What strategies are school districts using to build a bilingual teacher workforce in support of effective dual language education?
This paper identifies the unique and shared conditions of Washington state school districts that support hiring to adequately staff dual language basic education programs. How do state level policies influence implementation at the district level? How does state-level policy influence hiring strategies at the district level, and in turn trends in the teacher workforce?
To answer these questions, we analyzed ten years of OSPI workforce data, conducted semi-structured interviews with six school districts in Washington state, and reviewed existing policies intended to grow and develop dual language programs and the bilingual workforce to support them. Interview participants were selected through conversations with subject matter experts, analysis of OSPI workforce data, and the relevant literature.
This paper reviews the existing policy literature on Dual Language funding and incentive programs in Washington State, and attempts to provide definitions of teacher and classroom support workforce roles at the district level. T
his paper also shares interview findings to identify themes of opportunities and challenges at the district level. These challenges represent state policy and funding distribution, and are, ultimately, unique to each district.
Using structure-agent implementation theory as a foundation for our analysis, we were able to effectively compare key inputs to the policy framework that was constant across districts—namely, the status quo, rules, roles, values, and interests of district agents that ultimately feed back into policy a the state level.
To assess the strategies school districts are using to build a bilingual teacher workforce for dual language programs, we collected qualitative data through interviews with administrators at three Washington school districts. Participant selections were informed by conversations with subject matter experts, analysis of OSPI workforce data, and the relevant literature. In selecting districts to interview, diversity of dual language program characteristics and diversity of overall district characteristics was a priority.
To help enrich and triangulate our qualitative findings, we were granted access to workforce data from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. The data set we used contained workforce data for every teacher employed at a Washington public school from the 2010-2011 to the 2017-2018 school year, and contains information on teacher demographics, employment location (school & district), what endorsements and certifications each teacher has, what they are assigned to teach, and which higher ed or state certifying agency recommended them for certification (for many, this serves as a proxy for where they went to teaching school).
Recruiting Strategies: The districts we interviewed reported that they were looking inwards – towards their own people and their own resources – to try and create the workforce that they needed. From our interviews, we found that Grow Your Own (GYO) strategies - defined by PESB as diverse educator recruiting and retention programs that are highly collaborative and community-rooted (PESB, 2018) - were the strategies that districts were employing the most often and the most successfully.
University Partnerships: Our participants all mentioned partnering with nearby universities to attract bilingual talent. This could also be seen as a grow your own tactic, since most of the universities mentioned were local (“community-rooted") and some of the partnerships were highly collaborative.
Increasing Retention: All three of our participant districts mentioned retention as a tactic they were using to build (or keep, in this instance) their dual language workforce.
During the course of our research, we encountered limitations in how effectively we were able to use the OSPI workforce data to triangulate our qualitative findings. Most importantly, there was no indication on any of the records as to whether the teacher was teaching in a dual language program or not. While it is safe to say that a district with a dual language program should have bilingual endorsed teachers, they do not equal each other.
This limited our ability to assess whether teachers with bilingual endorsements are teaching in dual language programs. We also were not able to discover how many teachers teaching dual language were conditionally certified. Investigating how widespread the use of conditional certifications is in dual language programs would be a good subject for future research.
School districts in Washington seem to be looking inward – towards resources and strategies that are within their control – to bolster their bilingual workforce. Some districts are turning to grow your own because they feel like they are on their own, but they are also responding to the unique needs of their districts. For these reasons, they see their community – their current workforce, their students, and their local universities – as their best chance at building the bilingual workforce necessary to support dual language programs.