Texas schools are majority Hispanic. There’s been a shortage of bilingual teachers since 1990, and the pandemic made it worse.

Concerning teacher pay in Texas, what a sad state of affairs, particularly since our teachers are frontline workers, now more than ever, in the context of the pandemic: 

"The average pay for teachers has not increased between 2010 and 2019; it instead decreased from $55,433 to $54,192, according to the report."

This is critical considering two polls, one by the Charles Butt Foundation and another by the Texas American Federation of Teachers find that 68 percent and 66 percent of educators, respectively have recently seriously considered getting out of the profession altogether.

Yes, this has been festering, however, the situation IS amenable to policy solutions, beginning at the district level, I would say, with incentivizing the teaching of bilingual education, as well as other shortage areas. Over a million children in Texas are bilingual learners such that addressing their needs is essential. 

We're in the interim period right now, with the January, 2023 88th session of the Texas State Legislature rapidly approaching. Now is the time for our advocacy community, including parents, and coalitions of conscience, to make plans to address our state's critical teacher shortage.

-Angela Valenzuela

Additional Reading:

Carver-Thomas, D. (2022). Teacher Shortages Take Center Stage, Learning Policy Institute

Carver-Thomas, D., Burns, D., Leung, M. & Ondrasek, N. (2022). Teacher Shortages During the Pandemic: How California Districts Are Responding, Learning Policy Institute

Lopez, B. (2021, Sept. 9). The pandemic’s toll on educators has made Texas’ teacher shortage worse, Texas Tribune

 Texas schools are majority Hispanic. There’s been a shortage of bilingual teachers since 1990, and the pandemic made it worse.

The pandemic is driving educators away from the profession, including key areas such as bilingual education.

BY BRIAN LOPEZ FEB. 11, 20225 AM CENTRAL

Mariela Vasquez Ehlers, a former teacher, sits in her home in Harlingen on Wednesday. Jason Garza for The Texas Tribune

Many of the students in Mariela Ehlers’ classroom spoke primarily Spanish at home. As a bilingual teacher at Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District, it was her job to teach them both English and Spanish.

But when she looked at these children, she saw herself. She was the kid who spoke only Spanish at home before starting school.

As a bilingual teacher, she often had to work double duty. She would send out parent newsletters in both English and Spanish, pay for students’ field trips and maintain constant communication with parents about their child’s education.

But at 50, coming off the straining COVID-19 pandemic, she retired last summer.

“I felt exhausted,” she said.

Over the course of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, teachers have left the profession citing burnout and health concerns — adding to Texas’ ongoing teacher shortage. Two new surveys show an increase in dissatisfaction with pay, workload, health and safety.

It’s a problem across the board, but in a state that is 39% Hispanic, one area is hit particularly hard: locating and retaining teachers who speak both Spanish and English.

There are over 1 million English learners in Texas, according to the Texas Education Agency, and Hispanics make up more than half of the state’s student population.

In the past decade, years before the pandemic hit, Texas was struggling to find teachers and has consistently struggled to fill bilingual teacher positions since the 1990-1991 academic school year, according to a recent University of Houston report.

From 2010 to 2019, the number of teachers certified fell by about 20%, according to the report. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of bilingual certifications stayed steady with an average of about 4,000 a year, but administrators find it difficult to retain and recruit bilingual educators.

The pre-pandemic teacher shortage 

Public school teachers in Texas have felt unsupported and treated unfairly even before the pandemic, said Bob Popinski, director of policy at the education advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas. The pandemic has only put more stress on teachers.

Popinski said those high levels of stress on teachers coupled with being undervalued and underpaid is driving more teachers out.

The average pay for teachers has not increased between 2010 and 2019; it instead decreased from $55,433 to $54,192, according to the report.

In 2019, Republican lawmakers mandated raises for teachers in an ​​$11.6 billion overhaul of public school finance. The bill also included a merit raise system aimed to help rural and high-need school districts attract talent. In rare cases, the program rewards Texas’ highest-rated educators with hefty pay raises that could balloon to a six-figure salary.

The University of Houston report did not include the inclusion of the law.

In a Charles Butt Foundation poll of 919 Texas teachers last year, 68% said they seriously considered leaving the profession in 2021, an increase of 10 percentage points compared to the year before.

“The future success of our state is linked to our ability to recruit and retain effective teachers,” Popinski said in an email. “It will be up to our local communities and state to begin developing new policies that help better attract, prepare, and retain our teachers.”

School districts over the summer faced large vacancies as the pandemic has exacerbated the issue. The Houston Independent School District, the largest district in the state, had more than 700 vacant positions last summer. That number is down to 192, still a large number of vacancies. To attract talent, schools have offered more pay and stipends, with Houston ISD approving a $2,500 sign-on bonus.

In Waco, the school district increased base pay to over $50,000 last summer, and in Killeen, the district ​​increased base pay to about $52,000.

This week, a Texas American Federation of Teachers survey of 3,800 of its members found that 66% of educators throughout Texas said they have recently considered leaving their job. President Zeph Capo said teacher discontent has been festering for a long time and the pandemic only increased that feeling.

“In addition to long-neglected low wages and the stress of increasing workloads, the Omicron surge has created unbelievable chaos,” Capo said in an email. “Educators witness every day the devastating effects on our students when schools have staffing shortages. It’s only going to get worse unless teachers’ concerns are addressed.”

The bilingual teacher shortage

For Ehlers, the pandemic was the final straw. She had already been feeling overworked. Before the pandemic, she remembers some days she would not leave work until 9 p.m.

As part of her bilingual instruction, Ehlers would teach in English for two days a week, then in Spanish for the other three days. But often, she would have to translate books and other lesson plans into Spanish on her own, and the constant shifting between virtual and in-person classes just added to her workload.

“I never wanted to cheat my students out,” she said.

Teachers across the state have had similar experiences to Ehlers, but in some instances, the struggles for bilingual educators begin even before setting foot in the classroom.

To become a bilingual teacher, a person must take two exams and one of them is a five-hour-long Spanish proficiency exam.

Edith Treviño, founder and CEO of Dr. ET and Company, which provides review sessions on the Spanish proficiency exam, said when she first took the tests it completely drained her.

“This test is so hard, and I am a native speaker of Spanish and I struggled with it,” she said.

Treviño said helping people prepare for the proficiency exam can be demoralizing for them so it’s part of her job to push future teachers to keep going and letting them know that they can change the lives of many children.

“Bilingual teachers serve as an advocate,” she said. “They serve as liaison for culture and language.”

Andy Canales, executive director of Latinos for Education in Texas, believes one cause of the shortages is that only about 23% of Hispanic students were at or above criteria on a standardized test used for college admission. On top of that, Hispanics in college see that teachers don’t have that high of a salary and would much rather look for higher-paying jobs that will allow them to take care of their families.

Being able to master two languages is a massive benefit to a child, said Maribel Cantu, a mother of three bilingual children and a bilingual teacher herself in McAllen Independent School District. She has one child in elementary school, one in middle school and one in high school.

Cantu made the decision to enroll her children in a bilingual program at their schools in Sharyland Independent School District because she wanted them to continue practicing their Spanish while learning English.

When she made that decision, she was asked if she was OK with her kids being labeled as English learners and she didn’t understand why that was a bad thing.

“I don’t consider it a label,” she said. “The one in the high school is completely fluent in both languages. Anywhere he goes, in any job he takes, because he knows two languages he is going to be worth a lot more.”

"Ft. Worth Recruits Bilingual Teachers from Mexico," by Greg Pulte, Ph.D.

 Ft. Worth Recruits Bilingual Teachers from Mexico

by

Greg Pulte, Ph.D.

With bilingual teacher training options not meeting the demand for bilingual teacher in Texas, Ft. Worth ISD recruits bilingual teachers from Mexico for the 2022-2023 school year (https://www.fox4news.com/news/fort-worth-isd-looks-to-mexico-to-hire-more-teachers).

For decades, educators have pleaded with the legislature to provide pathways and funding that would allow high-school students to receive university tuition and training in exchange for bilingual teacher service. These efforts have not passed the legislature. Some school districts offer tuition to high-school students to enter teacher shortage areas, however, shortage areas remain (https://www.dallasisd.org/Page/74935). A 2018 article in the TABE Journal suggests a shortage of 7,600 bilingual teachers exists in Texas (http://www.tabe.org/__static/8a1bf29d27807f2f855299def96d6afd/journal-2018-volume-20-1.pdf?dl=1).

School district provision for bilingual education in Texas has been a legal mandate since the fall of 1973, when the Bilingual Education and Training Act (S.B. 121) was enacted by the Sixty-third Texas Legislature and signed by Governor Dolph Briscoe. Despite this legal requirement, Texas has failed to provide the needed teachers. The law stipulates that “all Texas elementary public schools enrolling twenty or more children of limited English ability in a given grade level must provide bilingual instruction” (https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bilingual-education#:~:text=On%20June%203%2C%201973%2C%20Governor,Education%20and%20Training%20Act%20(S.B.&text=The%20centerpiece%20was%20the%20mandate,level%20must%20provide%20bilingual%20instruction.), yet the State of Texas provides no mechanism to meet the required mandate of bilingual teachers. The shortage of bilingual teachers persists and student needs go unmet. I am still waiting for the class-action lawsuit to be filed. Texas is in violation of its own law. Search any school district human resource job webpage in the state and you will find bilingual teacher positions advertised.

Thank you Ft. Worth ISD for taking this step to address our students’ needs. 

Anxiety Looms for Thousands of Migrant Teachers as Trump Administration Pushes ‘Zero Tolerance’ Enforcement of Visa Program

Our current political context and visa system is harmful to education in the way that it's playing out.  Instead of H-1B visas that do allow a path for citizenship, However, some recruits are employed on J-1 visas. Unlike the H-1B for teacher recruitment to fill gaping needs in our classrooms, and economy, generally, that can result in permanent U.S. sponsorship by an employer, districts are utilizing the  J-1 visa option that is meant to be a temporary program.  It's more of a "cultural exchange" than offering a path to permanent residency.

Regarding the H-1B visa approach to filling gaps, one teacher expresses the following:

“It’s head-scratching to me that people who are highly trained, highly effective, and highly qualified and who are filling a role that’s underserved are now being asked to pack their bags, go home, and just only potentially be invited back. It makes no sense,” one teacher who’d been recruited from the Philippines told the Sun.

Throughout the country, there are many such teachers working under the H-1B visas system whose futures in the classrooms are insecure in the current policy context for immigration.  In Dallas alone, there are 250 teachers working in classrooms currently that are experiencing this insecurity.  They represent a few among literally thousands of teachers.

I'm happy to learn about this 2014 book by Dr.  Lora Bartlett on the topic titled,

Migrant Teachers: How American Schools Import Labor.  I've not read it, but the title is provocative, implying "organized instability," if you will, in the teacher workforce. 

What we are witnessing here is the intersection of what is termed, "intersecting policy streams"—those related to immigration and education.  This is why blunt solutions never work.  

The irony here is that the process of importing an unstable workforce is that it devalues the teaching profession overall and compromises student achievement in the process, making it a less desirable career for many locally who might otherwise go into teaching.

My hope is that we can continue with the H-1B visa program and over the long term, create pathways into the teaching profession for young people in our locales.  Ultimately, there's no reason why we should outsource when we could and should be insourcing local talent with a Grow Your Own educator framework about which I and others have been advocating.

If we grow our own educators, we tap into pre-existing motivations among would-be teachers that see teaching as a way of giving back to their communities.  This is what the research shows and this is what I see.  However, we must still work toward systems and structures for students and teachers that make teaching and learning rewarding and fulfilling.  We do have a long way to go in this regard but this is abundantly do-able if our communities, rather than being mere "consumers" of education, can exercise greater control in the public sphere.

Sí se puede!  Yes we can!

Angela Valenzuela

Anxiety Looms for Thousands of Migrant Teachers as Trump Administration Pushes ‘Zero Tolerance’ Enforcement of Visa Program

Pedro Terán knew what he was getting into.

Terán, 33, was living in Saltillo, Mexico, two years ago when his sister posted an ad on Facebook that said the Dallas Independent School District was looking for teachers. The district had sent recruiters to Monterrey, about an hour from Terán’s home, to find educators to help meet the demands of its mandatory bilingual programs.

If Terán aced his interview, met requirements, and passed a state certification test, he could teach for up to six years on an H-1B visa — a program that offers employers the chance to find workers with unique skills they often can’t find in American candidates. And if he performed well, the school district might even sponsor his application to remain in the U.S. permanently.

But from the beginning, Terán said, recruiters made no secret of the possibility that everything could shift if President Donald Trump decided to change the visa program — which he’s since indicated he may do.

“We’ve always known it’s a possibility, but if the program were to end I’d be very sad, both for myself and my colleagues,” he said.

Despite indications of a crackdown on the H-1B program, the Trump administration has yet to enact policy changes in this area. But enforcement of existing laws has tightened for the thousands of migrant teachers in this country, sending waves of anxiety through circles of educators already in tenuous positions, experts and district officials say.

While the visa program has not received the attention of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or the travel ban, experts say it appears to be part of the administration’s stricter approach to immigration policy.

San Diego-based attorney Vaani Chawla, who works on employment-related immigration issues, said she’s recently seen more intense scrutiny of visa applications and longer lag times as they’re reviewed.

“It seems like there’s a bit of a zero-tolerance approach going on for everything,” said Chawla. “Even if they’ve followed the rules and done everything the right way, immigration officials are still scrutinizing applications even more closely than before.”

That was underscored in early June, when the Baltimore Sun reported that 25 educators could face deportation after applications to renew their visas were held up for a federal audit. “It’s head-scratching to me that people who are highly trained, highly effective, and highly qualified and who are filling a role that’s underserved are now being asked to pack their bags, go home, and just only potentially be invited back. It makes no sense,” one teacher who’d been recruited from the Philippines told the Sun.

Baltimore City Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment, and without details of the teachers’ cases, it’s difficult to know why immigration officials held the applications for an audit.

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Unified School District said the district has started acting earlier to renew teachers’ visas in light of concerns raised elsewhere. Los Angeles has 25 teachers with H-1B visas, with three set to expire. The teachers help staff the district’s growing dual-language programs, which now include Mandarin and Korean.

Denver Public Schools currently sponsors 130 teachers under the visa program, which a spokesperson said has helped fill the district’s need for Spanish-speaking teachers. And this year, 250 teachers are working in Dallas ISD on H-1B visas.

Future restrictions to the program would impact not only the teachers working on guest visas but also the school districts that have recruited them to fill hard-to-staff positions.

Jordan Carlton, Dallas ISD’s manager of talent acquisition, said the state’s mandate to offer bilingual education for English learners in elementary school means the district has trouble finding the roughly 400 bilingual teachers it needs to hire each year.

“We do our best to recruit through the region, but Texas just isn’t producing enough teachers through traditional programs to serve our students,” Carlton said.

“Several years ago, when we turned to international recruitment, we tapped into an incredible wealth of talent. It’s a great linguistic and cultural experience for the teachers and students.”

Teachers as the new import

Dallas’s position points to the uncomfortable new reality for migrant teachers. Like many immigrants, they came to this country for economic reasons, and they fill a niche the economy has trouble filling elsewhere. Having been here for sometimes more than a decade, many have settled in their communities and bonded with students, never expecting a major change in U.S. policy.

In recent years, as the U.S. economy has improved, the practice of hiring foreign educators has been on the upswing.

Lora Bartlett is a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Migrant Teachers, which examines America’s growing reliance on teachers trained overseas.

Bartlett found that between 2000 and 2009, almost 100,000 teachers were recruited from overseas to work in American classrooms. For a sense of scale, that number dwarfs the 56,000 teachers recruited by Teach for America in its 27-year history.

The practice took off after 2001, with the implementation of No Child Left Behind, a federal law that required school districts to employ highly qualified teachers or face funding cuts. At the time, school districts, particularly those in urban communities where turnover is routine and positions are hard to fill, were desperate to tap into the pipeline of new talent, Bartlett said.

An early wave of teacher-recruits left the Philippines and landed in Compton. When one recruit arrived in Los Angeles just before Christmas 2001, an immigration official at the airport glanced at his visa, saw his destination, and asked the incoming teacher if he’d brought a bulletproof vest, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

Pedro Terán with his students (Pedro Terán)

Today, foreign teachers come from countries around the globe, with many from India, Jamaica, and China. But the Philippines, with its English-speaking school system modeled after America’s, made for an ideal source.

“Over 100 years ago we planted the seeds of the teaching system that we’re now harvesting,” Bartlett said.

In May, the New York Times reported on one school district in Arizona that’s recruited more than 50 teachers from the Philippines since 2015. The Times linked the foreign recruitment to concerns around teacher pay: As educators across the country protest low salaries and poor working conditions, those from countries with low costs of living may see American teaching salaries as a boon.

However, the Arizona recruits are employed on J-1 visas. Unlike the H-1B, the J-1 visa is meant to be a temporary program that fosters cultural exchange; it offers no path to permanent residency.

That’s partly why Bartlett believes leaning on foreign teachers may pose problems for recruits, students, and the teaching profession as a whole.

“High teacher turnover leads to lower levels of student achievement. If we continue viewing these teachers as short-term stopgaps and allow them to turn over at high rates, we are going to undermine the opportunity for low-income students with the highest needs,” Bartlett said.

High-stakes teaching

A promise of a higher salary was one reason Terán came to Dallas.

He had experience teaching both in Mexico and abroad. But even at his job teaching at a private school in Mexico City — which, at around $1,000 a month, paid better than most teaching gigs — he had to find extra work as a private tutor just to scrape by.

“Teaching in Mexico is very, very underpaid,” he said. “If you’re teaching, you always have to worry about working extra so you can make it through the month.”

Terán now makes three times what he used to. When he moved to Texas, he bought a car at a dealership and was able to pay it off in six months.

“That was something that I would have never been able to do in Mexico,” he said.

Today, Terán teaches second grade, in a classroom where 100 percent of students are Latino and most speak his native language.

“Texas feels a bit like Mexico,” he said.

Carlton, Dallas ISD’s manager of talent acquisition, said the district typically recruits international teachers who already have teaching experience.

Before a teacher can score an H-1B visa and be hired, the district has to show that the teacher meets all qualifications for the job — which include passing state certification requirements — and that the district has tried, but cannot find, an American teacher to fill the role.

After the six years of visa eligibility are exhausted, the district has the option of sponsoring teachers for permanent residency if they’ve proven their value and scored proficient on teacher evaluations. Those consist of classroom observations, student test score growth, and, in some cases, students’ evaluations of teachers.

Teachers around the country have long pushed back against the notion of high-stakes evaluations, a practice that  can mean rewards or punishment based on performance or growth in student test scores. But for Terán and others like him, the stakes are even higher — the evaluations could literally determine their ability to remain legally in the United States.

“I do worry about my performance,” Terán said. “It’s impossible not to think about it. It matters not only for my residency, but also because it affects my pay. It affects everything.”

Still, for the moment, Terán feels lucky to have a job and an apartment. He’d like to stay in Dallas, he said, if the district wants to keep him — and the policies governing his visa don’t shift beneath him.

“I’ve moved around a lot and I know how life changes, so I try not to think too far into the future,” he said. “I just try to do my best today and plan for what I can plan for.”

Introducing 'Jovi La Justiciera'—The Most Novel Approach to Latinx Recruitment into the Teaching Profession

An important message from UNT Dallas College of Education Dean John Gasko, whose college is embarked on their grow-your-own superhighway for future bilingual educators into the teaching profession. 

Here is an earlier story from my blog on their wonderful efforts in Dallas, Texas titled, "How Texas can end its bilingual teacher shortage."  Read the story to learn  about how Dallas is one of our NLERAP sites that's brilliantly showing how we can go about meeting the demand for bilingual education teachers in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex.

So proud of the work that our colleagues are doing there to grown their own teachers and meet a serious demand for bilingual education teachers.

We need Jovi La Justiciera here in Austin, too!

-Angela Valenzuela
#ImWithJovi

_____________________________________________________

Colleagues,

I am excited to share with you the final first edition of our teacher superhero comic, Jovi La Justiciera, which will officially launch this July at the Texas Latino Comic Convention. Jovanna (Jovi for short) is a Dreamer from Honduras who is a product of Dallas ISD schools, who attended UNT Dallas to become a teacher, and through our bilingual grow-your-own superhighway has returned back to South Dallas as a teacher of record by day with an alter ego, “Justice”. 

Jovi was inspired by research that reveals that Latino/as are now the largest consumers of anime, comics, and manga worldwide and I thought we would reach and stir the callings of future UNT Dallas bilingual teacher candidates by being provoked through the comic imagination. Jovi’s story is modeled on the stories we so often hear among many of the high school and community college students we interact with as well as our own students. 

Jovi’s comic style was created by Hector Rodriguez, who is a bilingual teacher in McKinney and owner of Rio Bravo Comics. She is comparable to Ms. Marvel, who is a Pakistani immigrant and, outside of Wonder Woman, is one of the few female superheroes in the Marvel Universe. 

We will have all editions as they come compiled in digital form and we will be printing out limited copies in the traditional comic form. Eventually we will have it translated into Spanish. 

Happy reading:

https://www.flipstack.com/EmergingTeacherInstitute/jovi-la-justiciera.html

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAfRm3sH3ewQTFS2bT0XudLjPuJpskai/view

John

John W. Gasko, Ph.D.

Dean and Professor, School of Education

Founder, Emerging Teacher Institute

Emerging Teacher Institute

972.338.1654 (office)

The Intrusion of White Families Into Bilingual Schools by Conor Williams

This is an excellent article for looking at the intricacies of gentrification and dual language education programs.  The demand for dual language education is growing, particularly among white, native English-speaking middle class parents that engage in "opportunity hoarding."  This means that in seizing privileged, highly-desired spots in schools and programs, they ironically push out English language learners for whom these programs are meant.

Dual-immersion seems to be good at everything—for everybody. It’s popular with English-dominant families, it’s good for ELs, it’s effective at promoting integration and multilingualism.

But—and here’s the rub—if a two-way dual-immersion program helps generate middle-class interest in multilingualism, that dynamic could also undermine the program’s design and effectiveness. What happens when rising demand from privileged families starts pushing English learners out of these programs? Advocates for educational equity are already seeing this specific problem play out in their communities.

These are matters that we are wrestling with locally, as well.  That said, I nevertheless concur that considering the preparation and hiring of bilingual/dual language education teachers as top priorities can make a large difference.  So can opening up pathways for paraprofessionals to become certified teachers, including through GYO programs as highlighted in this report by policy analysts and co-authors Kaylan Connally, Amaya Garcia, Shayna Cook and Conor P. Williams (Jan. 12, 2017)  of New America.

Fortunately, that's something that many of us are currently focused on in our own locale here in Austin, Texas, working in and with the Austin Independent School District.  Locally, we call this "growing our own educators."  

It's not just language that's important, however.  Nor is it cultivating brown bodies for either segregated or newly-integrated, dual language schools.  Rather, teachers' critical consciousness must also be raised so that students and parents are skilled in addressing the multiple and varied politics of education and schooling that they'll invariably face.

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

The Intrusion of White Families Into Bilingual Schools

Will the growing demand for multilingual early-childhood programs push out the students these programs were designed to serve?

Lucy Nicholson / Reute

by Conor Williams | The Atlantic
Dec 28, 2017

Stephanie Lugardo’s second-grade classroom at Academia Antonia Alonso in Wilmington, Delaware, is bubbling. Students chatter with one another as they work, smiling and joking and wiggling in and out of their chairs. Sure—it’s an elementary-school classroom. It’s expected to exude the earnest joy of children growing into themselves. But this one is different. Smiles break out on an array of faces, and the chatter spills out in English and Spanish.
This is an incarnation of a new American pluralism, one of the latest iterations of Walt Whitman’s “teeming nation of nations” flowering in “their curiosity and welcome of novelty.” Downstairs, in a kindergarten class, an African American student exclaims to her friend, “I know how to say that in Spanish!”
José Aviles, the head of Academia Antonia Alonso, describes the school as a sort of multicultural nirvana. “We tell parents, ‘Your kid is going to be surrounded by Latino kids, white kids, African American kids—we offer everyone the same education, the same quality, the same love,’” he told me.

Academia Antonia Alonso, which opened as a public charter school in 2014, was designed to meet the needs of a linguistically diverse population. School leaders took full advantage of the flexibility allowed to charters to launch what’s known as a “dual-immersion” program: Children learn in both English and Spanish and, ideally, become fully bilingual in the process. The students switch languages each school day—if a class runs in English on Tuesday, it switches to Spanish on Wednesday. (With some exceptions: For example, all the school’s capoeira classes are usually in Spanish—with a smattering of Portuguese.) The program also balances the linguistic makeup of each class of students through its enrollment process. About a third of the school’s children are formally recognized as English learners (ELs), students who are still developing basic proficiency in that language. Nearly two-thirds of the school’s students are Latino, while around half of those enrolled are native Spanish speakers; the other half are native English speakers.
Dual-immersion classrooms aren’t just joyful to watch. They’re also ever more important to understand as their approach grows in popularity across the country. But there are some indications that multilingual schools’ increasing appeal is inadvertently undermining the original purpose for the model.

* * *

Dual-immersion programs seem like an answer to a range of difficult questions in education. For instance: How should U.S. schools educate their rapidly growing population of students who speak a language other than English at home? How can districts with shifting demographics simultaneously meet the needs of all of their students? How can schools prepare students for a complicated global economy (and convince families that they’re doing so)?

Research suggests that linguistically integrated dual-immersion programs work best for ELs. These “two-way” programs enroll roughly equal numbers of native English speakers and native speakers of the other language. And, of course, immersion programs offer the perk of multilingualism to all students regardless of what languages they speak at home.
It’s no wonder that new immersion programs are popping up faster than anyone can count (literally: there’s no up-to-date tally of the number of programs in the United States). In the past decade, Utah’s dual-immersion initiative covers around 200 schools. Delaware has a similar statewide program. Portland Public Schools in Oregon has doubled the size of its dual-immersion programs to more than 5,000 students in the past eight years, with those classrooms instructing in a combination of English and Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Russian, or Japanese. New York City recently launched dozens of new dual-immersion programs across a host of languages.
“We have an incredible wealth, a resource that comes into our country … [this] linguistic and cultural wealth and capital,” Michael Bacon, who oversees the dual-immersion programs in Portland, told me. “If we really, truly are reflective about our history and our country, if we want to stop the systems of repression, if we want to uplift our people and uplift our country, then I think [dual-immersion] is one of the best investments that any community, that any school system, can make.”
This isn’t a sui generis moment in U.S. language education. Multilingual instruction has a long history in American public schools. In the 19th and 20th centuries, immigrant communities speaking German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, or other languages pushed, at various times, for their children to continue learning their parents’ native tongues even as they learn English.
English-speaking Americans’ discomfort with multilingual schools has a similarly long history. Various political pressures—anti-German sentiment during the World Wars, for example—chipped away at these programs over the years. In the 1990s, English-only advocates enacted mandates that largely eliminated bilingual education in California, Arizona, Massachusetts, and in districts around the country. Most of these were Spanish-English programs, which came under scrutiny as part of broader American anxiety about the unity of the country’s identity. Samuel P. Huntington, a political-science professor at Harvard, captured the mood in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, warning, “Spanish is joining the language of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelts, and Kennedys as the language of America. If this trend continues, the cultural division between Hispanics and Anglos will soon replace the racial division between blacks and whites as the most serious cleavage in American society.”

California, currently home to almost one-third of America’s English-learner students, is a particularly instructive example for thinking about the politics surrounding multilingual instruction in U.S. schools. In an article analyzing the rise of California’s English-only movement, Laurie Olsen, a researcher and EL advocate, argued that a “worsening economy and the increasing ethnic and linguistic diversity of the state provided fertile ground for politicians to build their popularity by feeding on the fears of a shrinking White majority and focusing campaigns about the incorporation of immigrants on the terrain of public school policy.”
In the early 1990s, California’s poverty rate spiked and housing values dropped by more than 20 percent. This at a time when the state’s foreign-born population was growing quickly. Writing in 2007, the University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers described the dynamic: “Immigrants were a convenient set of outsiders who could be blamed for the unfortunate turn of events because they had arrived on the scene at about the time all the other misfortunes began.” In one 1995 poll, more than 80 percent of Californians expressed concern about illegal immigration, with over 50 percent saying they were “extremely concerned.”
These anxieties led to serious critiques of the effectiveness of California’s bilingual-education programs in raising the achievement levels of participating students. They were ripe targets. Olsen noted that “poorly implemented bilingual programs were resulting in poor educational outcomes for English learners in too many places.”

What’s more, the programs largely operated out of regular view of the state’s native English speakers. California’s programs generally offered Spanish and English instruction to classes of native Spanish speakers until those students were fully proficient in English. As such, they often separated these EL students from their native English-speaking peers. This made it hard for native English-speaking families (and voters) to feel comfortable with—let alone confident in—the state’s bilingual-education programs. How could they believe in a model they knew only as a distant abstraction serving kids who seemed so different from their own?
Against this backdrop, in 1998, 61 percent of Californians voted in favor of Proposition 227, which effectively eliminated bilingual education for English-learning students.

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Two-way dual-immersion programs, which instruct native speakers of English and another language in both of those languages, speak directly to some of the old concerns about bilingual education. They customarily start in pre-k or kindergarten, when children’s brains are still plastic, and have not yet learned to be monolingual. Research suggests that new language acquisition generally works best, fastest, and fullest when it begins early.
Two-way dual-immersion programs enroll approximately equal ratios of native English speakers and native speakers of the other language. Historically, reaching this level of linguistic integration has required schools to sell English-speaking families on the benefits of multilingualism, while also reassuring families that speak the other language at home that maintaining their native tongue won’t damage their children’s development of English proficiency.

Two-way dual-immersion programs help English learners continue to develop in their home languages. But some new research suggests that the presence of their native English-speaking classmates might also help them learn English and succeed academically. A recent study of San Francisco’s dual-immersion programs found that these programs were especially beneficial for helping English-learning students succeed in math, literacy, and even in learning English.
Naturally, native English-speaking kids also benefit from regularly talking with peers who fluently speak the other language featured in a given immersion program. This is straightforward enough: If the only native Spanish (or Mandarin, or French, or Arabic) speaker in a multilingual classroom is the teacher, it makes it much harder for students to avoid relying on English. But if the class is full of native Spanish speakers, that should help all students learn to work—and engage socially—in both English and Spanish.
Furthermore, the linguistic integration of these programs can give native English-speaking families more comfort with and interest in multilingualism—and, in turn, multiculturalism—generally. While the old bilingual-education programs served English-learning children separately, in some other wing of their schools, dual-immersion programs bring English-learning students into schools’ mainstream classrooms and convert their home languages into assets for the entire school community.

All of this is making dual-immersion programs easier to sell to a linguistically diverse range of families. In particular, interest from middle-class, English-dominant, cosmopolitan families is helping to drive these programs’ expansion. Becky Reina is a white, native English-speaking mother of two children in one of Washington, D.C.’s dual-immersion programs. In an email, she told me that such models can help reduce the racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools in cities like Washington, whose public-education system still struggles with the aftermath of a white flight that began a half-century ago. Dual-immersion programs, she said, can attract affluent, white students into schools “that have previously consisted of exclusively non-white and largely low socioeconomic-status students.”
Academia Antonia Alonso’s Aviles is finding similar interest from the parents in his school: “We thought that Latino communities were going to be more interested [in our school] because they understand the value of two languages, but we’re finding that lots of English-speaking families also recognize the value of access to a second language.”
Catherine Brown, the vice president of education policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said that her son’s Washington, D.C., dual-immersion school puts a high value on serving different linguistic, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic communities. “There’s a lot of people who have really thought out this cool, global, culturally complicated learning environment.”

It’s no surprise, then, that communities across the country are looking to start and expand dual-immersion programs. Multilingualism is hot, especially in gentrifying urban areas with shifting populations. Many white, English-dominant families are moving to economically dynamic cities for their promise of upward social mobility, and these cities’ tight housing markets are bringing them into the same areas as linguistically diverse communities of immigrant families. The cities’ school districts are using dual-immersion programs to encourage these new residents to send their children to schools in their own zip codes and to provide equitable educational opportunities for all kids. For instance, Portland, Oregon—the country’s fastest-gentrifying city—says its dual-immersion programs exist to close “the opportunity gap for historically underserved students.”
There’s evidence that this strategy is living up to its promise. A recent study of Portland’s dual-immersion programs found a wide array of benefits for students. By the sixth grade, English learners in these programs were more likely to be proficient in English than ELs in other language programs. Dual-immersion programs also significantly raised all students’ literacy scores in English, and helped students reach an “intermediate” proficiency level in the programs’ other languages (on average). Ongoing research has confirmed those findings.

Dual-immersion seems to be good at everything—for everybody. It’s popular with English-dominant families, it’s good for ELs, it’s effective at promoting integration and multilingualism.
But—and here’s the rub—if a two-way dual-immersion program helps generate middle-class interest in multilingualism, that dynamic could also undermine the program’s design and effectiveness. What happens when rising demand from privileged families starts pushing English learners out of these programs? Advocates for educational equity are already seeing this specific problem play out in their communities.
“Opportunity hoarding [is] happening everywhere,” said Courtney Everts Mykytyn, the founder of Integrated Schools, an organization encouraging white parents to choose to integrate their area schools. She was referring to a phenomenon in which wealthy families wield their influence to secure access to educational resources in ways that crowd out traditionally underserved families. This has sparked the development of “one-way” dual-immersion programs, which also provide students with instruction in two languages but enroll mostly—or entirely—English-dominant children. When a two-way dual-immersion program gentrifies into a one-way program, Mykytyn said, “we’re not talking about integration, we’re talking about what other special programs your white kid can get, your privileged kid can get.”
In other words, if integrated, two-way dual-immersion programs make multilingualism more appealing to English-speaking families, they can also shift these programs’ focus away from educational equity for English learners. Left unchecked, demand from privileged, English-dominant families can push ELs and their families out of multilingual schools and convert two-way dual-immersion programs into one-way programs that exclusively serve English-speaking children. In some places, this ultimately results in a system in which English-dominant students get access to Spanish-English dual-immersion programs, while native Spanish-speaking students are consigned to English-only programs.

Mykytyn explained how that happens. “When something tips to becoming ‘the cool school,’ the cool thing, the next thing you can get for your kid—that’s the problem,” she said. “So individual schools, in order to increase their enrollment in some places, will start a dual-language program with the best intentions. Pretty soon … the privileged kids get more privileges.”
In many cases, this problem stems from cities’ gentrifying real-estate patterns. Most U.S. elementary schools enroll students based on their home addresses. If you live in a school’s surrounding neighborhood, you have purchased the “right” to send your children there. Trouble is, the real-estate market can very easily—and very quickly—put neighborhood public schools’ programs out of financial reach for the families of EL children: Their child poverty rate is about 10 points higher than the poverty rate of English-dominant families. If a two-way dual-immersion program designed to serve equal numbers of ELs and native English-speaking students starts attracting attention amongst other privileged families, that increased demand for houses in the neighborhood can contribute to rising housing costs that push out ELs’ families.
In Washington, D.C., dual-immersion programs are attracting significant demand from English-dominant families. One of the city’s oldest immersion programs, Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, has seen its surrounding neighborhood become so English-dominant (and white and wealthy) that the school is running short on native Spanish-speaking students. Neighborhood students get guaranteed slots at kindergarten, and these are now taken almost exclusively by English-speaking children, so the school has taken to overweighting its pre-k enrollment toward native Spanish speakers, reserving 30 of the 36 available pre-k seats for Spanish-dominant kids. Just 15 percent of the school’s students are classified as English learners. Not coincidentally, just 23 percent of students come from low-income families (across D.C. Public Schools, it’s 77 percent).

Newer immersion programs around the city are also facing growing gentrification pressures. For instance, in the district’s rapidly gentrifying Petworth neighborhood (where I live), the median 2015 price of a three-bedroom house that guarantees a seat at Powell Elementary’s highly regarded dual-immersion program was $649,900. By contrast, the average cost of a home whose location guarantees access to the nearby (English-only) Truesdell Elementary was $450,000.
Lotteries can help ameliorate this problem. When schools enroll students randomly, without considering families’ places in the real-estate market, it makes it difficult for privileged parents to purchase guaranteed access to any particular educational program.
And yet, this is no guarantee that a dual-immersion school will remain insulated against real-estate pressures. The economic pressures pushing many English learners’ families out of a city’s gentrifying neighborhoods can also, eventually, drive them beyond the city limits. Once they’re in the suburbs, in many cases, they’re precluded from applying to enrollment lotteries for the city’s dual-immersion schools.
What’s more, the advantage of random lotteries—they reduce schools’ control over their enrollments—can also be a problem. Lotteries can’t guarantee that dual-immersion programs will enroll students with an even balance of language proficiencies in cities where English-dominant students account for a large (and often growing) percentage of the population. In other words, lotteries can partially stop real-estate privileges from shaping a dual-immersion program’s enrollment, but any linguistic balance will be as accidental as it is unlikely.

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What to do when an education model that thrives on integration becomes so popular that privileged families take it over and resegregate?
In theory, the tension here could be artificial. The ability to converse and learn in more than one language is good for all kids. The United States would be better if every student left high school with a multilingual seal on her diploma. The trouble is, at present, the growth of dual-immersion programs is limited by the country’s shortage of teachers who speak a non-English language well enough to use it in class. There simply aren’t enough bilingual teachers to simultaneously meet all ELs’ needs and satisfy growing demand from privileged families. In many communities, demand far outstrips supply: After current students’ younger siblings were offered seats, D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School had just 22 open pre-k slots available this year. There were 675 children left on the school’s pre-k waitlist after the enrollment lottery.
This zero-sum situation means that education leaders who are adding or expanding dual-immersion programming have to make choices. If policymakers open one-way immersion programs to meet growing demand from English-speaking families, it makes it harder for them to open more of the linguistically diverse two-way programs that are maximally effective for English learners.
So: Policymakers could make the training and hiring of bilingual teachers a top priority. They could offer incentives to encourage bilingual college students to pursue teaching. They could develop programs to give bilingual teachers’ assistants and paraprofessionals multiple, flexible paths to becoming fully licensed teachers. They could adjust the country’s visiting-teacher visa program (the J-1) to provide more of these educators a path to long-term work permits and U.S. residency options (most currently have to leave after three years).

But in the meantime, leaders will be stuck with tough choices over where to open dual-immersion programs—and for whom?
State policies can help ensure that ELs get equitable access to new—and existing—multilingual-education programs. To that end, some states have established bilingual-education mandates for districts serving significant numbers of English learners. In states where these programs are well established, like Texas and New York, districts are exploring ways of converting bilingual classrooms into dual-immersion programs. But policies like these are hardly the rule. Most states’ policies for expanding dual immersion are indifferent to whether the programs are two-way and integrated or one-way. The large majority of Utah’s new dual-immersion schools are one-way programs, for instance.
When new dual-immersion programs are established, some local school leaders are setting enrollment policies that are directly aimed at creating a balance between native speakers of English with native speakers of the program’s other language. This can mean establishing two lotteries for a dual-immersion program—one for native speakers of each language. Alternatively, it can mean deciding to place new dual-immersion programs in neighborhoods with large numbers of ELs.
Linguistic integration may even lead to benefits beyond multilingualism and educational equity. At Academia Antonia Alonso, Spanish- and English-language abilities vary throughout the building. Some students use Spanish to talk to teachers and classmates. Others switch to Spanish only for answering their teachers. Still others listen and understand their teachers’ questions in Spanish before answering in English.
School leaders say this balance builds an environment where all students are experts in something and developing in others. As students learn to rely upon the linguistic strengths of their peers, it can help them be more open-minded to other ways that classmates may have different backgrounds or needs. In one Antonia Alonso classroom, for instance, a student with special-developmental needs has organically developed into a teacher assistant, calling out Spanish directions in a foghorn voice and leading her peers in chants. Her behavior initially seems out of place—but her classmates’ enthusiastic responses make it clear that it works for their class.
The diversity of linguistic strengths also creates a special dynamic between students and their teachers. While students are learning—and learning in—both languages, not all of the staff are fully bilingual. This means that, for instance, English-dominant teachers are learning to recognize their Spanish-dominant English-learner students as experts. “It’s amazing,” Aviles said. “[The students] can see themselves in us, the teachers, learning with them.”

 

This story is part of our Next America: Early Childhood project, which is supported by grants from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

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