A program that prepares bilingual teachers for the growing number of dual-language classrooms in California is set to end this month, potentially worsening a chronic bilingual teacher shortage.
School districts in California have struggled for years to hire teachers with bilingual credentials. That’s a major obstacle to achieving the state’s goal, under the Global California 2030 Initiative, to enroll half of all K-12 students in “programs that lead to proficiency in two or more languages” by 2030.
The same initiative has set a goal to increase the number of new bilingual teacher credentials from 700 in 2015-16 to 2,000 in 2029-30. In 2019-20, 1,075 bilingual credentials were issued, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.