Bilingual Education Returns to California--Kind Of

For those who have taught or taken education law in recent years, you have probably touched on the seesaw history of bilingual education in our schools.  The trend of the last two decades has included the banning or limiting of bilingual education and the move toward immersion programs.  That shift came to a head in Valeria v. Davis, 307 F.3d 1036 (9th Cir. 2002)--a rather complicated case to teach.  More than sixty percent of Californian's had voted to ban bilingual instruction.  This prompted a legal challenge, alleging that the ban was discriminatory and motivated by ethnic animus.  The court rejected the challenge, reasoning that the motivation behind the legislation was to improve education.  The case involved the same political inequality theory that was recently taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action--the case challenging Michigan's ban on affirmative action. 

While Valeria and Schuette turned out poorly for civil rights advocates, they have now secured a win in the court of public opinion.  California, by a vote of 73-27 percent, just reversed course again and ended the era of English-only instruction in its public schools.  Nuance and problems, however, still loom.  First, as NPR explains,

[I]t'll be up to school districts to decide locally whether they want to offer bilingual education or not, based on parents' demand for it. Under the new measure, if at least 20-30 parents want bilingual instruction for their children, their school will have to provide it. Even if only a few parents want it — less than 20 — that could put pressure on schools to make and force school district officials to intervene and come up with an accommodation.

The main change under Proposition 58 is that parents no longer have to sign a waiver in order to enroll their children in a dual language or bilingual classroom. Under English-only policies, teachers were prohibited from making any recommendation on bilingual education, so that could change too.

Second, California has an enormous capacity problem.  When it banned bilingual education two decades ago, it helped dry up the pipeline of teachers with the training and skills to offer bilingual instruction.  That problem is only further amplified by the fact the general teacher pipeline was also decimated by the recession and state policy in response to it.  As I detail in Taking Teacher Quality Seriously and Averting Educational Crises: Funding Cuts, Teacher Shortages, and the Dwindling Commitment to Public Education, California, along with a number of other states, have a very big hole to dig themselves out of.  In other words, there are not enough qualified teachers to fill basic education spots, much less bilingual education.