Honoring Our Students’ Linguistic Gifts
The children were rolling their r’s loudly and with pride. That’s what I remember most from my visit last year to Edenvale Elementary School in San Jose, part of the Oak Grove School District. Young children in small groups were eagerly jumping into dynamic academic conversations in Spanish, as the teacher zigzagged across the room offering encouragement, guidance, and individualized support.
The teaching and learning I witnessed was the product of the school district’s decade-long partnership with SEAL, a nonprofit created to transform the educational experience of multilingual learners.
SEAL was born out of a bold question. In the early 2000s, during an era in which state law mandated that schools teach their multilingual learners in English only, the Sobrato family asked: What if schools taught young multilingual learners and immigrant students in a new way to help them succeed in a global economy? Inspired by their own immigrant roots, they partnered with Dr. Laurie Olsen to pilot a new model in a few local schools in their home region of Silicon Valley. More than 15 years later, SEAL has served over 50,000 students (and counting) in hundreds of schools statewide.
I joined Sobrato Philanthropies to help make this vision of education a reality for the over one million multilingual learners in California. This is personal for me too. When I was 10, my family emigrated from Peru to the United States in search of economic opportunity. I was a good student in Peru, but I really struggled to adjust to my new American school and to the new language. Today, many years later, I feel privileged to be part of a team that is working to make it easier for our students to learn and flourish.
On top of our support for SEAL, we are a leading foundation champion for responsive, inclusive, equitable state education policy for multilingual learners. We have seen great progress since we first started making policy and advocacy grants in 2017. Soon after voters overturned Proposition 227, our partners engaged the California State Board of Education to create the new English Learner Roadmap policy for all schools to meet the needs of their multilingual learners. They worked with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to set new measurable goals for the expansion of multilingual education statewide. And they helped unlock millions in new public dollars for priorities such as the professional development of early childhood and Kindergarten-12th grade teachers, the launch of new dual language immersion schools, and the roll-out of the English Learner Roadmap in school districts.
Next year, as part of our 10-year Thriving Communities strategy at Sobrato Philanthropies, we will launch a new educational equity approach in keeping with the Sobrato family’s deep, personal commitment to multilingual learners. Guided by new research, input from expert advisers, and feedback from our partners, we are embracing a big goal for our state: to give all multilingual learners the opportunity to become fully bilingual and biliterate through a quality multilingual education. For us, this means joining with parents, students, educators, school district leaders, policymakers, and others to advocate for more multilingual classrooms, to grow the pipeline of multilingual teachers, and to support communities in envisioning a different kind of schooling for their children. If Texas can make headway, so can California.
Even as we are optimistic about the future, we see clearly the challenges of today. The latest flurry of federal actions are having a tangible impact on our communities. Immigrant families are afraid to send their children to school, so student absenteeism has gone up. Federal funds that all states rely on for their multilingual learners to meet academic standards are suddenly being withheld. As we face these and other headwinds in education, our schools in California can show the rest of the country a path forward by teaching in ways that nurture the linguistic and cultural gifts of all students. At the Sobrato family’s company and philanthropy, we are ready to roll up our sleeves and meet this moment.