Nearly 10 years after a decades-long ban on bilingual education was repealed, California is still lagging on providing enough dual language education to its large population of English learners according to a recently release report.

The 50-page-report released in December by the Civil Rights Project out of UCLA found the state is far behind in enrolling students in bilingual programs. With more than one million of the state’s K-12 students being English learners, the authors of the report recommend a handful of steps for the state to protect and promote bilingualism.

“For at least 15, even 20 years now, we’ve had a series of studies that have mostly come to the same conclusion,” said Conor Williams, co-author of the report. “They show that the best way to support young, linguistically diverse English learning students over time is to help support their bilingualism from the beginning.”

The Civil Rights Project, founded in 1996, states it is dedicated to finding “research-based evidence” to support equitable education for all students.

To create a more equitable educational system and take advantage of “multilingual assets,” authors of the report recommend California policymakers expand bilingual education,; invest in growing programs and pathways for bilingual teachers and prioritize access for English learners into bilingual programs.

One explanation for the state’s lag in bilingual education is that it was banned from 1998 to 2016. In 1998, voters approved Proposition 227 which required schools to teach almost exclusively in English, even in schools with high numbers of bilingual students. In 2016, voters approved Proposition 58, which reversed the ban.

Local programs

Since Prop 58 was passed, school districts have been trying to catch up on the decades of missed bilingual education. In Monterey County, 35% of all students are considered English learners, according to Teri Pimentel, communications officer for the Monterey County Office of Education. All of these students are enrolled in programs that “support their language acquisition,” said Pimentel.

Salinas City Elementary School District has seven dual language immersion programs. Out of 8,300 students, nearly 50% are English learners and almost 2,000 are enrolled in one of these programs.

The Dual Language Academy of the Monterey Peninsula also offers students a chance to study in more than one language. The preschool-eighth grade program currently has 415 students attending “linguistically balanced” classes, according to Principal Rita Burke.

Both programs follow the popular 90/10 method which integrates native English speakers and native Spanish speakers. Unlike other English as a Second Language (ESL) models that separate English learners from the rest of the class for periods at a time, this method sees both sets of students learning the same things each day.

For the early years, students are taught 90% in Spanish and 10% in English and the balance of the languages incrementally increases as students reach the upper grades.

Integrating students with different native languages and different cultures allows students to “feel like they’re working together as partners,” said Velma Veith, director of Salinas City Elementary’s Emergent Bilinguals program. “There’s a lot of collaboration and as a result, they need each other … that lends itself to them respecting each other (and) valuing each other’s languages.”

Who will teach them?

The bilingual workforce took a blow because of the ban. Once teachers earned their bilingual certification, districts weren’t necessarily in a rush to hire them. According to the report, only about 5% of new teachers had bilingual authorizations in the 2021-22 school year.

In 2016, “the state popped its head up and suddenly realized it had no teachers that could do this, or very few comparatively,” said Williams.

The ban “didn’t just strip a generation of English learners’ home languages, it also dramatically reduced the system’s ability to support bilingualism in the long run.”

Williams and his co-authors recommend the state pour significantly more funding into training and support bilingual teaching. This includes providing at least $200 million in funding for the next round of grants for the Bilingual Teacher Professional Development Program, launching a statewide program to financially support teaching candidates while they pursue bilingual certification and providing matching funds to districts that implement research-based models to retain bilingual teachers.

“If you try to grow bilingual programming or dual language programming without bilingual teachers, it’s like trying to drive a car with no wheels,” said Williams. “You’re not going to get very far.”

According to Burke, not having access to enough bilingual teachers is a “huge issue.” In the past few years, she said, it has started to become a bit easier to recruit and retain teachers as more universities have been offering bilingual certifications.

Salinas City Elementary works with Cal State Monterey Bay to recruit teachers in the process of completing their bilingual certification. The teachers participate in the district’s dual language summer program to complete the necessary hours of bilingual teaching needed for their certification. That connection helps teachers, students and the district in the long run.

Cognitive benefits

Both local programs require a minimum six-year commitment for students. According to the Civil Rights Project report, there are usually not immediate results when developing bilingualism and true proficiency in another language.

“For the first two or three years, you don’t see a whole lot of English language proficiency growth there … that’s partly because they’re studying both languages,” said Williams. “But after you look back after five or six years, you see that a much higher percentage of those kids have reached proficiency in English and are doing better academically than the kids who are in the English-only program.”

Alongside the linguistic benefits of being proficient in two languages, there is also a range of cognitive and socioemotional benefits to bilingual education according to experts.

“The biggest thing is cultural empathy,” said Burke. “You’re exposed to another culture so you’re developing relationships with other families who might have limited communication.” The school does monthly activities that allow families to come in and share skills like painting or cooking to share cultural experiences.

Kids who develop bilingualism early on also often have better conflict resolution skills and higher emotional well-being, according to Williams. Veith said she often tells parents the program helps students develop more self-control and more attention to detail.

Students in these programs “have a different kind of confidence … because they get to value their linguistic (skills) that they bring to the classroom,” said Veith. “It really helps their self-esteem.”

Expanding access

While the 1998 Prop 227 widely restricted bilingual education, there were still many programs that encouraged bilingualism in well-funded districts mostly populated by white students. The majority of students negatively impacted by this ban were students of color from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

“(The state) has long been willing to acknowledge the value of multiple languages,” said Williams. “They had just targeted a specific group for the stripping of languages and that’s the problem.”

The report suggests state leaders work to not only expand bilingual education access but also prioritize access to these programs for English learners and underrepresented groups.

Supporting bilingual education in secondary schools would also be universally beneficial, according to the report.

By encouraging or even requiring middle and high schools to offer dual language programs, the state would further be supporting a more diverse population of emerging bilingual adults.

“The state ought to put its thumb on the scale acknowledging and prioritizing the emerging bilingualism of its Spanish dominant population, the Japanese dominant population, the Vietnamese dominant population … and all the other languages,” said Williams.

“These are languages that deserve to be supported, not just because more languages are good … but also because this is a core equity matter.”