Bilingual/Dual Language Education in California Before COVID-19
Bilingual Education has been offered in California public schools for decades given the number of language minority students in TK-12 classrooms. Numbers of English learners have fluctuated from 1.6 million to our current number of 1.4 million students attending school. In order to meet the needs of emerging and developing bilinguals, the state provided traditional Bilingual Education for decades until the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998. This proposition mandated that instruction be delivered predominantly in English with the resulting consequence of eliminating Bilingual education programs as they were implemented (Gandara & Hopkins, 2010).
The implementation of Proposition 227 for almost two decades resulted in the implementation of Structured English Immersion (SEI) where there was no provision for instruction in languages other than English, resulting in the closure of many local bilingual programs and reassignment and miss-assignments of bilingual teachers. Furthermore, IHEs were not able to maintain their Bilingual Teacher Education Programs due to a sustained drop in enrollment and a lack of demand from LEAs for bilingual teachers. Many IHEs closed their Bilingual Teacher Preparation Programs. Currently, California has 30 IHEs offering Bilingual Authorization Preparation Programs as opposed to 80 institutions preparing teachers for Multiple and Single Subject Credentials (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). We are confronted with a serious bilingual teacher shortage to staff the multiple multilingual/bilingual programs offered as a result of Proposition 58 (2016) and a gap in teacher preparation since many IHEs need to establish new teacher preparation programs or re-establish former programs. Currently, there are Bilingual Authorization programs offered by California State University (51), University of California (12), Private IHEs (11), and LEAs (4). The three largest programs are Spanish (35), Mandarin (11) and Korean (6) offered across the state, followed by other programs offered in American Sign Language, Arabic, Armenian, Chinese (Cantonese), Farsi, Filipino/Tagalog, French, German, Hmong, Japanese, Khmer, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian and Vietnamese (Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2019)
In November 2016, the passage of Proposition 58 removed all restrictions on bilingual programs for English Learners by amending and removing key components of Proposition 227.