August 1, 2007
New awards address low performance in local schools
The Education Alliance has received four new awards from the US Department of Education. The awards total 5.5 million dollars in funds and cover a 5-year period. The funds will be used to assist school districts throughout Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts in addressing the needs of their increasingly diverse student populations through a variety of initiatives. "These grants support the recommendations of Brown's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice by enabling the University to dedicate resources to improving the quality of education for children in the city of Providence and all of Rhode Island," said Adeline Becker, Executive Director of the Education Alliance. "Additionally, each of these grants promotes the commitment of The Education Alliance to provide all students equitable opportunities to succeed."
Two of the awards provide tuition scholarships for complementary cohorts in Brown's Master's program in English as a Second Language (ESL) and Cross-Cultural Studies. Project Call to Lead-Middle School and Project Call to Lead-High School will prepare a cadre of 20 middle and 20 high school content area teachers from throughout Rhode Island. Through their coursework, these practicing teachers will acquire both theoretical and practical knowledge regarding effective instruction to English language learners (ELLs) and, along with specialized leadership training, will also be building their capacity to lead other teachers in this area. Specialists at The Education Alliance will be providing ongoing, job-embedded professional development as participants develop their own expertise.
The Master's program has been designed specifically as a part-time program so as to enable the two cohorts of teachers to continue working in their schools. In this way, they are able to apply their newly acquired strategies directly to their classrooms.
The other two new awards similarly target instruction for English language learners.
Project BRITE (Brown's Response to Improving Teacher Education) provides support and consultation to 36 higher education faculty involved in the preparation of secondary school teachers. The Alliance will work with faculty at four universities to integrate knowledge about English language learners into their course syllabi. The program focuses specifically on effective practices for promoting language acquisition and developing literacy for social and academic purposes. Project BRITE's goals are to increase the professional capacity of higher education faculty to prepare future teachers to address the language and literacy needs of ELLs; increase the percentage of highly qualified teachers who are placed in schools with diverse student populations; and create a process by which faculty review their course curricula to address the needs evidenced by the schools' changing demographics.
Enhancing Content Area Learning (ECAL) is an intensive professional development grant that builds secondary content area teachers' capacity to deliver high quality, effective instruction to second language learners. This program targets middle and high school teachers in three urban Massachusetts school districts and represents a collaboration between The Education Alliance and the Massachusetts Department of Education. Teams of Alliance specialists will oversee the implementation of research-based instructional strategies, and provide pre- and post-classroom observation consultations with each teacher in the project. In so doing, ECAL will continue to build the capacity of each of the targeted districts. In addition, selected participants will receive supplementary instruction that will enable them to become qualified trainers for other staff in their districts.
Collectively, these four multi-year awards provide an opportunity for The Education Alliance to help redress the cycle of low-performance in urban schools by creating opportunities to enhance the skills of educators in Rhode Island and beyond.
