they need to thrive and succeed.”
