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FOR RELEASE CONTACT: Henry DuvalAugust 10, 2017 (202) 393-2427 or hduvall@cgcs.org
Urban Schools Launch Purchasing Consortium to Increase the Quality of Instructional Materials for English-Language Learners
WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 – The Council of the Great City Schools has formed a unique purchasing consortium of the nation’s big-city public school districts to spur the production of better instructional materials for English-language learners and to use their joint buying power to incent the marketplace to improve quality.
The lead district in this first-ever instructional procurement alliance formed across state lines will be the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves over 100,000 English learners. Together, the 70-member Council serves some 1.3 million ELLs or about 26 percent of all such students in the nation.
Nearly a dozen urban public school districts, including Austin, Boston, Cleveland, Denver, El Paso, Nashville, Milwaukee, Palm Beach County (FL), San Diego, and Wichita, contributed to the conceptualization and design of this singular purchasing force.
L.A. Unified’s procurement requirements and protocols form the basis of a Request for Proposals (RFP) that was issued yesterday and seeks responses from commercial publishers to create mathematics materials that are consistent with college- and career-readiness standards and that meet the needs of English-language learners in middle-school grades. Materials would need to ensure that ELLs are ready to take a rigorous Algebra I course no later than grade nine and could apply their mathematics skills to real-world problem-solving.
“Proposals from publishers that successfully meet the RFP criteria would be those that show high expectations and the promise of meeting the needs for language development in preparation for rigorous “This is an opportunity for students and teachers to have access to high quality rigorous materials that are designed with language development and mathematical reasoning to ensure academic success,” said L.A. Unified’s Executive Director of Multilingual and Multicultural Education Department Hilda Maldonado.
Winning publishers will collaborate with a Council working group of urban educators and experts to develop specified instructional materials.
Based on the terms of the RFP, school districts that are members of the procurement alliance will be able to jointly purchase instructional materials from the successful publishers. Districts can either purchase directly from the L.A. Unified contract or enter negotiations with publishers to meet specific purchasing requirements of their districts.
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