Professional Development to Prevent Long-Term English Learners in LA Unified

The skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles are visible from the playground of Esperanza Elementary School. Nearly 60 percent of its students, drawn from a neighborhood filled with immigrants from Central and South America, are identified as English learners (ELs). Most (96 percent) of them live below the poverty line. Its principal, Brad Rumble, finds “hope” a “very fitting” name for his school because of the population it serves.[1]

On a Thursday morning last April, the school hosted teachers from around the district who were finishing a two-year professional development program designed to help improve instruction and outcomes for EL-identified students. This work is part of Project PEARLL,[2] led by the Center for Equity for English Learners (LMU-CEEL) at Loyola Marymount University in partnership with Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL), the Los Angeles Unified School District (LA Unified), and the Wexford Institute. Project PEARLL provides fourth- and fifth-grade teachers with professional learning that includes opportunities for collaboration, coaching, practice, and reflection. Given the steady growth of the EL-identified student population, providing actionable and ongoing professional learning is an important step in ensuring teachers are equipped with strategies that can increase students’ access to grade-level content and rigor.

Funded by a federal National Professional Development grant, Project PEARLL has several goals, including to increase the use of research-based strategies in transitional kindergarten to fifth grade (TK–5) classrooms to improve outcomes for EL-identified students and to prevent long-term English learner (LTELs) status. Nearly 19 percent of students in California are identified as ELs, and the state has a long history of serving these students with policies and practices that continue to evolve (see photo below).

Many in the state would argue that there is still a long way to go in ensuring these students have access to equitable educational opportunities, but there are several organizations that are leading the way in reaching this goal, including the Center for Equity for English Learners and SEAL. Both of these organizations work with school districts to provide professional learning and with policymakers to support the development of research-aligned policies, engage in research to help the field understand what works best for these students, and, importantly, partner with families and collaborate with educators to strengthen instruction to increase student achievement. This brief takes a closer look at the work of Project PEARLL, focusing on the professional learning offered to fourth- and fifth-grade teachers and sharing key takeaways.

As the second-largest school district in the nation, LA Unified educates over 387,000 transitional kindergarten to 12th grade (TK–12)[3] students in over 1,000 school buildings in 25 different cities. Among these students, 86,081 are identified as English learners (ELs) who speak nearly 100 different languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Cantonese, Farsi, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. “Los Angeles Unified School District students are made up of a multilingual and multicultural tapestry,” said Lydia Acosta-Stephens, director of the multilingual and multicultural education department at LA Unified,[4] adding, “that’s one of the biggest strengths, I believe, of our district and our families.”

Indeed, the EL-identified student group is far from homogenous. A majority of ELs are U.S.-born, but others vary in terms of their time in the United States, immigration status, experience with formal schooling, and even how long they have been classified as an EL. Generally, EL students who have not reached English language proficiency after six to seven years are labeled as long-term English learners (LTELs). Research demonstrates that LTEL students often lack access to rigorous coursework and receive language instruction and services that are not aligned with their educational needs. A 2022 article by Ilana Umanksy and Janette Avelar of the University of Oregon notes that many LTEL students are viewed through a deficit lens and blamed for having poor academic outcomes despite the fact that these outcomes are due to an educational system that has largely overlooked their needs.

As Elvira Armas, director at LMU-CEEL, explained, “The long-term English learner population—a label that we’ve affixed to a group of students that we've created as a system—is definitely presenting us with opportunities to really look at our systemic efforts and where we’ve had gaps in those efforts to be able to meet students’ needs.”[5]

Federal law provides states with flexibility to set their own determinations about how long it should take to reach English proficiency and to adopt their own definitions of long-term English learner status. California defines LTELs as students who are enrolled in grades six through 12; have attended a U.S. school for more than six years; have remained at the same English language proficiency (ELP) level for two or more consecutive years or moved back to a lower proficiency level; and, for students in grades six through nine, have not met academic standards in English language arts.[6] Around 15,300 students in LA Unified were labeled LTEL during the 2023–24 school year.

California also mandates that districts collect and report data on students who are “at risk” of becoming an LTEL.[7] By identifying these students early, schools are able to implement instructional interventions to help them make growth in their ELP and academic achievement. In the 2023–24 school year, 15,717 ELs in LA Unified were designated as being “at risk” of being eventually identified as LTELs, with the majority (12,706) enrolled in grades three through five.

LA Unified has devoted resources to reduce the number of LTELs, including by implementing an early warning system to monitor EL student progress in third, fourth, and fifth grade to help identify areas they need support. The school district tracks multiple data points, starting with the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC), which assesses students across the domains of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. According to Acosta-Stephens, this process first entails “looking right away where kids are falling in [the] domain: ‘Are they moving up levels? Are they regressing? Or are they staying at the same level?’ And so [teachers/administrators] start looking at how they want to group, who they’re going to meet with, [and] what they need.”[8] Data are reviewed on a regular basis and are shared with instructional coaches, EL designees at each site, and multilingual academic language teams in each region to drill down and identify gaps and needs.

The district also funds 100 multilingual, multicultural, academic language instructional coaches (MMALCs) who provide teachers with support in learning and implementing strategies to better support these students. Sebastian Torres is an MMALC at Esperanza Elementary School and has served as a coach for three years, demonstrating strategies and lessons, co-teaching, and working with small groups of students. He focuses on working with students who are potential LTELs, usually fourth- and fifth-grade students who have not met the criteria to reclassify as English proficient. “Our district goal is…to make sure that they reclassify or [to] get them ready to [reclassify, or exit EL status] before they go to middle school,” said Torres.[9] And this goal is directly connected to the professional learning component of Project PEARLL that seeks to give teachers research-based strategies to help more fourth- and fifth-grade students reach English proficiency and exit EL status.

Project PEARLL was developed out of a previous collaboration between LMU-CEEL, SEAL, and LA Unified. Their first collaboration focused on implementing SEAL’s research-based model in transitional kindergarten to third grade (TK–3) classrooms in four schools in the district. After that project ended, LA Unified was interested in an opportunity to expand the SEAL model into grades four and five, which is an important developmental period for English learner (EL) reclassification. LMU-CEEL took the lead in applying for a federal National Professional Development grant to facilitate this expansion.

The expansion into fourth and fifth grade is happening in two ways: (1) implementing the SEAL model into grades four through five in three schools that already use the model in their TK–3 classrooms, and (2) providing fourth- and fifth-grade teachers from 19 different school sites with professional development focused on comprehensive English language development to boost literacy and language outcomes for ELs and prevent long-term English learner (LTEL) status (which is the focus of this brief). PEARLL provides a test case for how SEAL’s approach can be implemented in the upper elementary grades, even at schools that do not use the model in earlier grade levels.

Indeed, SEAL offers this type of flexibility in recognition of the fact that schools and districts have varying levels of capacity, time, and resources. Implementation of the full model is a significant commitment that many schools are not able to make, yet students, teachers, and schools can learn and benefit from SEAL’s approach. As SEAL lead trainer Erin Peleti explained, “The strategies are the same across both,” adding, “The biggest difference is that there is no dedicated planning day and there’s no dedicated walk-throughs from trainers…and the way that we are delivering the strategies.”[10]

The SEAL model supports language, content, cognition, and literacy through research-based strategies that foster the development of these skills (see Figure 1). “We’re embedding rigorous, rich, language-focused learning to really make sure that kiddos are making progress and preventing long-term English learners,” said Anya Hurwitz, executive director of SEAL.[11]

SEAL’s model is aligned with California’s English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework that provides standards for curriculum, instruction, and assessment. EL-identified students receive comprehensive English language development (ELD) through both integrated and designated ELD. Integrated ELD mixes language instruction with the content being taught in the classroom, while designated ELD focuses on developing English language proficiency and understanding of how English works.

Another core component of SEAL is an asset orientation towards students and their families. The model places emphasis on family engagement and support for students in both their home language and in English. “The best way to prepare all educators, teachers, leaders—everyone who interacts with students—is to first come from an asset-based perspective, seeing students share their identity, their linguistic and cultural identity, and what students are interested in, and where their strengths are,” said Acosta-Stephens of LA Unified.[12]

PEARLL teachers participated in six cycles of professional learning, with each cycle including a combination of an asynchronous course, an in-person learning day, and a community of practice. As Jill Heuberger, a fifth-grade teacher at Esperanza Elementary, explained, “Within each cycle, new strategies were introduced to us, explained to us, shown to us [with] videos of them in action, and then time [was] given for us to plan a unit using the new strategies.”[13]

Since teachers did not all work in the same school building, they received varying levels of collaboration, planning time, and school-based coaching to supplement the training and practice the strategies. At Esperanza Elementary, teachers were given time during the school day to plan together so that they could implement the strategies in an aligned way in all of the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms. The teachers we spoke with emphasized how lucky they were to be given dedicated time and space to plan together.

During the project’s planning phase, partners collaborated to ensure that the professional learning would align with and complement LA Unified’s ongoing work to bolster the implementation of research-based instructional practices for EL-identified students. The focus was on designated and integrated ELD and how to cluster research-based strategies across the six cycles offered during the two-year project. Each year was anchored in a different content area, with the first year focused on history/social studies and the second year focused on science, with literacy and language practices embedded. “Our educators need dedicated and sustained time and space to really understand not only their craft, but also how to be intentional about…a standards-based instruction that’s responsive to language, literacy, and content—and an integration of the three,” said Armas.

Indeed, teachers described the model as providing them with strategies that can be used with any curriculum and one that solidified the need to integrate language development within core content. Prior to participating in PEARLL, teachers were offering English language development in a designated period of 45–60 minutes and were left to figure out “what you can do to kind of push in integration throughout the day, but [it was] never anything very concrete,” said Heuberger. “What PEARLL has done, in a nutshell, is give us the strategies to really successfully integrate it across the board throughout the entire day,” she added.[14]

Each professional learning cycle is connected to a research base. For example, the first learning cycle was focused on creating a welcoming and affirming learning environment. The strategies that teachers were taught were aligned with four research findings: (1) teachers must self-educate and examine bias; (2) curriculum must reflect student identities and (3) leverage home language; and (4) partner with families. One of these practices included “mirrors and windows,” which is a process for selecting literature for the classroom that reflects students’ identities and experiences. Trainers at SEAL said that this strategy was very impactful for teachers, as it allowed them to integrate aspects of students’ home languages and cultures into the existing curriculum.

As Principal Rumble said, home language and culture are “something that we want to celebrate.” He said, “We live in interesting times, where our emergent bilingual students may not always feel as welcome as they should. And it’s really important that we create that community of learners on this campus where we celebrate our differences. And certainly [celebrate] our parents in the broader community.” These lessons were reflected in the classrooms we visited, with the walls featuring pictures of students and student-created work. The school has developed a culture where students feel welcomed, respected, and understood, which Rumble says has been informed by the work the teachers have done with Project PEARLL.

Another strategy teachers were able to learn and implement was deconstructing text, which entails breaking down text at the word, sentence, or full-text level to help students learn skills and strategies for understanding content and learning more about language. Deconstructing a text involves breaking down challenging sentences by simplifying their meanings and analyzing their structure. For example, you can unpack a complex sentence into simpler ideas and highlight key features like conjunctions or verb tenses, guiding students through the process. Using relatable examples alongside the text helps make the concepts clearer.

Teachers remarked on how learning these types of strategies helped them integrate English language development into subject areas like math, which was not something they had done in the past. Additional strategies that were evident in the classrooms we visited included sentence frames, graphic organizers, and drawing and labeling to help students access and better comprehend informational text (see photos below). “Giving them those strategies so that they can access…words and texts that they can visualize…That’s a lot of the strategies that I’ve seen,” said fourth-grade teacher Ileana Letona.[15] She added, “My kids’ scores have improved from the informational reading.”

Several individuals we spoke with said that SEAL has created an impactful model of professional development by pulling together research-based strategies that many teachers are familiar with and giving them the tools and space to integrate those practices into their teaching in a meaningful way. “We are really a research-based set of high-leverage strategies,” Hurwitz said, adding, “Those are things that have been around, and teachers have been exposed to, at different points. But it doesn’t mean that they’re supported on a regular basis to prioritize those practices.” This is also true, she said, “as new curriculum, new mandates, [and new programs] come in.”[16]

Preventing Long-Term English Learner Status Requires an Integrated Approach

PEARLL was designed in part to help prevent students from being labeled long-term English learners (LTELs) and improve reclassification rates among fourth- and fifth-grade students in LA Unified by providing teachers with research-based and sustained professional learning. The work used an integrated approach that leveraged enabling policies, a commitment from the school district, and sustained professional development.

In 2023, the California State Legislature passed a bill requiring that schools and districts report disaggregated ELA, math, and science test scores by different English learner (EL) subgroups, including LTELs and students at risk of becoming LTELs. These data, reported publicly in 2024, provide a clearer picture of how EL-identified students perform and the heterogeneity that exists within the subgroup. LA Unified has an early warning system and regularly reviews and shares multiple data points with schools to help inform instruction and focused interventions. These data also helped set a foundation for identifying which grade-level teachers to target for professional development.

LA Unified is committed to devoting resources to preventing LTELs. Indeed, when asked how to ensure that all teachers of EL-identified students have access to effective professional development, many of those we spoke to pointed first to a commitment from the school district. Clearly, LA Unified wanted participating teachers to have the necessary time, space, and support structures. And this commitment also translated to the school building; teachers at Esperanza said that Principal Rumble had allocated co-planning time for them to ensure purposeful and aligned implementation across their classrooms.

The professional development provided teachers with strategies that could be practiced and then implemented in their daily practice, and it was also designed with students in mind. “The whole point is that it’s responsive to the students in front of you,” said Peleti of SEAL. “It can’t just come through a curriculum. It can’t just be a sequencing that you just follow, because the students in your room are different every year, and they have different needs, and they grow at different paces.” She added, “In order to be responsive to ELs, teachers need time to plan for that—they can’t do that in their 30 minutes after school when they’re doing all their other things.”[17]

Changing Teacher Practice Promotes Rigor and Student Engagement

Research suggests that EL-identified students often receive watered-down instruction due to the erroneous assumption that they cannot engage in rigorous learning tasks. This deficit orientation has long impacted the educational experiences of these students, even though it’s clear that EL-identified students can handle rigor, including engaging with complex, informational text and using their own agency to help drive their learning. The key is providing them with strategies and tools that help them access the content and curriculum. As Heuberger explained, strategies such as graphic organizers and “draw and label” allow for more student engagement: “The classroom reflects that the kids’ work is in progress…and it’s created by them. It’s not our work on the wall. They’ll add information to it or…they’ll cross out something that they had put up, and they’ll make a change to it.”[18]

Principal Rumble noted that the professional learning of Project PEARLL supported his goal of promoting student interaction and student agency. He said that when he observes the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms, students are engaged in deep conversations about complex text, annotating and relying on their notes for class discussions. It is easier to infuse rigor when you’ve captivated students with engaging and accessible content. These instructional innovations have coincided with an increase in the school’s reclassification rate. “We’re definitely seeing effectiveness in the rate of reclassification that’s happening on our campus. Last year, more than 120 emergent bilingual students [were] reclassified as fluent. We’ve never had those kinds of gains,” he said.[19]

Investing in Partnership Helps Meet District Needs

Professional development is often criticized for consisting of one-off training that teachers rarely have time to practice and apply in their classrooms, resulting in little change in teacher practices and student outcomes. However, research has found that professional development can be effective given the right design and conditions. In planning for the grant, LMU-CEEL was attentive to the fact that professional learning has to be relevant and practicable in district contexts. As districts vary, the design needs to be flexible, said Magaly Lavadenz, executive director of LMU-CEEL.[20] Preliminary evidence suggests that this collaboration has paid off and resulted in positive changes to teacher practice and student outcomes. As part of the grant, the Wexford Institute is investigating changes to teacher practice through several surveys of teachers, coaches, site administrators, and district leaders; classroom observations; changes in students’ language proficiency; and their English language arts scores on the state standard assessment.

The teachers we spoke with highlighted the value of the training for their own practice and appreciated the way that the professional learning cycles were structured. “It’s not often that you go to a [professional development session], and then the very next day, you have something new and worthwhile and meaningful to take right back to your classroom and put into practice,” said Heuberger.[21]

Resourcing Professional Development Is Challenging but Worthwhile

Providing teachers with the support and time to collaborate and implement strategies to integrate language, literacy, and content can be a game changer for teacher practice. However, these conditions and opportunities are not present in every school building due to resource constraints and competing priorities.

Project PEARLL was made possible through a National Professional Development (NPD) grant, a program funded through Title III of the Every Student Succeeds Act. NPD grants are a significant source of funding and expertise for school districts that are serving this large and increasingly complex population of EL-identified students. The grant helped cover costs that included SEAL’s professional development services, a facilitator from LA Unified’s multilingual and multicultural education department, substitute costs, research and evaluation, and much of the work LMU-CEEL did to facilitate and coordinate the grant activities. These types of federal investments are important to sustain, and expand, to ensure that teachers can engage in long-term and research-based professional development to improve instruction and support better outcomes for EL-identified students. These grants also help foster partnerships between school districts, institutions of higher education, and organizations like SEAL to help achieve shared goals.

Federal resources are not enough to support this type of research-based and sustained professional learning; a funding commitment from states and school districts is also needed. Some of those we spoke with pointed to previous state-level mandates that required all teachers to be trained on certain content, with significant dollars allocated to this goal. Others acknowledged that providing teachers with integrated and comprehensive professional development would take capacity building, the development of expertise, and potentially, a redesign of the academic calendar to build in the necessary time. As Armas summed up, EL-focused professional learning should be “integrated throughout all types of professional development rather than being an add-on or an afterthought.”[22]

Implementing sustained and research-based professional learning can be daunting. School districts can start out by exploring resources that highlight research-based strategies. For example, the National Academies consensus report Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures includes effective practices for EL-identified students in early education and K–12. California school districts, including LA Unified, also rely heavily on the state’s English Learner Roadmap that outlines educational policies and services for these students. These policy frameworks can be used to guide professional development efforts. Districts can also bring together EL content leads and professional learning leads to collaborate and identify ways to implement research-based EL strategies in their professional development system. While SEAL works exclusively in California, the strategies in its professional learning model are widely known. Professional learning programs, such as Project GLAD and Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), are also widely used. School districts can also seek out partnerships with local institutions of higher education to help build expertise and support teacher professional learning.

California is home to one of the largest populations of EL-identified students in the nation and has developed a host of policies to address their needs that other states can learn from. The collaboration between SEAL, CEEL at Loyola Marymount, and LA Unified through Project PEARLL demonstrates the potential of sustained and targeted professional development to improve teaching to English learners. By providing teachers with strategies to integrate language development across content areas and to create engaging and rigorous learning environments, the project has shown promise in increasing student engagement and preventing long-term English learner (LTEL) status.

The success of such initiatives, however, hinges on several key factors: district commitment to integrating EL-focused strategies into its existing systems of professional development, adequate time for teachers to learn and implement new strategies, and sufficient and sustained funding. While challenges exist in scaling up this type of comprehensive professional development, school districts can begin by incorporating research-based EL strategies into existing professional development systems and seeking partnerships with higher education institutions and organizations with expertise in EL education.

As the population of English learners continues to grow across the nation, we must equip teachers with the tools and knowledge to effectively support these students. Projects like PEARLL offer a model for how sustained collaborations to improve professional development can lead to meaningful changes in classroom practice and, ultimately, better outcomes for ELs. English learners are a growing segment of the school population; it’s time to put these students at the forefront when designing instruction, assessment, and teacher professional learning.

This brief would not have been possible without the research support of Leni Wolf. She brings over 17 years of experience working in education, including teaching, work with state government and nonprofits, and advocacy. Special thank you to Elvira Armas at the Center for Equity for English Learners (LMU-CEEL) at Loyola Marymount University (LMU-CEEL) for her support with coordination and outreach. Appreciation to Anya Hurwitz, Charice Guerra, Katie Mlakar, and Erin Peleti at SEAL for their continued collaboration and expertise. I am grateful to Magaly Lavadenz of LMU-CEEL and to Lydia Acosta Stephens, Brad Rumble, Sebastian Torres, Jill Heuberger, Jennifer Como, and Ileana Letona of Los Angeles Unified School District for participating in interviews. Thank you to Elena Silva, Sabrina Detlef, Katherine Portnoy, Natalya Brill, and Amanda Dean for editorial and layout support. This work was generously supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation and Sobrato Philanthropies. The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

[1] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[2] Purposeful Engagement in Academic Rigor and Language Learning (PEARLL).

[3] California offers transitional kindergarten (TK) to four-year-old children to provide them with access to high-quality early learning that will support their transition into kindergarten.

[4] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf, May 30, 2024.

[5] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf, May 1, 2024.

[6] The definition has additional criteria specific to students in grades six through nine and 10 through 12. For the full definition, see California Department of Education Data Reporting Office, “Glossary of Terms for English learner (EL) Reports.”

[7] The criteria used to determine whether an EL is at risk of becoming an LTEL include: “An EL student to which all of the following apply: (1) is enrolled on Census Day (the first Wednesday in October) in grades 3 to 12, inclusive; and (2) has been enrolled in a U.S. school for four or five years; and (3) has scored at the intermediate level or below (level 3 or below) on the prior year administration of the ELPAC [...] and (4) for students in grades 3 to 9, inclusive, has scored in the fourth or fifth year at the “Standard Not Met” level on the prior year administration of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP)-English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA).” There are other criteria based on grade level and other factors. For the full definition, see California Department of Education Data Reporting Office, “Glossary of Terms for English learner (EL) Reports.”

[8] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf, May 30, 2024.

[9] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[10] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf and author, May 3, 2024.

[11] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf and author, May 3, 2024.

[12] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf, May 30, 2024.

[13] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[14] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[15] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[16] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf and author, May 3, 2024.

[17] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf and author, May 3, 2024.

[18] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[19] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[20] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf, May 1, 2024.

[21] Interview with Leni Wolf, Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 2024.

[22] Zoom interview with Leni Wolf, May 1, 2024.