Thank you, Tom, for that kind introduction. I'm grateful to Tom for his leadership on behalf of education for the whole child, and for ensuring that every student in California has the opportunity to graduate ready for college and career success.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to join CABE for today's conversation. I appreciate the leadership of Karling, Jan, and the CABE board, as well as the commitment that CABE has lived over many years to ensure that we advance bi-literacy and multi-literacy for all students. CABE's record includes launching the Seal of Bi-literacy here in California -- which we then replicated in New York -- and a commitment to the leadership development of teachers, principals, and school board members. These are critical efforts that are a testament to the strength of commitment in this room to bi-lingual education.
As a former high school social studies teacher, I like to put conversations in historical context. And I think it's important to take a moment to celebrate the transformation in the conversation around bi-lingual education over the last decade -- thanks, in no small part, to the leadership of those in this room. One need look back only ten or fifteen years ago to see many folks making the wrong-headed assumption that students speaking a language other than English at home were a deficit, an obstacle, a problem to be fixed. But we've shifted.
Thanks to your hard work, the conversation has shifted, and we now have a better appreciation -- I think not only here in California, but across the country -- that bilingualism is an asset. Having the ability to speak multiple languages is a strength and an asset to be leveraged on behalf of student success.
We have a growing body of research that makes clear that students who are bilingual have advantages, not only in their literacy development, but in the development of problem-solving skills and other areas of cognition. What we see now is that bilingualism is a gift that we can give to our students and to our communities. And that is a powerful shift in our historical perspective on bilingualism.
We also understand more clearly the importance of bilingual education to students' understanding of self and community. Nelson Mandela once said, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." That's a powerful statement.
If we give students the gift of bilingualism, of multilingualism -- if we give students the gift of those skills and those opportunities -- they have a better sense of themselves, their community, and their future, and a better appreciation for our diversity as a country. As Tom said, we aspire to a day when every child has the opportunity to be bilingual or multilingual and we have much work to do to pursue that goal.
We know that our competitiveness as a country depends, in part, on advancing that goal. A recent survey of California employers showed that a majority of employers, across all sectors, small business, large business, want and prefer bilingual employees. We know that our international competitors often do a significantly better job of preparing bilingual students. And so, we've got work to do as a country to ensure that we embrace bi-literacy and multi-literacy.
We also have work to do to ensure that our students who are English learners, who do not speak English at home as their first language, have the full range of opportunities. In too many places across the country, English learners get less -- less access to quality teachers, less access to advanced coursework, less access to the resources they need to succeed. That is the reality we must change, together.
We have a new opportunity with the Every Student Succeeds Act to move closer to the full range of opportunity for all students. But we have to approach that work with urgency. A new law only creates an opportunity -- we have to seize that moment, by making the right policy decisions with strong engagement of stakeholders. I take that as a deep and important charge for the Department.
The President signed the Every Student Succeeds Act because he believes it advances the civil rights legacy of that law. Again, this is worth putting in historical context: the Every Student Succeeds Act is a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It was adopted as a civil rights law. It has to be viewed in the context of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act because he believed -- as a former teacher -- that education was our path to equality of opportunity in this country. The President signed the law because he believes we have an opportunity to advance that vision with this new law.
For me, this is deeply personal. I grew up in Brooklyn, and went to PS276 in Canarsie. When I was eight, my mom passed away; it was October of my fourth grade year. I lived with my dad, who was quite sick with Alzheimer's disease, but it was undiagnosed. I didn't know what home was going to be like from one night to the next. I can recall a night when my father woke me up at two in the morning and said, "Time to go to school." I remember clinging to the banister of the staircase in our house and saying, "No Daddy, it's not time to go to school. It's not time to go to school." I didn't understand why he was acting that way. I didn't understand what was causing that. And that was how home was. Home was this unpredictable, scary place.
Read and learn ore HERE!:
https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/importanc... Please start the discussion in your family, neighborhood, community, with your church family, and in your classrooms, too.
Posted By: agnes levine
Thursday, January 5th 2017 at 6:29PM
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