In 1953, BĂĄrbara Flores entered kindergarten at Washington Elementary School in Madera, California, a small city in the Central Valley surrounded by farm fields. Her mother and grandmother had talked it up: You’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to like it. She believed them. A little girl who would one day become a teacher, Flores was excited.

But only until she got there.

“I walked out,” Flores recalled recently. She got to her grandmother’s house a few blocks away, furious. “Son mentirosas,” she said. “No entiendo nada. Y jamas voy a regresar.” You’re liars. I don’t understand anything. And I’m never going back.

Flores only spoke Spanish. As the grandchild of Mexican immigrants, she didn’t find her language or culture welcome in the school. But little BĂĄrbara didn’t get her way. And, after depositing her daughter back in the classroom, Flores’ mother asked the teacher a question: Aren’t you paying attention? My daughter walked out. The answer felt like a slap and became a part of family lore. All these little Mexican girls look alike. I didn’t notice.

Flores returned to her old school this fall; the building she walked out of still stands, but almost everything else has changed. Now students speak Spanish because their teachers require them to. Little Mexican girls see their culture celebrated on the walls of every classroom.

Washington students will graduate knowing how to speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, joining a growing number of “dual-language immersion” schools in California. Flores’ eyes open wide as she describes the about-face her alma mater has taken.

“We were punished for speaking Spanish,” she said. “We were hit with rulers, pinched, our braids were pulled. Now the whole school is dual-language.”

The path has not been linear. When Flores was a child, California still had an English-only law on the books from the 1800s. As governor, Ronald Reagan signed a bill eliminating it. Then the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new era of bilingual education, and the California Legislature went further, requiring the model for students still learning English from 1976 until the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1990s. Voters banned it again in 1998, only reversing the latest prohibition in 2016.

Researchers have found bilingual education helps students learn English faster and can boost their standardized test scores, increase graduation rates, better prepare them for college and much more. California has removed the official barriers to offering this type of instruction since 2016, and the state now champions bilingualism and biliteracy, encouraging all students to strive for both. But eight years after repeal, California schools have yet to recover. A decades-long enrollment slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline. And underinvestment by the Legislature, paired with a hamstrung state Education Department, has limited the pace of bilingual education’s comeback. 

The result? A rare case in which Californians can say Texas is inspiring. Both states enroll more than 1 million students still learning English — but last year, the Lone Star State put 40% of them in bilingual classrooms. California managed that for just 10%.

In 1987, Flores didn’t think state policy would go this way. At the time, both states required bilingual education. She was a professor, helping build a bilingual-education teacher prep program at Cal State San Bernardino. Her home state could have kept pace with Texas.

But it didn’t.

The English-only years: 1998 to 2016

By 1998, the bilingual-teacher prep program was flourishing. Flores helped aspiring teachers understand how students learn to read and write in two languages, sending them off into classrooms with binders full of instructional tips. Her daughter, then 10, was learning both English and Spanish through bilingual classes in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Flores was on a parent committee organizing broader support for such programs in the face of a statewide campaign to get rid of them, bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz.

Proposition 227, which passed with 61% of the vote, required schools to teach only in English with students who were still learning the language, something that may sound like a good idea but often ends up unnecessarily putting students’ grade-level learning of other subjects on pause while they master English. Flores saw the impact immediately. Faculty on campus called for the elimination of her program, an effort that ultimately failed but showed, she said, “the intensity of the discrimination and language racism that was prevalent.” Enrollment in bilingual-teacher prep programs across the state plummeted.

Flores also watched local school districts respond. “I was shocked at superintendents in the area,” she said. “They just made everybody throw away their Spanish books. It was horrendous.” As she recalls, every single school district in the Inland Empire got rid of its bilingual programs except San Bernardino City Unified, where parent activism helped ensure the district took advantage of an exception to the new law.

Dual-language students outperform their peers in San Bernardino City Unified

At the time, student achievement data from San Bernardino City Unified had shown that bilingual programs were helping kids succeed. And over the next two decades, researchers studying programs across the United States released a steady stream of evidence about the benefits of bilingual education, especially a version called “dual language.” Traditional bilingual education essentially lets students use their first language while they learn English. Once students become fluent, their schools shift entirely to English instruction, which was the goal all along. Dual-language programs, by contrast, set bilingualism as the goal. Students continue to take courses in Spanish or another language for about half of the school day until they leave the program.

While dual-language programs often stop after elementary school, the “” stretches through students’ K-12 years and into their working lives. Dual-language students have been found to score higher than their peers on both  and exams by middle school. They also get higher scores  in high school, setting them up to be more competitive in college admissions. And importantly, a team at Stanford found that native Spanish speakers were more likely to test out of English-learner services , a coveted goal because of how well “former English learners” do. University of Chicago researchers just released data showing that Chicago high schoolers in this group had  GPAs and SAT scores, high school graduation rates, and community college enrollment and persistence rates.

Patricia Gándara co-directs the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which has published similar findings, and has spent decades of her career cataloging the bilingual advantage. She laments the narrow value placed on bilingual education in the U.S., where it has historically been pursued as a way to help kids who don’t speak English learn the language more quickly and then succeed in English-only classes.

“That’s a very shortsighted view,” Gándara said, “particularly from the research that we’ve done that shows kids who get a strong bilingual education are more likely to go to college, they’re more likely to complete college, they’re more likely to have better jobs and better opportunities.”

Yet while policymakers didn’t catch on right away, well-off and well-educated white parents did, seeing the economic benefits of bilingualism for their children very clearly.

Glendale Unified School District launched its first Spanish-English dual-language program in 2003, going on to add programs in six other languages while official state policy was to ban them. Last year, 85% of the students enrolled were fluent English speakers, according to program director Nancy Hong.

Immigrant families, weighed down by the pressure to speak English and make sure their children do too, have been hard to recruit. Hong said immigrant parents have long been concerned that letting their children spend half the school day or more hearing their home language will get in the way of learning English, even though research has shown it can make the whole process go faster. “The goal is to dismantle those myths and misperceptions,” she said. But even though about 20% of students districtwide are English learners, only about 10% of them are in dual-language programs.

Many immigrant families, however, have become strong advocates for the programs. JosĂ© Sanjas, a Mexican-born father in Madera Unified School District, takes his 6-year-old daughter past her neighborhood school every day en route to one of the district’s dual-language programs. He and his wife want to preserve their native language as their daughter grows up here, but the draw isn’t only personal; Sanjas also sees how bilingualism will benefit his daughter in the workplace.

“She can help more people in the future,” Sanjas said. “Professionally, she’ll be able to serve everyone.”

Spurred on by support like his, a diverse coalition of school leaders in Madera Unified had, by 2016, come to see dual-language education as key to turning around the district’s chronically low performance, especially among the children of immigrants. Flores had helped make the case, inviting school board members to the annual conference of the California Association for Bilingual Education. And in Flores’ hometown, U.S.-born, white families were among those speaking up in support of the programs, knowing even if the immigrant students’ test scores had the most room to grow, their children could benefit too.

Statewide, public opinion had swung in the other direction; that November, about 74% of California voters said yes to Proposition 58, officially allowing bilingual education back in California classrooms.

“It was a relief we [could] finally move forward for our children,” Flores said. “We lost a whole generation of kids — quite a few generations, really — because of English-only.” 

The next generation, however, is still waiting.

A limping recovery: 2016 to 2024

Flores spent 40 years training future teachers before retiring in 2019. Across three institutions and 32 years at Cal State San Bernardino, she likely taught 10,000 students, many of whom remain sprinkled throughout the state’s bilingual-education system. But if anything defines the legacy of Prop. 227, it is the shattered teacher pipeline it left in its wake.

GĂĄndara, of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, said the current state of affairs is “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ 
 I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.” 

California colleges are not producing nearly enough teachers to meet the state’s bilingual-education goals. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — . Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the  in California schools that year. And it actually gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.

The Legislature has not ignored this problem entirely. In 2017, it funded six grants, totaling $20 million, to help districts coach up bilingual staffers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms. But Edgar Lampkin, CEO of the California Association for Bilingual Education, said seeding such “grow your own” programs falls far short of addressing the statewide need. “That’s not systemic,” he said.

In 2022, the National Resource Center for Asian Languages, based at Cal State Fullerton, got state money to train 200 teachers over five years. They’re on track, and the center’s director, Natalie Tran, is proud that their programs are not only increasing the number of teachers certified to teach in Asian languages, but also diversifying the languages they speak. She expects to certify teachers who speak Tagalog, Hmong and Khmer this school year. Still, she said, the state needs to do more to train additional teachers of Asian languages, including the less common ones. “We’re going to need help from policymakers to make this happen,” Tran said.

She isn’t the only one calling on lawmakers to be part of the solution. Anya Hurwitz is executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit that got its start as an initiative of the Sobrato Family Foundation to address achievement gaps between immigrant and native-born children in Silicon Valley. She says the state underfunds education, which gets in the way of doing what’s best for kids who don’t speak English.

In 2022, the last year for which  is available, New York spent almost $30,000 per student. California spent about $17,000. And besides its support for teacher training, the Legislature has only given districts  extra to start or expand dual-language programs. In Massachusetts, home to about one-tenth the number of kids still learning English, the Legislature disbursed $11.8 million for the same work, kicking off its own recovery from an English-only law.

“Funding is not the solution to everything in and of itself,” Hurwitz said, “but at the same time, we can’t build capacity without funding and resources.”

Back in Flores’ hometown, Madera administrators have been able to use state and federal money earmarked for their sizable number of immigrant families and those living in poverty to achieve their dual-language goals. But startup costs for dual-language programs are expensive. Teacher preparation programs, Superintendent Todd Lile said, are not producing graduates who are ready to do this work, leaving districts like his with steep professional development costs.

A residency program with Cal State Fresno has given Madera a solid pipeline of teachers, but the recent grads have to clear all the usual hurdles of being new to the profession while also adapting to using Spanish in the classroom. While these new hires at Washington Elementary School grew up bilingual, they went to school through the Prop. 227 years, meaning most of them didn’t develop an academic vocabulary in Spanish.

Viviana Valerio, a kindergarten teacher, said that history made bilingual education an intimidating proposition. “I commonly speak Spanish at home, but then when I was thinking about teaching, I was thinking, ‘OK, academic terms, I don’t know how to translate that,’ or ‘Parents ask me a question and I can’t think of it, I’m going to want to transition into English,’” she said. “For me, that was the scary part.”

Texas, too, lacks bilingual-education teachers, echoing a shortage present in much of the country, but the state is far ahead of California; many districts are able to recruit their own alumni because their programs have been around so long. Texas also continues to invest in bilingual education, helping districts comply with state mandates to offer it. Like California, Texas gives districts more per-pupil funding for every student still learning English; unlike California, Texas offers an additional premium for each of them enrolled in a dual-language program.

As an extra incentive to start and maintain these programs, Texas has started bumping up funding for the native English speakers enrolled too. Research shows the programs work better when classes are evenly split between native English speakers and speakers of the program’s second language. Then, not only are students learning their second language from the teacher but from their peers as well. Conveniently, this also makes for more integrated classrooms, something Gándara said California needs.

“We haven’t been able to take advantage of that, in large part because people don’t pay attention to that as a major issue and also because we don’t have the teachers to pull it off,” Gándara said.

Indeed, districts across the state cite staffing as a major barrier to starting or expanding their programs. Some have gone abroad to recruit. Others have been forced to scrap their plans entirely. Newark Unified School District, in the Bay Area, got rid of its dual-language program this year because it couldn’t find teachers to staff it. “We tried everything,” said Karen Allard, assistant superintendent of education services.

For more than a decade now, the state’s Education Department has tried to champion bilingual programs. Students who can prove their fluency in two languages before graduation get a special seal on their diplomas. The department also implores schools to help the children of immigrants maintain their home language while learning English, building that recommendation into its 2017 . By 2030, it wants half of California students on a path to .

Yet all of this largely amounts to cheerleading. The department is , a result of the state’s commitment to sending almost all K-12 funding directly to school districts, and its support for bilingual education has not come with any firm demands.

Conor Williams, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently found himself — a self-described “professional lefty” — in the surprising position of . Besides following Texas’ lead on funding, he said, California should rethink teacher licensing. The state requires college graduates to pass a suite of tests to become teachers, but Williams points out the tests don’t lead to better instruction and can keep good teachers from classrooms. Getting rid of the requirement could bring more bilingual adults into the profession and expand the teacher pipeline.

Hard to overcome, however, is California’s shift toward more local control over schooling. Williams doesn’t always agree with what the Texas education department does with its power, but the state’s centralized approach means it has “enough power and muscle and will to set rules and hold districts to them,” he said. California’s  is widely popular and has ensured districts get more state money to serve students still learning English as well as those in foster care and low-income households. But, Williams points out, local control has its limits.

“You don’t win civil rights battles by leaving it up to local school boards,” he said.

Still, districts like Madera are moving ahead on their own. In 2020, Flores’ alma mater, Washington Elementary, became Madera Unified’s second dual-language school, welcoming its first class of kindergartners who are expected to leave proficient in both English and Spanish.

Mateo Diaz Zanjas was one of them. He’s now a fourth-grader and speaks in easy Spanish about the school and his long-term dream of going to Harvard. Upon hearing that he and his peers speak very good Spanish, he eagerly replies: “We also speak good English.” And he proves it, going on to answer questions in English about his favorite subjects and the languages he speaks with certain friends.

Administrators, however, are still waiting for the data to show that their bet on bilingual education will pay off in student achievement gains. The pandemic interrupted their early years and set them back, and the oldest students aren’t doing as well as district leaders would have hoped. Commitment to the programs, however, has not waivered. Students’ overall test scores remain low, but their growth scores — or how much they learn over the course of the year — are high.

The district is helping students learn English more quickly, too, meaning they are becoming “former English learners” faster with the newer supports and joining the district’s highest-performing student group.

In the meantime, Madera teachers are using bilingual education to give Spanish speakers grade-level material, knowing that once they sharpen their English skills, all that information will transfer.

“Kids can learn math in Spanish; it’s still math,” Lile said. “They can learn social studies in Spanish; it’s still history and geography. These subject matters don’t exist only in English.” 

During Flores’ recent visit to Madera Unified, she heard Lile describe his long-term goals for the district, including higher graduation rates and better college readiness for the children of immigrants. She looked on proudly, sure her hometown district was finally getting it right.

An uncertain future: 2024 and beyond

A few years ago, Flores introduced Lile to Margarita Machado-Casas, a professor at San Diego State’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education, which has long been a top producer of the state’s bilingual teachers. Machado-Casas is helping the district figure out what concrete steps teachers and administrators should take to follow the high-level recommendations of the state’s English Learner Roadmap. They started out with “Principle 1,” which asks school and district staffers to see immigrant students’ language and culture as assets rather than seeing their lack of English proficiency as a deficit. Pointing to Madera’s long and painful history of discriminating against immigrant students, including Flores, Machado-Casas said this principle unexpectedly took the entire first year, requiring “courageous conversations” — including asking staffers to think deeply about whether they believed in the work enough to stay in the district.

Machado-Casas is helping educators in Madera understand both how to help immigrant students tackle grade-level material and convince them that the students can handle it.

Flores hopes the work ends up being a playbook for the entire state — which could soon need one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed  this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the road map’s guidelines and report on their progress.

This planning process guarantees California will be over a decade into its recovery from the English-only years before the state even considers holding schools accountable for changing their practices. When New York passed a blueprint for how to serve English learners in 2014, it followed it up with new state regulations that same year, creating stricter policies for serving students who were still learning English, including a broader mandate for bilingual education, which had already been required for decades.

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez leads the California Education Department’s multilingual support division. She said state budget limitations have gotten in the way of implementing the English Learner Roadmap and said any call to require bilingual education like Texas or New York would have to come from the Legislature, not the department. “That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.

Advocates caution such a mandate would have to come with enough funding to help districts create high-quality programs, but many agree it would be a win for California students. Children from immigrant families speak , according to the Education Department, but 93% of them speak one of 10. To require bilingual programs, the Legislature would likely tweak the current law, which says if the parents of 30 or more students in a single school request a language acquisition program, the school has to offer it “to the extent possible.” Texas, Illinois and New York have similar laws, but instead of requiring bilingual programs in response to parent advocacy, they do so based solely on enrollment.

Flores thinks the state is at least moving in the right direction. And Madera Unified gives her hope. During her recent visit, she was flooded with memories: She saw the tree she and her friends used to circle while playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” She visited the classroom she walked out of as a 5-year-old, where the walls are now decorated with vocabulary in Spanish as well as English. She suffered in that room 70 years ago. Now, little Mexican girls do not.

“We don’t stop,” she said. “We keep plugging away. That’s our tenacity. That’s our grit. And our motivation, of course, is for our children.”

This was originally published on .

“I’m teaching in a neighborhood that I grew up in,” said Lee. “I’m really a part of this community, like, I have more of an obligation as an educator to really serve the individuals that I’m working with. I think that’s what connected me with families more so it helped me be more involved with other curriculums around the school.” 

This matches the campus mission. Camino Nuevo — “New Way” in English — is a school tailored to its diverse, polyglot community’s needs, but it’s probably better understood with the operational arrow inverted: This is a school that exemplifies and expresses that community and its aspirations.

Its Burlington campus, in Central Los Angeles, is just west of downtown in a vibrant, plural area bursting with linguistic and cultural assets. Lee, a child of , grew up nearby speaking Spanish, English, and (some) Cantonese. The large majority of Camino Nuevo students identify as Latino and come from families where Spanish and/other non-English languages are spoken. 

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Burlington — the flagship campus of Camino Nuevo’s LA charter schools network — would host a pioneering response to California’s persistent shortage of bilingual teachers. After all, Camino Nuevo-Burlington served as a  during California’s 18 years of mandating English-only instruction. Only a small number of schools were able to secure waivers from the policy and keep bilingual education’s fire burning in the state. 

When that mandate was lifted in 2016, schools across the state began the arduous task of returning non-English languages to their campuses. Or, put better, they started working on bringing those languages to the front of classrooms — the linguistic diversity of California’s students had persisted through its decades as an English-only state. In 2023,  spoke a non-English language at home, and the number is much higher . 

At Burlington,  are currently classified as English learners — and that number does not include former English learners who have reached proficiency in English but also speak other, non-English languages. 

Despite this abundant multilingualism, California schools and districts have struggled to regrow their bilingual programs in the past eight years. Asked why they’re struggling to overhaul their English-only classrooms, school leaders here almost universally raise the same challenge : they can’t find enough bilingual teachers. 

Compared to California’s students, . Just 27 percent of California teachers speak a non-English language at home. Over 60 percent of California teachers are white, compared to just 22 percent of California students. 

“Post-pandemic, we realized that we had to do something about this because we had teachers leaving and there were no new teachers coming in,” says Camino Nuevo leader Adriana Abich. 

How can this be? , of all places, to build a bilingual teaching force that reflects the burgeoning linguistic diversity of its student population? 

Above all, it’s because teacher training pipelines and state credentials — in  and in most states — are inflexible, expensive, and largely designed for monolingual teacher candidates. 

“In California, there’s so many layers to becoming a teacher, [particularly] a lot of testing” says Camino Nuevo principal Juliana Santos. “We’ve lost some wonderful, high-quality teachers because they couldn’t pass those tests.”

To get , young adults first need to complete a bachelor’s degree, in a state where  at four-year public colleges and universities, and room and board charges add thousands more. Most candidates then need to enroll in  to get their preliminary teaching license — which often adds tens of thousands of dollars more in cost. 

Teacher candidates must also complete  of student teaching and pass a battery of tests (in English) covering everything from knowledge of the U.S. Constitution to subject matter expertise and pedagogical methods. Further, to be eligible to teach in bilingual classrooms, candidates also need a , which requires extra coursework and successful passage of additional language exams. 

These various requirements often serve as diversity filters, blocking bilingual teacher candidates who cannot easily pay for years of coursework, multiple testing fees, and many months of unpaid student teaching. Even those bilingual candidates who are able to clear these financial obstacles may be filtered out by the necessity of passing multiple teacher credentialing assessments in English — even though there is overwhelming demand for their abilities to work and teach in Spanish or another non-English language. 

Perhaps worst of all, there is little research suggesting that these credential requirements reliably produce higher quality instruction — in English-only or bilingual classrooms — let alone better academic outcomes for students.

Since it couldn’t find the teachers it wanted post-pandemic, Camino Nuevo decided to train its own. Last fall, it partnered with a handful of local schools and Loyola Marymount University’s (LMU) School of Education to launch , with three dedicated residency pathways: bilingual, English-only, and special education.  

“Basically, it’s a program to disrupt the typical approach [to teacher preparation], where you don’t get paid for work. You sit side by side with a master teacher and you learn as a student teacher,” Abich says. “My main thought was, ‘How do we make it work for people of color? How do we make it so that, number one, people are getting a living wage when they come and do a residency with us?’” 

To that end, AVANCE residents’ daily work counts towards their required student teaching hours. Unlike most student teachers, they receive a salary — along with tuition stipends and payments to cover testing fees  — for a   of nearly $50,000. In return, residents work with students alongside  at one of the participating schools’ campuses (their mentors also receive a stipend for their participation). 

While , the University provides scholarships that reduce costs by roughly half — and AVANCE provides an additional scholarship that brings the total cost down to $8,000 (or $10,000, if they are seeking a special education credential). State-sponsored scholarship programs for teachers can further reduce costs, provided that residents go on to spend at least four years in the classroom once they earn their teaching credential. 

During their residency year, AVANCE participants take coursework both online and in person as a cohort, studying trauma-informed pedagogy and weekly coaching sessions to give them practical guidance for their specific roles — in bilingual education and/or special education. “These are our way of saying, ‘this is the reality of the theory you’re hearing about in your classes,” Abich says. “This is the real stuff.” 

To ensure that candidates can get over the state’s testing hurdles for teacher credentials, AVANCE residents also receive free test preparation materials through a partnership with . 

As it launches its second year, it appears that the program’s blend of support and flexibility is meeting its goals. Across the first two cohorts, 97 percent of AVANCE residents identified as BIPOC. Nearly 70 percent of the first cohort are already leveraging their language abilities to launch careers as lead teachers in Camino Nuevo’s bilingual classrooms, and another 24 percent are on track to take on lead roles once they complete their final credential requirements.

In a state starving for bilingual teachers, high-support, low-cost residencies like AVANCE could be a policy camino worth exploring. The key, Abich thinks, is to design these programs with teacher candidates’ specific strengths and challenges in mind. 

In Camino Nuevo’s case, she says, “We were focused on our community. We wanted people from the community to be in those teacher roles.”

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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Here are our takeaways:

1. Bi- and multilingualism are the norm. Most people around the world speak more than one language, said Viorica Marian, professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication and author of . The United States has among the greatest share of monolingual people, and many mistakenly assume that English is our official language, but the percentage of bilingual speakers is rapidly growing. Upper middle class families understand the power of bilingualism, she noted, but in low-income immigrant families, children are often pressured to stick with English.

Claude Goldenberg, professor emeritus at Stanford University, who was born in Argentina and grew up bilingual, said, “There’s an overlooked American tradition of bilingual education,” which various cultural moments — for example, anti-German sentiment during World War I — have suppressed over the years. He described bilingualism as “an intellectual and cultural resource and tradition we’re not taking full advantage of.”

2. Language is good for the brain. When it comes to young minds, Marian said, “The richer the input the better.” She referred to language acquisition as a way of “building other roads to reach your destination.” The early years are when these neural pathways are the most agile. Furthermore, bilingualism has been shown to postpone dementia and cognitive decline in seniors.

Martha Martinez, senior director of Research and Evaluation, , asserted that “reading is an inherently cultural activity.” In other words, denying or restricting children’s access to their cultural heritage impedes early literacy. Knowing more than one language increases awareness of language components and the way language works.

SEAL, a research-based English learner and bilingual education model, has been working with educators and school leaders from more than 100 elementary schools and 130 preschool classrooms in California for 12 years. While schools in the state are required to provide access, services and grade-level content for multilanguage learners, this often isn’t the case.

3. Discrimination is rampant. According to the , 20% of Latino children encountered bullying or shaming for speaking Spanish at school within the last year. Speaking with an accent or displaying other signs of coming from another culture can subject children and families to negative stereotyping and to what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Discrimination is passed down from generation to generation, and parents who have been subject to it may want to protect their children by discouraging their home language, but when we, as a society, confront racism and bigotry, we can normalize bilingualism and recognize it for the asset that it is.

4. Misinformation persists. Stechuk summarized the report . Despite decades of science showing that infants and toddlers can distinguish among two or more languages, so-called experts continue to tell parents otherwise. Too many teachers, pediatricians and speech therapists continue to embrace the outdated and harmful myth that bilingualism interferes with literacy. “Don’t bring in Spanish now,” one mother was told after her child’s cochlear implants were removed. “You don’t want to confuse him.”

In too many circles, the cultural skill known as continues to be regarded as evidence of disability. “Teachers get caught in the battle,” Martinez said. “They need more support and policies that recognize complexity and diversity.”

5. Educator training is part of the solution. According to Stechuk, postsecondary curricula for teachers often lack coursework about dual language development or cultural responsiveness. Martinez urged colleges to tell educators in training: “Nurture their genius, don’t squash it.” School administrators, Goldenberg said, need to build respectful community relationships. “What do good teachers do?” he asked. “They create a sense of belonging. They create the opportunity for learning, starting every morning. Otherwise you lose the whole day“

Bilingualism Resources

• • (UnidosUS)
  • (National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine)
  • (The Century Foundation)
  • (The Century Foundation)
  • (IlluminatEd)
  • (IlluminatEd)
  • (American Federation of Teachers)

When parents learn their child has a developmental disability, they often have questions about what their child may or may not be able to do.

Children with developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome, often have challenges and delays in language development. And for some families, one of these questions may be: “Will speaking two languages be detrimental to their development?”

However, studies consistently demonstrate exposure to an additional language, including a minority language, . This highlights the importance of giving children the opportunity to become bilingual.

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Many parents feel speaking one language would be easier than two. Some may feel for a child with a developmental disability. This is a belief which is also sometimes held by teachers and clinicians who may be consulted on their view towards bilingual exposure.

With good intentions, paediatricians, speech–language therapists, teachers or social workers to avoid using a heritage or minority language in the home, as children will also be exposed to the majority community language.

Research also shows children with disabilities may have in a second language.

However, bilingualism is possible for children with developmental disabilities, as our research on children learning both Welsh and English shows. Children who are able to access bilingual provisions may also benefit. In fact, research shows bilingualism may have a .

Bilingualism in Wales

The most recent census data for England and Wales suggests from 19% in 2011 to 17.8% in 2021. The largest decline was in those aged between 5 and 15 years old.

While these latest figures are unexpected and , the age group with the highest percentage of Welsh speakers was also children between the ages of 5 and 15. This gives a promising outlook for the future of the Welsh language.

Crucially, converging evidence shows bilingualism does not cause .

Parents may have reservations about Welsh-medium education if they do not speak Welsh themselves, for example. Parents of autistic children or children with developmental disabilities may have further reservations still.

Once again though, studies show for these groups either. This includes children with more

Why parents should embrace bilingualism

Regarding children with Down syndrome, . Indeed, our research suggests families should embrace bilingualism. We recruited children with Down syndrome alongside typically developing children who were either acquiring only English, or were exposed to both English and Welsh. These children completed a range of specialist tasks to assess their cognitive and language skills.

We found Welsh-English bilingual children with Down syndrome had comparable English skills in important language areas to children with Down syndrome who had only been exposed to English.

Meanwhile, the bilingual children were also developing skills in their additional language. Those also acquiring Welsh had similar abilities in that language as younger children without Down syndrome, who were at the same level of development.

Children with Down syndrome should therefore be supported in accessing similar educational provisions as more typically developing children. In the context of Wales, this could mean accessing Welsh-medium schools or being included in second language classes.

In Wales, parents can opt for their children to receive Welsh-medium education, regardless of their home language. Children who receive Welsh education can flourish if they have access to bilingual education.

Research on typically developing bilingual children and adults suggests there may be other . These include better mental skills, creativity and even the possibility of being , such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Being bilingual opens up a range of opportunities such as , and .

Research shows some of these benefits, such as enhanced thinking skills, .

Giving children the opportunity to develop abilities in two languages also enables them to be able to choose what language they want to communicate in. It may also make them feel connected to their community.

These findings challenge the view that bilingualism is detrimental to children’s development. In contrast, including children with developmental disabilities in bilingual provisions gives them the chance to blossom alongside their typically developing peers.

As a result, families should feel empowered to reach informed decisions for themselves by considering the potential opportunities being bilingual may provide.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .