Faculty Can’t Fill Bilingual Needs of State

Children in kindergarten probably will graduate from high school before California school districts have the necessary number of bilingual and minority teachers, education experts said at a legislative hearing Tuesday.

An additional 20,000 new bilingual teachers will be needed statewide over the next 10 years, educators told the state Assembly Education Committee meeting in Los Angeles. Last year, only 415 students who graduated from California colleges qualified to apply for a state bilingual teaching credential, said Jim Parker, research coordinator for the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

“That is nowhere near enough,” Parker said.

While educators offered no immediate solutions, they said there are not enough minority and bilingual college students studying to be teachers.

“Unless we bring more bilingual and bicultural teachers into the classroom we are not going to be successful educators,” said Linda Wong, director of California Tomorrow, a nonprofit group studying the state’s ethnic diversity.

Wong said providing proper education for minority students--Latino, African-American and Asian--is crucial because the students eventually will constitute 80% of the workers entering the job market in California. The majority of the state’s public school students are ethnic minorities.

Assemblywoman Teresa P. Hughes (D-Los Angeles), chair of the education committee, said some of the blame must be shouldered by California colleges for not properly preparing minority students, who fail the state teacher exam in greater than average numbers.

Representatives of the California State University system said campuses are recruiting minority and bilingual teacher candidates, but more state grants are needed to assist working students.

“We have to convince (lawmakers) that these grants are a good investment,” said Jud Taylor, dean of the teacher education program at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Raymond E. Castro, director of policy research for the Tomas Rivera Center, a national institute for policy studies, said the teacher shortage reflects the school dropout rate among minority students.

“There are three or four spots along the pipeline that we lose them,” Castro said. “The ones that are left are stolen by other professions.”

Officials of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, said that despite aggressive recruiting efforts and a starting pay of nearly $35,000 a year, only about 10% of the system’s 28,000 teachers have bilingual credentials.