Nurturing a Prize : Schools, Colleges Scamper to Lure Bilingual Teachers

It took Darci Cadis only three days as an aide in a primary school classroom to validate her plans to become a bilingual teacher.

As she made the rounds in the English-only class, the San Diego State University senior noticed the puzzled look on the face of Omar, a Mexican immigrant, and realized he comprehended nary a word of instruction.

“How alone, how frustrating, how awful it must be to sit there and not understand anything,” said Cadis, who is fluent in Spanish. “I want to encourage him and all the others like him not to give up.”

For educators throughout the state, future bilingual teachers like Cadis are golden apples ripe for the picking. But there simply aren’t enough with that sense of mission to meet the academic challenges posed by growing numbers of Spanish-speaking students.

The number of students in San Diego County whose first language is not English has risen annually by about 15% during each of the past three years, to more than 63,000 out of a countywide kindergarten-through-12th-grade population of 400,000. More than 80% know Spanish as their first language.

In the San Diego city schools district--the nation’s eighth-largest--almost a quarter of all students are limited-English proficient, with the great majority Spanish-speaking.

This year alone, the district needed more than 100 bilingual instructors. But it attracted fewer than 30, because there is stiff competition throughout California districts for the too few bilingual teacher graduates from state universities.

And competition comes not only from urban systems. For example, Valley Center, tucked away in the county’s rural northeast reaches, needs as many bilingual teachers as San Diego Unified, on a percentage basis, because of the many children of immigrant workers showing up at its doors.

San Diego garnered only two of 30 candidates available last year from the SDSU program, the state’s largest, but the district still would have been short even if it had lured all of the candidates.

As a result, school districts end up using temporary emergency credentials to hire Spanish-fluent people without teaching skills and classroom experience.

Bilingual programs vary somewhat from district to district. In general, bilingual teachers give Spanish-speaking elementary children instruction in math, science and other key academic areas. The children are separately taught English language skills.

By doing so, the school keeps students up in core subjects while working on their English. When immersed in English-only instruction, the children often fail to comprehend the core material for several years, falling behind their Anglo peers while also losing much of their ability to speak Spanish.

Without special teachers, however, students must be put in English-only classrooms.

No quick permanent solution appears on the horizon. Most future teachers now in the pipeline are Latinos, or immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, whose overall numbers at California public universities are still small.

Districts countywide are scrambling to boost the teacher supply, with a host of experimental programs. Among the more promising:

* San Diego Unified will hire 32 Spanish-fluent interns this summer and credential them under new teacher-training courses, using a state law that permits alternatives to university bilingual programs. Interns will teach bilingual classes during the day--supervised on a one-to-eight basis by four master instructors--and take district training at night, once a week for three years.

By offering paid teaching assignments immediately, San Diego hopes to attract would-be bilingual teachers now discouraged by the time and money needed to go through a university program.

* Eight North County districts jointly offer a series of yearlong multicultural seminars to monolingual teachers who want help in learning specifics--such as hands-on demonstrations--to use with Spanish-speaking students in their English-only classes. More than 80 teachers have gone through the 2-year-old program.

* Five promising Latino ninth-graders in the Escondido Union High School District have been awarded scholarships in a new effort to identify promising future bilingual teachers. By annually targeting freshmen-year teen-agers, Escondido believes the students will have time to strengthen their native Spanish fluency and to take the necessary academic courses required for college teacher-preparation programs.

* The B-First Club at San Diego High School downtown connects bilingual high school students at the heavily Latino campus with SDSU undergraduates working toward bilingual teaching credentials. Some 40 high school students now drop in every weekday after school--and on Saturday mornings--for tutoring in academic subjects from the undergraduates, as well as for practice in Spanish. The groups play softball, watch movies and have picnics on the weekends, all in an effort to build a stronger sense of identity.

“I want them to understand that maintaining their Spanish is important, and also to see that being a teacher in the truest sense of the word is more than just standing up in front of a class,” said SDSU professor Rafaela M. Santa Cruz, who designed B-First.

* A new San Diego State program will encourage freshmen and junior Latino students to consider teaching careers. Prof. Richard Pacheco, using a three-year $65,000 private grant, will partner the students with successful teacher-training candidates, give them extra counseling and arrange part-time teachers aide jobs.

“More Latinos have to feel part of the academic environment so that they don’t see courses as obstacles in their way to becoming teachers and thus begin to lose interest,” said Pacheco, who heads SDSU’s bilingual credential program.

In fact, Pacheco does not blame San Diego city schools for setting up its own program to supplement those at Cal State and UC campuses.

“For years, universities have dropped the ball, even though we were being told that schools would need more and more bilingual teachers down the road,” Pacheco said. “But universities made no foreign language requirements for the teaching credentials so we graduated 7,000 teachers (statewide) last year with only 400 or so bilingual.”

Efforts at the high school level might ultimately prove more valuable, especially in encouraging more Latino students to consider teaching careers, many bilingual teachers and students believe.

All but two of the 30 seniors in Pacheco’s class, who are now preparing for the one-year credential program next year, were fluent in Spanish by the time they entered SDSU. They point out that many students whose first language is Spanish still need to work on their skills, especially in reading and writing fluency.

“My parents tell me to keep my culture alive,” said Daniel Terrazas, a San Pasqual High School freshmen who received one of the five Escondido scholarships. His interest in teaching was sparked by instructor Rafael Sanchez while a student at Marston Middle School in San Diego.

“His Spanish was good and that made a real difference for me at the time in math, because I didn’t understand English much at first,” Terrazas said.

Many also see themselves as role models.

“I came to this country like many of these students have,” Angelica Silva, a SDSU senior said, “and I want to share my own background with them and make sure they don’t fall behind.”

Valley Center fourth-grade teacher Lorena Guerrero-Lopez recalled being tracked as a student in San Diego city schools “and not allowed to take certain college preparatory courses because the teachers thought my (native) language had held me back academically.

“That’s why I want to fight for these students today and get more through the system,” said Guerrero-Lopez, a graduate of UCSD’s small but well-respected bilingual teacher program.

She credits La Jolla High Spanish teacher Sandra Scherf with prodding her to maintain her Spanish. Each year, Scherf shepherds dozens of Latino students, who garner high scores on the Advanced Placement exams in Spanish literature--scores that give students college credit while still in high school.

Non-Latino students must work hard to learn Spanish--an effort that also gives them a sense of what children in their classrooms face while tackling English.

“It’s awfully hard to be ready for the program unless you know the language by your first year of college,” Lisa Wood, a San Diego State student teacher, said.

But second-language ability by itself is not enough to prod most Anglos to go into bilingual teaching, they say.

“There has to be another motivation, such as an interest in multiculturalism,” said Valley Center first-grade teacher Natalie Weston, a UCSD graduate.

Weston first learned Spanish while a student living in Mexico City, “and I was shocked when I returned (to the United States) to see that bilingualism was not valued here.”

Valley Center administrators have persuaded a significant number of Anglo parents to put their children in bilingual classes, to underscore the importance of knowing more than one language. Data shows such students score as well or better than those who have studied in English-only classes, Lucy Haines-Aviles, Valley Center bilingual coordinator, said.

“But too many administrators fear multiculturalism and want (Latino) kids transitioned to English as soon as possible before they are literate” in either language, said Griselda Gottfredson, a SDSU student teacher.

“There probably never will be more than 10% of students who are Latino” at SDSU, Pacheco said. “We have to cast the net more widely. Some of my finest bilingual teachers have been non-Latinos.”

Added Irene Villanueva, director of the bilingual teachers program at UCSD, “Every teacher should be aware of different cultures . . . and that means more than just being fluent in Spanish.”