The national shortage of multilingual educators has and led school districts to travel overseas and off the U.S. mainland to fill vacancies or newly created positions.
Now, a Washington-based think tank has to help school districts and states that want to identify, develop, and hire bilingual educators in their own communities.
In recent years, the Education Policy Program at New America has studied schools in Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington state to learn about the design and implementation of successful grow-your-own programs鈥攑artnerships that prepare residents to work as teachers in their own communities.
Their new two-page resource synthesizes findings from those communities and recent research, outlining key practices and policies for states and districts to consider when launching or fine-tuning their efforts to train and hire bilingual teaching candidates.
The bilingual teacher shortage is widespread: 31 states and the District of Columbia have a shortage of teachers who work in bilingual, dual-language immersion, and English as a second language classrooms, federal data indicate.
The proposed policies and practices include creating data systems to track recruitment, job placement, and retention outcomes and developing teacher certification and licensure systems that offer multiple pathways for candidates to earn teaching credentials. The guide recommends that districts focus on recruiting 鈥渓inguistically and culturally diverse candidates鈥� who are reflective of the need of the community and offer potential candidates paid work experience under the guidance of mentor teachers.
The guide also aims to expand the definition of grow-your-own programs because some districts restrict their recruitment and development efforts by only grooming bilingual high school students as potential hires. That misses a wealth of candidates already working in schools as paraprofessionals or other working adults looking to make career changes, said Amaya Garcia, the deputy director for English learner education with the Education Policy Program at New America.
In previous reports, New America has explored the when they want to transition to a lead role in the classroom and partnerships that help prospective teachers earn paychecks while getting on-the-job training.
鈥淕row-your-own is a much bigger term and concept that is really rooted in this idea of community and that you鈥檙e pulling people from the community to be teachers, and that part of that effort is done through partnerships,鈥� Garcia. 鈥淭hese partnerships, they can be really impactful to promoting candidates鈥� success.鈥�
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