This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
In 1953, Bárbara 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 Bárbara 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.
Related: Widen your perspective. Our free weekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation and inequality in K-12 education.
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.
Related: A superintendent made big gains with English learners. His success may have been his downfall
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, now 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 for students who were still learning the language, something that may sound like a good idea but 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.
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 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 “bilingual advantage” 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 math and English language arts exams by middle school. They also get higher scores on the ACT 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 if they took bilingual classes, 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 higher-than-average GPAs and SAT scores, high school graduation rates, and community college enrollment and persistence rates.
Related: How to keep dual-language programs from being gentrified by English speaking families
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.”
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. José 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 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, white, U.S.-born 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.
Gándara, 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 — across all languages. Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the second-most-common language 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 more 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 federal census data 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 $10 million 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 English Learner Roadmap. By 2030, it wants half of California students on a path to becoming bilingual.
Related: Trump’s deportation plan could separate millions of families, leaving schools to pick up the pieces
Yet all of this largely amounts to cheerleading. The department is minimally funded and staffed, 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 celebrating Texas’ policy over California’s. 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 Local Control Funding Formula 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.
Related: A small rural town needed more Spanish-language child care. Here’s what it took
“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 alma mater 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 a bill 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 108 different languages, 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.”
Tara García Mathewson is an education reporter for CalMatters. You can contact her at [email protected].