How California can build a sustainable pipeline of bilingual teachers

Ang artikulong ito ay makukuha sa Filipino.

In a small office at a California university’s teacher education department, a single faculty member is doing the work of an entire department: recruiting bilingual candidates, writing bilingual curriculum, teaching classes bilingually, arranging bilingual student teaching placements in bilingual classrooms, and personally mentoring every bilingual student in the program. There is no staff. There is no dedicated budget line. This one person is a bilingual authorization program coordinator, and in most cases, that person’s commitment is the primary reason California’s bilingual teacher pipeline exists at all in that region.

We know this because we spent the better part of a year asking. As researchers affiliated with the California Association for Bilingual Teacher Education (CABTE), we interviewed coordinators from all 49 state-authorized bilingual preparation programs, spanning from rural areas in Northern California, the Central Valley, the Bay Area, and the urban southern areas of the state. We convened focus groups and surveyed practitioners across our diverse state. What we found is the basis for a policy brief we are releasing this month with Californians Together, and it shapes everything we want to say here.

The people holding the pipeline together are doing so at personal cost, and the pipeline remains fragile as a result.

California has made genuine progress toward its Global California 2030 goals, the California Department of Education’s 2018 commitment to raising a generation of multilingual students. The number of bilingual teaching authorizations issued each year has more than doubled over the past decade, hitting a record 1,370 in 2023-24. Dual language immersion schools are opening in communities that once had none. About 75,000 students earned the State Seal of Biliteracy in 2025. These gains are real, and they were built by tireless educators and advocates who refused to let the vision die.

The question we bring to this conversation is not whether progress has happened. It has. The question is whether the structures we have built are strong enough to sustain it.

They are not, yet. And let us be clear: There is no pathway to a multilingual California without a sustainable bilingual teacher pipeline.

The coordinators we spoke with described programs held together by personal dedication rather than institutional design. One came to university work after watching bilingual teachers in K-12 schools break down in tears, convinced they would not survive their first year. Another put the problem plainly: “Within my institution, I have a lot of autonomy from my dean. It’s the bigger policy issues that feel really defeating right now.” A third had her only course release eliminated in her second year running the program, with no explanation and no recourse.

What these voices describe is not personal struggle. It is a policy failure. Bilingual authorization has been treated as an institutional afterthought: funded when grants allow, starved when they expire. The people holding the pipeline together are doing so at personal cost, and the pipeline remains fragile as a result.

Our research points to five specific actions. None requires inventing something new. Each addresses a gap the field has been naming for years, plain to see. 

Going Deeper

Californians Together and the California Association for Bilingual Teacher Education (CABTE) are hosting a webinar launching their new brief “Toward 2030: A Grounded Call for Action to Strengthen California’s Bilingual Teacher Pipeline.”

Noon on May 26.
Go here to learn more & register

First, protect the people running these programs. Bilingual authorization coordinators need guaranteed release time from teaching to actually run their programs, a vote on institutional decisions that affect them, and a funded statewide network so they are not working in isolation. Right now, many are doing all this on top of a full teaching load, alone.

Second, replace one-time grants with stable funding. Programs need permanent budget lines, not competitive grants that vanish after two or three years. Candidates need financial support, too: tuition waivers for bilingual coursework, a living stipend during student teaching, and loan forgiveness in exchange for a commitment to teach in a bilingual classroom. You cannot build a workforce on goodwill and temporary money.

Third, fix the student teaching placement problem. California cannot credential bilingual teachers without bilingual classrooms to train them in. The state should build a searchable registry of districts able to host bilingual student teachers and pay the cooperating teachers who mentor them. Districts that step up should be rewarded in state grant competitions.

Fourth, give coordinators a seat at the policy table. The people who run bilingual preparation programs know exactly where the pipeline leaks. Right now, state policy is designed without them. CABTE, Californians Together and the California Department of Education should and could establish a standing Coordinator Council that would be formally consulted whenever rules, budgets or legislation affecting bilingual teacher preparation are being decided.

Fifth, stop using a flawed test as a gatekeeping tool. The CSET Spanish exam routinely screens out heritage speakers, the very candidates most likely to thrive in bilingual classrooms. The state should audit the exam for bias, accept a bachelor’s degree in Spanish as a full substitute, and recognize 600 or more hours of supervised bilingual teaching as proof of language readiness. The same fix is needed for CSET exams in Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian languages.

We began by describing one coordinator in one small office. She is not an anomaly. Across California, dedicated professionals are holding up something the state has said it values but has not yet chosen to fully invest in. Five targeted steps would change that: protecting coordinators, stabilizing funding, building placement infrastructure, connecting practitioners to policy, and opening a fairer path to authorization. The foundation is already here. What remains is the decision and resolve to build on it.

•••

Eduardo R. Muñoz-Muñoz, PhD., is an associate professor in the critical bilingual authorization program “Bilingüismo y Justicia” at San José State University’s Lurie College of Education.

Nirmla Griarte Flores, EdD., is an assistant professor in the Education Department at Cal Poly Pomona, where she also serves as Bilingual Coordinator.

Clara Amador-Lankster, PhD., is a professor and director of the Master of Bilingual Education program at National University. She previously worked as a teacher and bilingual coordinator in LAUSD and the Los Angeles County of Education.

Danna Baldwin Moreno is a retired supervisor and lecturer of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she observed, coached, and evaluated bilingual and non-bilingual student teachers.

The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors.

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