California’s audacious goal of having half of all K-12 students enrolled in bilingual education programs by 2030 has encountered one big stumbling block — there aren’t enough qualified bilingual teachers.

To help remedy that, a $10 million grant tucked in the state budget aims to help school districts recruit high school students as future bilingual teachers.

The funding in the that passed Thursday allows schools to partner with community colleges and universities to help students obtain a teaching credential and the bilingual authorization required to teach English learners.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-Chula Vista, said the idea for the legislation came in part from school districts that communicated about their struggles to find qualified bilingual teachers.

“I kept hearing from districts and educators that bilingual students want to become teachers but run into a fragmented system with no clear path through high school, community college, university and credentialing,” said Alvarez.

Researchers and coordinators of bilingual teacher preparation programs applaud the new grant program, but say it’s not nearly enough to meet the state’s needs.

“Grant funding is important, but to me it just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be enough, given our size and also the size of our dreams and our ambitions as a state,” said Lucrecia Santibañez, a UCLA professor and author of two recent reports on bilingual teacher preparation.

The demand for bilingual teachers

California set a eight years ago to enroll half of all K-12 students in programs that help them become proficient in two or more languages by 2030.

But to reach that goal in the next four years, California will need an estimated 6,000 more bilingual teachers.

Several recent reports paint a picture of California’s bilingual teacher preparation as an unfinished quilt filled with gaps, rips and uneven stitching. Not enough bilingual teacher preparation programs exist, the reports found, and those that do exist are too far from the districts with the highest demand for bilingual teachers. 

In addition, bilingual students interested in becoming teachers are often stymied by the extra cost to finish both a teaching credential and a bilingual authorization — which requires several classes and 20 hours of student teaching, and can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 on top of a college degree.

California has more than doubled the number of bilingual authorizations issued to teachers annually, from 617 in 2014-15 to a record 1,370 in 2023-24, according to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Yet Santibañez and other UCLA researchers found that districts issue hundreds of emergency bilingual teacher permits each year for teachers who are not fully qualified to teach bilingual instruction.

The demand for bilingual teachers is not the same everywhere. While some districts have developed thriving dual language immersion programs and found ways to increase their numbers of bilingual teachers, many others lack the teachers and the funding to build these types of programs.

“We’ve worked with districts that have had to close programs they started, and they just couldn’t staff it, and the parents were very disappointed, but the district didn’t want to have long-term subs running their dual language program, which is fair,” said Anya Hurwitz, executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit organization that provides bilingual curriculum training for school districts. “There are other districts that have built more robust relationships with teacher prep programs, but those are the early adopters or the outliers, not the norm.”

Bilingual teaching deserts

The areas in California with the greatest need of bilingual teachers are also the areas where preparation programs are scarce or underfunded, UCLA’s Santibañez said. Imperial County on the Mexico border, as well as Kings and Tulare counties in the Central Valley all have large English learner populations but have no preparation programs nearby.

“We know from the research that teachers and students in college who decide to become teachers like to stay close to where they live,” said Santibañez. “So when the teacher preparation places aren’t really building capacity in a region that has tremendous growth of multilingual learners, it’s going to create that sort of access or needs gap.”

Fewer established bilingual teachers in an area also means there are fewer teachers who can serve as mentors for student teachers, she said.

“We don’t necessarily see somebody from San Diego or even from L.A. making the two-hour trip to Indio or Coachella or Calexico or wherever to do those mentoring sessions. So it is important to grow the capacity where the capacity is needed,” Santibañez said.

Starting in high school

The new legislation responds to some of the researchers’ recommendations. For example, school districts will be given priority for grants if they have a high percentage of students who are English learners and not enough teacher preparation programs. 

Sparking interest in bilingual teaching among high schoolers, as the new grants would do, is crucial, said Adam Sawyer, director of the bilingual authorization program at California State University, Bakersfield. He said his university helps as many as 30 credentialed teachers get their bilingual authorization every year, and also has a bilingual teaching residency established with local elementary school districts that enlists about 10 to 15 student teachers per year.

Sawyer said CSU Bakersfield is working to establish an undergraduate pathway for prospective teachers and a dual-enrollment course for high schoolers, which will start next year. 

“I have always thought this would be a wonderful way to start tapping into high school juniors and seniors that may not have thought about bilingual teaching, but may start seeing that as, ‘Hey, that might be something I want to do!’ ” Sawyer said.

‘A drop of water in the sea’

Still, the new funding, which will be distributed in grants of up to $600,000, is not a lot to address the need for bilingual teachers, educators say.

“It’s not a whole lot of money to do great things,” said Eduardo Muñoz-Muñoz, San JosĂ© State University professor and co-author of a report by the California Association of Bilingual Teacher Education and Californians Together. “It’s a drop of water in the sea.”

Researchers have called for California to collect and publish data on the number of dual language immersion programs in the state, how many students they serve and the number of teachers with bilingual authorizations working in them.

More data would help the state pinpoint where to fund more bilingual teacher preparation programs, Muñoz-Muñoz said. 

Santibañez and Muñoz-Muñoz also recommend the state offer more financial aid for students working on bilingual authorizations on top of their teaching credentials, a stipend for students to complete student teaching in a bilingual classroom, or bonuses for teachers who have bilingual authorizations, which not all districts provide.

“There’s just got to be an incentive,” Santibañez said. “You’re a college student, right? You’re getting your teaching credential, and you speak Spanish because you’re a heritage language speaker. So getting a bilingual authorization seems like something like a slam dunk, right? But you have to pay for it.”

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English-learning students’ scores on a state test designed to measure their mastery of the language fell sharply and have stayed low since 2018 — a drop that bilingual educators say might have less to do with students’ skills and more with sweeping design changes and the automated computer scoring system that were introduced that year.

English learners who used to speak to a teacher at their school as part of the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System now sit in front of a computer and respond to prompts through a microphone. The Texas Education Agency uses software programmed to recognize and evaluate students’ speech.

Students’ scores dropped after the new test was introduced, a Texas Tribune analysis shows. In the previous four years, about half of all students in grades 4-12 who took the test got the highest score on the test’s speaking portion, which was required to be considered fully fluent in English. Since 2018, only about 10% of test takers have gotten the top score in speaking each year.

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Passing TELPAS is not a graduation requirement, but the test scores can impact students. Bilingual educators say students who don’t test out of TELPAS often have to remain longer in remedial English courses, which might limit their elective options and keep their teachers from recommending them for advanced courses that would help make them better candidates when they apply for college.

The way the state education agency currently tests English learners’ skills frustrates some educators who say many of their students are already fully capable of communicating in English but might be getting low marks in the test because of the design changes.

“You’re putting [students] in an artificial environment, which already reduces the ability of students to give you natural language,” said Jennifer Phillips, an educator with two decades of experience teaching bilingual students in Texas. “It’s a flawed system.”

TELPAS scores also account for 3% of the grades the TEA gives school districts and campuses in its A-F accountability rating system. Though they only represent a small portion of their rating, TELPAS scores might be more significant for school districts at a time when they have grown increasingly worried about how the state evaluates their performance. Several districts have sued TEA to block the release of the last two years of ratings, arguing that recent changes to the metrics made it harder to get a good rating and could make them more susceptible to state intervention.

TEA’s use of an automated scoring engine to score portions of TELPAS has also come under scrutiny after the agency used the same tool to evaluate short-answer and essay questions in this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, the state’s standardized test that all students in grades 4-12 take to measure their understanding of core subjects. of using an automated system to score STAAR and list it as one of their complaints in the districts’ latest lawsuit against the state.

Testing English learners’ skills

When students enter a public school in Texas, they are classified as “emergent bilingual” if they indicate they speak a language other than English at home and fail a preliminary English assessment. About a quarter of Texas students have that designation.

Federal law requires Texas to assess English learners’ progress regularly. Texas is one of only a handful of states that developed its own test instead of using the exam used in other parts of the country.

Each spring, about a million emergent bilingual students in Texas public schools take the TELPAS exam, which consists of four parts: listening, reading, writing and speaking.

Before 2018, teachers with TELPAS training would administer the test at students’ schools. Listening and reading evaluations were, and still remain, multiple-choice sections measuring student comprehension. For writing, teachers would gather and assess a sample of students’ work in the classroom throughout the school year. For speaking, teachers would talk to students in one-on-one evaluations or fill out a rubric based on their observations of students’ English fluency throughout the year.

When the TEA moved the test online, it changed the testing environment and scoring method. The change sought to standardize the test and make the results more reliable, an agency spokesperson said. The automated scoring technology helped deliver speaking assessment results more quickly. Last year, the automated scoring system started evaluating students’ written responses.

In each of the four assessment categories, students get a score of beginner, intermediate, advanced or advanced high. Students have to continue taking the test each year until they score advanced high in at least three categories; they may score advanced in the other one and still pass. Before this year, students had to score advanced high in every domain.

Several bilingual educators the Tribune spoke with for this story said the low test scores students have received since the test was changed do not reflect their actual performance in the classroom, adding that many English learners communicate better than their scores suggest. While English-learning students’ scores have since 2021, the TELPAS scores — particularly in speaking — have remained low since the test was changed.

“It is a little disheartening,” said Ericka Dillon, director of bilingual education and English as a Second Language courses at Northside ISD in the San Antonio area. The district has about 14,500 emergent bilingual students, a significant number of whom are proficient in English but struggle to reach advanced high on the TELPAS assessment, she said.

“They’re doing the best that they can, but they still won’t be able to meet that criteria,” Dillon said.

In response to a Tribune data analysis showing that the average number of passing TELPAS scores in speaking dropped after TEA redesigned the test and introduced the automated scoring system, an agency spokesperson said, “It’s not uncommon to see performance adjustments when student performance is evaluated in a standardized manner across the state.” The spokesperson also noted that speaking and writing are by nature more challenging than listening and reading.

The TEA has vigorously defended its automated scoring engine, rejecting comparisons of the technology to artificial intelligence. The agency has said humans oversee and train the system as well as monitor its results. The TEA said a technical advisory council has approved the technology, and when the program encounters a student response that its training does not know how to handle, it directs it to a human to score.

This year, the TEA said that at least 25% of the TELPAS writing and speaking assessments were re-routed to a human scorer to check the program’s work. That number oscillated between 17% and 23% in the previous six years, according to public records obtained by the Tribune.

Score changes after human reviews

One of the reasons educators are skeptical of TELPAS’ automated system is how scores sometimes change when they ask for a review. Humans rescore speaking and writing assessments.

Last year, 9% of the TELPAS speaking assessments that TEA reviewed got a higher score; that number was 13% the year before. The automated system initially scored more than 95% of the assessments that improved after a second look, public records show.

Spring Branch ISD officials said the percentage of assessments that improved after requesting a rescore was even higher at their district. They sent more than 800 speaking assessments for rescoring in 2022, and more than a third got a better score after they were reviewed. The next year, about half of their submissions improved after rescoring, officials said.

“If the evidence from our rescoring submissions is any indication, the system leaves a lot to be desired for its accuracy,” said Keith Haffey, executive director of assessment and compliance at Spring Branch ISD.

It’s unclear how many assessments would lead to a better grade after a second look since most results go unchallenged. The number of rescored assessments each year is less than 1% of the total TELPAS tests administered. Educators say they have to weigh costs and time constraints when deciding whether to request a rescore. Reviews are free if they result in a better score; if they don’t, schools have to pay $50 per rescoring request.

In addition, educators say it’s not easy to decide which results to challenge because they haven’t had access to students’ audio responses. This contrasts with STAAR results: Written student responses are readily available online to districts.

“If we can’t hear how they did on TELPAS, we can’t say if this is where they really are or not,” Dillon said.

The TEA says district testing coordinators can request listening sessions, but some educators said the agency’s director of student assessments told them only parents can request the files. A TEA spokesperson said that person misspoke.

In response to district feedback, the TEA spokesperson said districts and parents will have easier access to all TELPAS responses starting in the 2024-25 school year.

Not an “accurate reflection”

Edith Treviño, known affectionately as Dr. ET, used to be the ESL specialist for the TEA’s education service center in Edinburg. Now she runs a private consulting practice helping students pass TELPAS.

Treviño said she worries that the automated scoring system penalizes students who are fluent in English but speak with an accent, mix in a few words from their native tongue or stray from using academic language.

“Children are not supposed to answer like regular people, according to TELPAS,” she said.

To score advanced high in the test’s speaking portion, students must respond to each prompt with answers that last 45 to 90 seconds. They have two chances to record a response and they need to use academic language fitting their grade level.

But Treviño said the prompts are often simple and do not require long answers. In a recent , she said some questions were like asking students to identify an orange.

Because passing TELPAS is not a graduation requirement and scores only account for a small portion of campus and district accountability ratings, some schools do not prioritize helping students prepare for the test. But the results can affect students’ educational journey.

Many school districts enroll English-learning students in ESL courses, which can prevent them from taking certain electives and advanced courses because of scheduling conflicts. Teachers or staff might also hesitate to recommend a student to advanced courses if they are still taking ESL courses, Phillips said. Those advanced courses, especially at the high school level, are crucial to being competitive in college admissions.

She said any school policies that keep English learners from participating in advanced courses would amount to language-based discrimination. Nevertheless, she said it’s a common practice she’s observed in her career as an educator and while studying for her doctorate in education.

“It’s not in the law, but it’s in practice,” Phillips said.

Not being able to test out of TELPAS can also impact students’ experience in school. Kids failing to pass the test could internalize the failure, which in turn makes them vulnerable to further academic struggles, Phillips said.

“What this does to children’s self-esteem is horrible,” Treviño said, particularly for students who can speak English well but have test results that tell them they are not proficient.

Carlene Thomas, the former ESL coordinator for the TEA who now is the CEO of an education consulting company, said she would like to see the TEA use more sophisticated tools that enable more conversational student responses to ensure TELPAS is “meaningful in how students interact socially and with content material.”

She added that educators should also help students by giving them more opportunities to practice speaking English during class, relying less on direct translation and ensuring they understand the stakes and structure of the test.

But as of now, she said, “TELPAS is not giving us an accurate reflection of where our students are.”

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On a pretty fall day in Massachusetts last week, Morad Majjad began work by checking in with a middle school nurse to see if he was needed as a translator.

By the time the day was over, Majjad — whose title is family liaison for the West Springfield school district but who is better described as “interpreter-in-chief” — had translated for a misbehaving elementary school child, explained to a librarian’s class in another language how to check out and return books, dropped into a kindergarten class with newly arrived refugees who had trouble understanding what they had to do, and jumped onto a rowdy school bus to discuss proper behavior with a group of immigrant kids new to riding the bus.

“At the end of the day, I’m exhausted, but it makes me fulfilled,” said Majjad, a native of Morocco who speaks five languages — Arabic, Berber (a language spoken by many people in Morocco and Algeria), French, Spanish and English — and who is learning Portuguese. “Last year, I helped 300 families. This year, I think I will be able to affect the lives of many, many more kids.”

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The West Springfield, Massachusetts, school district has seen an overwhelming influx of immigrants in the past couple of years, in Massachusetts.

Democratic Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in August because of the rising number of migrant families and called on the federal government for help. She announced in August that Boston and the state will share a $1.9 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to expand shelters and transportation for the new immigrants. But that did not include money for schools. The state is providing schools with extra money for students housed in emergency shelters.

An increase in immigrant kids has created challenges for schools in areas that have seen a recent wave of migrants, from Texas to Illinois, Massachusetts to Florida.

Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 education research at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group, said while many school districts have been dealing with English learners and migrants previously, the wave of the past few months means states are trying to provide guidance to schools without knowing exactly when and from where new students are coming.

“Finding [educators] with the right credentials can be challenging,” she said. “Having students come throughout the year is incredibly challenging.”

Take Chicago, for example. A census of the Chicago Public Schools, updated last week, showed that the “English learners” population grew nearly 11% from last fall to this fall, increasing 7,810 to reach 79,833, according to information provided by the district.

In a typical school year, the district said, there are about 3,000 new English learners, though not all are from migrant families.

The Chicago school district is ramping up recruitment and hiring of educators with bilingual skills. As of the 2022-23 school year, it has about 850 teachers with bilingual credentials and 2,100 teachers with both bilingual and English as a second language credentials, the department reported, up from about 2,100 in 2017.

In the Miami-Dade County School District in Florida, 7,519 new students from other countries had enrolled this year as of Sept. 9, spokesperson Ana Rhodes said in an email. That compares with 13,941 from other countries who enrolled throughout last school year, and 7,436 in 2021-22, she said.

This fall in New York City, a reported 20,000 new migrant students enrolled in public schools.

Increased costs

A large infusion of new immigrant families adds to the costs of schools but not greatly to the tax base that funds them, said Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a national research and advocacy group that favors reduced immigration. In general, schools are financed by local property taxes, though states and the federal government contribute. In some cases, he said, the increased costs are marginal — buying more equipment and books, for example — but others require capital expenditures such as new school buildings.

In addition to language issues, there is a “lack of familiarity with American culture, American education, American ideals,” he added. Those aspects all play into school employees’ work, such as the translations Majjad does in West Springfield. Camarota noted that while the kids generally pick up a new language quickly, parents and other family members acquire language more slowly.

West Springfield Superintendent Stefania Raschilla said the stock of materials she buys every year is based on a set number of students. “With the influx of refugees, it’s been a challenge because the state and agencies don’t know how many are coming, they don’t know the grades they are in, they just show up here,” she said in an interview.

She said space in classrooms, space in buildings, transportation and more than 50 different languages students speak at home are among the other challenges.

She hired a few more English as a second language teachers, anticipating the wave.

Massachusetts and New York City attract many immigrants because of mandates requiring that all people have access to shelter. New York Democratic Mayor Eric Adams recently a judge to suspend the requirement, in the face of overwhelming immigration.

Access to education

Every kid in the U.S. is entitled to an education, no matter how they came to live here. That’s because of a Supreme Court ruling about 40 years ago, in , that said all children are entitled to a free public education, regardless of immigration status.

In 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, the ruling might be ripe for overturning. In comments on Texas radio and to local media, he said that states either should be able to set their own immigration policies, or the federal government should pay for the public education of children without legal status.

In Liberty County, a northeast exurb of Houston, where the immigrant population more than between 2017 and 2022, the Cleveland Independent School District has been unsuccessful in trying to get bond issues passed to build new schools. Undaunted, the school district is seeking $125 million with a bond this fall.

Matt Bieniek, spokesperson for the school district, which serves Liberty County, said the district now has 66 portable classrooms and may have to order more. He said because a state law requires the bond question to be described as a “property tax increase,” people were put off by it, even though it won’t affect property tax rates. But he is hopeful that it might pass this time if there’s better voter turnout.

He said most of the new immigrant population lives in a residential development comprising several subdivisions called Colony Ridge, which has been the subject of discussion by Abbott and the legislature. Abbott  the large number of immigrants buying homes there might become one of the topics to be addressed in a special legislative session planned for later in October.

But immigration status cannot be a reason to deny someone the right to buy property, noted Allison Tirres, a visiting professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, who teaches immigration law. She said those immigrants who are buying homes are contributing to the tax base that funds schools. She said the “knee-jerk” anti-immigrant reaction is to “go scapegoating” when schools get crowded.

The school district’s Bieniek said some resentment in the community comes because “you have some pushback from the community who want things to be the way they always were. We are doing everything we can to continue the small-town feel,” he said, “while getting our community adjusted to the change in the district.”

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