Ang artikulong ito ay makukuha sa Filipino. In a small office at a California university’s teacher education department, a single faculty member is doing the work of an entire department: recruiting bilingual candidates, writing bilingual curriculum, teaching classes bilingually, arranging bilingual student teaching placements in bilingual classrooms, and personally mentoring every bilingual student in the program. There is no staff. There is no dedicated budget line. This one person is a bilingual authorization program coordinator, and in most cases, that person’s commitment is the primary reason California’s bilingual teacher pipeline exists at all in that region. We know this because we spent the better part of a year asking. As researchers affiliated with the California Association for Bilingual Teacher Education (CABTE), we interviewed coordinators from all 49 state-authorized bilingual preparation programs, spanning from rural areas in Northern California, the Central Valley, the Bay Area, and the urban southern areas of the state. We convened focus groups and surveyed practitioners across our diverse state. What we found is the basis for a policy brief we are releasing this month with Californians Together, and it shapes everything we want to say here. The people holding the pipeline together are doing so at personal cost, and the pipeline remains fragile as a result. California has made genuine progress toward its Global California 2030 goals, the California Department of Education’s 2018 commitment to raising a generation of multilingual students. The number of bilingual teaching authorizations issued each year has more than doubled over the…
