ESL After the Bell: After-School Programs Give English Learners a Boost

The library at H.D. Cooke Elementary School bustles with activity. At a small table, two 2nd grade students are talking to a group of parents about the dangers of plastic in the ocean. At another table, 5th graders are proudly showing off the video they made about the importance of water conservation. These students are part of ESL After the Bell, an afterschool program where English language learners (ELLs) engage in project-based activities to build their background knowledge and English proficiency.

From Intervention to Standard Practice

Center City Public Charter Schools, a network of six charter schools in Washington, D.C., developed ESL After the Bell in 2012 in response to performance gaps between ELLs and non-ELLs. English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction had mostly consisted of push-in support in classrooms.

To design the curriculum, central office staff used Title III funds to target specific areas of growth, identifying standards where ELLs were performing at least 10 percentage points lower than their peers ((Garcia & Williams, 2015). All K–8 ELLs could participate in the program, which ran two hours after school, four days a week, over four months. After only one year, math and reading proficiency rates of those students rose by 30 and 35 percentage points, respectively, and 50 percent of ELLs exited formal ELL classification.

Today, the program operates in three Center City schools for its growing ELL population (who represent 18 percent of total enrollment and speak 14 different languages). Students in 2nd through 5th grades attend two days a week for two hours a day over a period of 20 weeks. In the 2017–18 school year, ELLs across D.C. traditional and charter public schools who participated in the program met their ACCESS test growth targets at double the rate of non-participants (Passante & Sanchez Pimienta, 2019).

ESL After the Bell provides a valuable model for schools to enhance EL instruction through after-school programs. Though we are not involved in the program ourselves, we think Center City's strong results are replicable on a grander scale and want districts in need of effective ELL programs to understand the process behind this work.