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 were 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.

We also encountered data quality issues when trying to determine a teacher’s recommending agency. For this reason, we were not able to determine where our district’s bilingual teachers were educated. Many records have a null value in the recommending agency field and many more have “OSPI” in this field, which could mean any number of things.

PESB would need to be consulted as to the meaning of OSPI as a recommending agency in order to properly clarify this data, which would be a good subject for further research. If the OSPI designation represents the use of alternative pathways to education, for instance, that could be significant.  

Dual language teachers are not flagged in the OSPI workforce data, and this was the most significant limitation we encountered when conducting our research. Having this indicator will demonstrate the rate of ELL and bilingual education endorsement amongst teachers in dual language programs and provide a better picture of the current state of the workforce. Additionally, if we had known which teachers were teaching in dual language then we could have calculated the rate of conditional certifications in the dual language workforce.

OSPI has identified this need and will be putting these identifiers in place starting in the 2020-2021 school year (P. Finnegan, personal communication, May 19, 2020). Using this new data to investigate whether conditionals are being used at a higher rate to staff dual language programs would be a good subject for additional research.

Another limitation of our research was that the districts we spoke with were mostly in suburban or city areas. Additional research could be done on the tactics being employed by rural districts to build their dual language workforce. Since we spoke only to districts that had established dual language programs, it would also be worth researching how districts with brand new programs are recruiting dual language teachers.

One of the most important steps towards OSPI’s goal of dual language for all will be to increase attainment of bilingual education endorsements, but the literature on barriers to receiving a bilingual education endorsement is limited. Seeking to identify why the number of teachers with this endorsement is not increasing is an important subject for future research.

Finally, one challenge that was mentioned by several our participants was the challenge of finding good, dependable dual language curriculum. More research could be done into the possible benefits of adopting state level dual language curriculum supports.