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. For some, this took the form of a classic student teaching situation, in which the school district would endeavor to hire student teachers once they had completed their degrees.
For one of our participants, the university partnership was a formal career pipeline, integrated into the university’s teaching program, with alternative pathways to certification being offered through the university while teachers worked in the school as para-educators.
Though the majority of universities mentioned in our interviews were close to our participant districts, we decided to reference the OSPI workforce data to see if their bilingual workforce had been educated nearby. Analyzing the recommending agency of bilingual teachers, we thought, should give us an idea of where the district is drawing their talent from.
Unfortunately, the recommending agency data is inconclusive as most of the teachers with bilingual endorsements in our participant districts had recommending agency data marked as “OSPI” or “Null” (see figure 6). More research could be done into which endorsement situations fall into the “OSPI” category and why recommending agency might not contain data.
Clarity on both classifications (or lack thereof) could possibly be obtained through consultation with PESB and could provide valuable insight into where districts’ bilingual teachers are coming from.
The following chart represents the University relationships between three of the districts we interviewed. We omitted data from our other three interviewees to preserve the confidentiality of our districts.
