Growing Teachers in Our Own Backyard

There are so many bilingual people in Texas and across the United States that we should have no difficulty in filling our bilingual classrooms. According to research conducted by Amaya Garcia and Shayna Cook, the bilingual population in the United States is 21%. Many find work as paraprofessional educators in public schools. As their article indicates, these paraprofessionals are well positioned to be trained by local colleges and universities to fill the need for bilingual teachers and ESL instructors (K-12 Teachers Are Disproportionately White and Monolingual. Here’s One Way That Could Change).


With the numbers of Spanish speakers and speakers of other languages we in Texas should have no difficulty filling bilingual classrooms with trained, conscientious teachers. We need to find the political will to make it so.