OSPI’s (2019a) budget decision package notes that, according to a 2018 survey of school district superintendents, the top barrier districts are facing in implementing dual language is finding the workforce.
In mentioning solutions to staffing dual language programs, career fairs were mentioned in one way or another by all of the districts but were not considered an important source of dual language program talent by any of the participants. Some barely mentioned them, moving on to other subjects and never bringing them up again. Other participants declared career fairs to be outright ineffective for finding bilingual and bi-literate teachers with the training to teach a dual language curriculum. Job postings were also barely mentioned or not mentioned at all by participants.
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.
The GYO strategies we were told about were varied and ranged from formal career pipelines to just keeping an eye out around the community. Whichever strategies they were employing – and each district was employing several – our participants all seemed to feel that their best chance of getting teachers for their dual language programs lay within.
One GYO tactic that two of our participants mentioned was trying to get their bilingual students interested in teaching as a profession. One participant told us about the techniques they’re using in grades K-12 to get students interested in teaching:
“At the elementary level we have career fairs that have... an additional focus on education whereas in the past our career fairs were more about engineering and math and doctors and lawyers and CTE and firefighters and police officers and so forth... And then we have an established course at the high school level, teaching Academy that students can sign up for and actually learn and have experiences where they're directly working with children as an instructional aides, alongside a teacher in an elementary classroom, for example.”
One of the participants using this tactic did lament the gap in between high school graduation and when they enter a teaching program. They expressed a desire for “programming that could carry kids through from their high school year to becoming a bilingual teacher four years later.” Explaining that the lack of such a program is “a gap right now in the resources that are available.”
Two of our participants were using GYO strategies that made use of paraeducators as potential sources of bilingual talent but had different opinions of the value of this approach. One district told us that they had initially tried to recruit bilingual paras to become certified teachers, but had a difficult time making it work.
“When we talk about bilingual para pipelines,” they told us, “there is a notion in the [alternative certification] world that there are millions of paraprofessionals hanging around classrooms, not really doing very much... And if somebody would just come up to them and say, ‘Would you like to become a teacher? You can have a scholarship,’ that they would all raise their hands and say, ‘Yes.’”
That administrator then went on to tell us that when trying to recruit bilingual paras, “There were a bunch of people who said, ‘I don't really want to do that.’”
A second district told us that many of its paras were interested in becoming certified teachers. They told us that they were leveraging conditional certifications to help move paras into full time teaching positions saying,
“Currently, if you have a bachelor's – and not even a bachelor's, some of our folks might be biliterate in Spanish – [and] we think they have potential, we will serve them on a conditional certification. In hopes that by us grooming them in a permanent classroom that they'll become certified within three years.”
This same district also mentioned using conditional certifications to hire people with potential from outside the district (this was coded separately – not as a GYO technique).
Conditional certificates, according to the State of Washington Administrative Code 181-79A-231 (2013), are to be used
“to assist school districts, approved private schools, and educational service districts in meeting the state's educational goals by giving them flexibility in hiring decisions based on shortages or the opportunity to secure the services of unusually talented individuals.”
While the use of conditional certificates has its place, the drawback is that students are being taught by a teacher that is not (or not yet) certificated to teach that particular subject.
As you can see in Figure 5, there is an increase in the use of conditional certificates across the state and in our participant districts. The OSPI workforce dataset has the information necessary to tell whether or not a teacher with a bilingual endorsement is teaching on a conditional certificate, but there’s no way to know whether or not that teacher is teaching conditionally in a dual language program, or in a bilingual capacity at all.
A subject for additional research would be investigating whether conditionals are being used at a higher rate to staff dual language programs. If this were the case, then a dual language program would appear to be fully staffed but the students would likely be receiving a lower quality of education.
