Dual language teachers are key to making more California students bilingual. Few seek the job

Fourth grader Carla Rosas says she knows three languages. 

A Colombian, she speaks Spanish fluently, but she also speaks English and is in the French immersion program at the Language Academy, a San Diego Unified magnet school. She says her parents have encouraged her to pursue another language, too.

“They want me to learn Chinese so that I can talk to everyone in the world,”said Rosas, as she stood in class twirling her bubble braids. “They say it helps my skills.” 

As the world grows more interconnected, knowing more than one language is becoming increasingly important. It can give young people entering the job market a competitive edge and bridge cultural divides.

That’s why California wants half of its graduates by 2030 and three out of four by 2040 to be proficient in at least two languages. But the state and its school districts, including San Diego Unified, are far behind. 

The state recognizes that dual language programs, like the ones Rosas is enrolled in, are key to meeting its goal, but spots are limited. And to grow those programs, districts need to hire more teachers — and therein lies a major challenge: There aren’t enough dual language teachers available.

That’s because few educators are pursuing the professional certifications needed to teach dual language classes. And worse, fewer teachers across the state are choosing to enter the workforce year over year.

“It’s been getting harder and harder to fill positions, and we can even see it in the people who asked to observe — there’s not as many requests to observe because they’re not going into a bilingual program,” Elisa Peñaloza, a third grade teacher at the Language Academy, told inewsource. 

That’s a major pipeline problem for school districts such as San Diego Unified that want to expand their dual language programs.

“There aren’t enough (teachers) for the amount of growth that we want to make as a district when it comes to dual language,” said Marissa Allan, senior director for the district’s multilingual department. 

 In 2022 a mere 10% of high-school graduates statewide and 6% in San Diego Unified were awarded the State Seal of Biliteracy with their diplomas. 

At San Diego Unified, for example, just 25 of its 176 schools offered a dual language program last year. Only 6% of the district’s 113,000 students were enrolled in dual language classes. 

The district started with four dual language programs in 2008 and plans to add at least eight more programs next year, said Richard Barrera, a San Diego Unified board member. Over the last five years, it’s also expanded programs at the universal transitional kindergarten (UTK) and middle school levels, opening 16 classrooms at 13 schools, according to the district. 

“Best thing we can do is start them with UTK,” he said. 

San Diego Unified officials say they would like every student to have access to learning more than one language, and the district’s aim is to expand its dual language programs first at schools where demand is high and parents express an interest.

A quick way to expand access isn’t easy to come by. But paying bilingual teachers more for getting credentialed would be a great start, some say.

Calexico Unified, a district near the U.S.-Mexico border in Imperial County, is doing just that. 

The district, which serves a majority Spanish speaking student body, offers teachers already credentialed and teaching bilingual classes a yearly stipend of close to $2,200, a deal worked out between the district and the teachers’ union. 

“It is an acknowledgment that it does require a little bit more work,” Calexico Unified Superintendent Arturo Jimenez said. The district is looking to bring back immersion programs, starting in the earliest grades. 

By contrast, San Diego Unified once offered dual language teachers additional pay, but doesn’t anymore – a problem even some district officials have recognized as a barrier to expanding access to dual language programs.

“It wasn’t very much, but it was something to kind of say, ‘Hey, we know that you’re doing this extra work,’ ” said Peñaloza, who noticed her paycheck referenced her distinction as a bilingual teacher. 

The district offers a $10,000 salary stipend to attract special education teachers to the district, but a similar incentive could also help attract bilingual teachers, Allan said. 

“We need to be able to provide some sort of an incentive for people to go this route.”

But advocating for pay incentives to attract and retain bilingual teachers isn’t something the board will initiate, Barrera told inewsource. 

That’s because the district doesn’t have a problem attracting teachers, and the teachers union would lead any bargaining to increase salaries for dual language teachers, he said. 

If recruitment does become an issue when the district gets ready to further expand its programs, the superintendent could advocate for potential solutions then, he added. 

Board members also say the challenge of expanding these programs is not as simple as having an insufficient number of teachers. Another problem is having the physical space to expand these programs. 

“Even if we had more teachers … Language Academy wouldn’t be able to accommodate more students,” said Shana Hazan, a San Diego Unified board member. She added that many immersion programs throughout the district are running at capacity. 

Other San Diego Unified board members didn’t respond to requests to weigh in on whether they’d support such an increase. San Diego Unified Superintendent Lamont Jackson wasn’t available for comment.

Why dual language programs? 

San Diego Unified offers dual language programs as part of an extensive menu of school choice options designed to give students and their families alternatives to traditional education and keep them in public schools, which are seeing enrollment declines nationwide. 

But language immersion programs also serve an important – and historically disadvantaged – student group: those who are learning English. They made up 18% of San Diego Unified students last year. 

In fact, immersion programs were originally created to support English learners, but have morphed because of increased interest among parents who want their child to be bilingual, Allan said.

Immersion programs also fell to the wayside after the state adopted a law in 1998, which eliminated most bilingual classes. That law, Proposition 227, was repealed in 2016, sparking a comeback for dual language programs. 

Today, San Diego Unified’s dual language programs are the “gold standard” for providing education to English learners, who as a group tend to perform worse academically than their peers, Allan said. 

Dual language programs help English learners because they teach them strong primary language skills which lead to higher rates of English proficiency in later grades compared to English learners who are just immersed in English instruction, Allan said. 

Parents of English learners also see value in dual language programs.

Gabriel Morales is an English learner and a third grader at Cherokee Point Elementary. The school’s dual language program is a way for him to work on proficiency in both Spanish, which he speaks at home, and English, his mother Rosa Rodriguez told inewsource in Spanish. 

“It makes them focus on their roots but also that it’s important in this country – because this is where they’re living – that they have to know how to speak English well,” she said in Spanish.

Today, many parents in California want their child to be immersed in a foreign language at an early age. In fact, their interest in dual language programs at San Diego Unified is outpacing capacity, Allan said — there’s even a waitlist to get into a dual language program at some schools. 

Preston Chaffee said his daughter Addision was placed on the waitlist for the kindergarten program at Tierrasanta Elementary, but it wasn’t long after the start of the school year that a spot opened. 

For Chaffee, dual language programs represent an opportunity for his child that he and his wife never had: access to a foreign language at an early age. 

“We didn’t get to take foreign languages till like seventh or eighth grade, and by then we didn’t really have the neuroplasticity to learn them,” he said, referring to the brain’s ability to change and adapt due to experience.

“If she wants to travel, or there’s a lot of people in the United States that maybe speak Spanish, it might be nice to be able to talk to them.”

Although there’s a waitlist for dual language programs at most of the district’s magnet schools, there are available seats at neighborhood schools, said San Diego Unified spokesperson Maureen Magee. 

Universities starting to offer programs

In recent years, more of the state’s universities have begun offering programs for teachers to get the credentials to teach dual language courses. 

Twenty of the state’s 49 bilingual teaching programs were approved since 2019, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

Of the twelve four-year colleges in San Diego County, six offer bilingual teaching education to teachers that allow them to apply for authorization from the state. No college in Imperial Valley offers this pathway on campus, but San Diego State University offers it online.  

Between 30 to 50 students graduate with a bilingual credential from SDSU each year, according to the university.

At California State University San Marcos, 21 students graduated from its bilingual teaching program last year, according to the college. The University of San Diego is just relaunching its bilingual teaching program and has five students in its pipeline, said Reyes Quezada, professor at the college’s School of Leadership and Education.  

The San Diego County Office of Education offers several grant options to individuals interested in pursuing teaching, including reimbursement for education costs of up to $3,000 for classified employees. 

But without more teachers obtaining the bilingual credential, it’s hard to expand classes and capacity to take on more students, Allan said.

San Diego Unified has about 445 teachers authorized to teach dual language courses. Hypothetically, they could serve about 13,000 students — about twice the students currently enrolled in dual language programs.

“If you take a look at how many people are graduating from the teacher credential programs … that’s not enough to open up hundreds and hundreds of classrooms in dual language from one district to another district,” Allan said.

Teachers weigh dual language track

Dual language teachers need what’s called a “bilingual added authorization” for their teaching credential. Some programs require prerequisites, several additional courses and field work. Then the teacher must apply for the credential through the state. 

Partially driving their lack of interest is the workload – translating materials from English into the target language, for example – and the lack of financial incentives to make pursuing the certifications worthwhile, some teachers told inewsource.

When Lionel Neri Garza was a student at SDSU’s Imperial Valley campus, he was also working as a student teacher at Enrique Camarena Junior High School in Calexico when his boss encouraged him to pursue his bilingual teaching authorization. Garza said he was told the specialty would make him more valuable.

He hopes to get a bilingual teaching job in a San Diego Unified school.

Being able to complete the speciality in about a year all online is what attracted the Mexicali resident to the pathway, he said. But pursuing the specialty was not without sacrifice.  

“Starting the teaching program was another level, like it asked for a big commitment,” he said.  

Before the break of dawn, Garza would cross the border into the U.S. to work as a student teacher and hopefully had enough time to grab a bite to eat before rushing back to Mexicali in the afternoon for class. After class, he’d sometimes take a shower just to wake up so he could focus on a project before going to bed. The next day, he’d repeat the cycle, he said. 

But not all teachers think the speciality is worth pursuing. That’s the case with Azar Robles, who teaches English at San Diego Unified’s Knox Middle School and is fluent in Spanish.

Although the bilingual teaching program at SDSU was advertised when Robles was pursuing her master’s degree there, the time it would take to get the credential and the cost of tuition played a factor in deterring her from the pathway. She said she’s still working off the debt from her masters program, which amounted to about $15,000. 

“I know that here in the United States maybe that’s not a lot, but to me, it’s a dent, it’s something that is there. I could be using that money towards something else. But you know, I’m using it to pay for school,” she said. 

Another reason that holds her back from the pathway is it doesn’t provide professional advancement for obtaining the speciality.  

“I think getting the BCLAD would just be going backwards or going sideways, and I would really like to grow instead of going sideways,” she said. 

Some research shows teachers of color and those who are bilingual experience a higher rate of burnout and turnover compared to other teachers. That’s a problem when it comes to attraction and retention, said Sera Hernández, department chair and associate professor at SDSU.

“If you’re a bilingual teacher and you get to a school and you have to translate all of your materials because you don’t have good quality materials in Spanish and you only have materials in English,” Hernandez said, continuing, “that’s an extra load, and especially if you’re not getting compensated for that extra workload, it’s a big problem.”

Dual language teachers sometimes receive curriculum in English and have to translate the materials into the instructional language, several educators told inewsource. They are also in charge of ensuring school communication between parents who may not know English.  

 

Melissa Taleb, a fourth grade teacher at the Language Academy, said she’s spent a large part of her teaching career looking for curriculum she can use. 

“We try to print authentic text too, so not just like a translated version of the English, but something that was authentically French in the first place that also meets the same standards,” she said. “And that takes an enormous amount of time to find something that’s high interest, accessible and authentic.” 

However, Magee, the district’s spokesperson, said curriculum at San Diego Unified is not translated. 

“Our curriculum is not translated, it is provided (in Spanish) as part of the core curriculum that all other students receive. We work to adopt curriculum from publishers that have a strong Spanish option available,” she wrote in an email.

San Diego Unified teachers were recently granted a raise, which makes teachers Peñaloza happy because she tends to think of the whole group, she said. 

“But I mean, I do have to say that it does feel like you know, I don’t want to be nitpicky, but if I’m doing more than why am I not being recompense for it?” she questioned.

Barrera, the San Diego school board member, said if staffing, recruiting and retaining bilingual teachers is a challenge, the district will address it. But so far, the board has yet to hear that translating curriculum, for example, is driving teachers away. There are many educators that go above and beyond their work duties by creating their own teaching materials, not just dual language teachers, he added.

“At what point do you distinguish above and beyond?” he said. 

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.