California must protect coordinators to sustain bilingual teachers

sustainable bilingual – A yearlong study of all 49 state-authorized bilingual teacher preparation programs finds California’s bilingual teacher pipeline is growing—yet held together by overworked coordinators, fragile funding, and weak infrastructure for student teaching and authoriz

In a small office at a California university’s teacher education department, one bilingual authorization program coordinator has become the entire system.

The work is relentless and wide. She recruits bilingual candidates. writes bilingual curriculum. teaches classes bilingually. arranges bilingual student teaching placements in bilingual classrooms. and personally mentors every bilingual student in the program. There’s no staff to share the load. There is no dedicated budget line. In that region, the pipeline exists largely because that one person keeps showing up.

Researchers spent the better part of a year trying to understand whether this was exceptional. As researchers affiliated with the California Association for Bilingual Teacher Education (CABTE). they interviewed coordinators from all 49 state-authorized bilingual preparation programs. spanning rural areas in Northern California. the Central Valley. the Bay Area. and urban southern areas. They convened focus groups and surveyed practitioners across the state. The through-line. they say. is that the people holding the pipeline together are doing so at personal cost—making the pipeline fragile.

California. meanwhile. has made genuine progress toward its Global California 2030 goals and toward 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 past decade. reaching a record 1. 370 in 2023-24. Dual language immersion schools are opening in communities that once had none. About 75,000 students earned the State Seal of Biliteracy in 2025.

The researchers’ question isn’t whether those gains are real. It is whether the structures built to produce them are strong enough to sustain them.

“They are not, yet,” the authors write—then underline the stakes: there is no pathway to a multilingual California without a sustainable bilingual teacher pipeline.

Coordinators described programs held together by personal dedication rather than institutional design. One coordinator said she returned to university work after watching bilingual teachers in K-12 schools break down in tears. convinced they would not survive their first year. Another said, “Within my institution, I have a lot of autonomy from my dean. It’s the bigger policy issues that feel really defeating right now.” A third coordinator said her only course release was eliminated in her second year running the program. with no explanation and no recourse.

The pattern that emerges from those accounts is not just individual hardship. The researchers frame it as a policy failure: bilingual authorization has been treated as an institutional afterthought. funded when grants allow and starved when they expire. In their view. the pipeline’s fragility is directly tied to the way the work is resourced—and the way coordinators are asked to absorb gaps that should be solved through policy.

That work of translation also matters because it is practical, daily, and concrete. The pipeline can’t function if student teachers can’t train in bilingual classrooms, if programs can’t rely on stable money, or if coordinators aren’t protected from being overloaded until the system breaks.

The researchers point to five specific actions. None, they say, requires inventing something new; each responds to gaps the field has been naming for years.

First, they call for protecting the people running bilingual authorization programs. Coordinators need guaranteed release time from teaching to run their programs. a vote on institutional decisions that affect them. and a funded statewide network so they aren’t working in isolation. They emphasize that many coordinators are currently doing this work on top of a full teaching load.

Second, they argue for replacing one-time grants with stable funding. Programs need permanent budget lines rather than competitive grants that vanish after two or three years. Candidates. they add. need support too: tuition waivers for bilingual coursework. a living stipend during student teaching. and loan forgiveness in exchange for a commitment to teach in a bilingual classroom. The researchers write that a workforce cannot be built on goodwill and temporary money.

Third, they say California has to fix the student teaching placement problem. They note that the state cannot credential bilingual teachers without bilingual classrooms to train them in. Their proposal is that California build a searchable registry of districts able to host bilingual student teachers and pay the cooperating teachers who mentor them. Districts that step up should be rewarded in state grant competitions.

Fourth, they want coordinators in the policy room. The researchers say the people who run bilingual preparation programs know where the pipeline leaks. Yet they argue that state policy is designed without them. They call on CABTE. Californians Together. and the California Department of Education to establish a standing Coordinator Council that would be formally consulted whenever rules. budgets. or legislation affecting bilingual teacher preparation are being decided.

Fifth, they argue for changing how the CSET Spanish exam is used as a gatekeeping tool. The researchers say the exam routinely screens out heritage speakers. even though those candidates are the ones most likely to thrive in bilingual classrooms. They call for an audit for bias. acceptance of a bachelor’s degree in Spanish as a full substitute. and recognition of 600 or more hours of supervised bilingual teaching as proof of language readiness. They say the same fix is needed for CSET exams in Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian languages.

The five actions land on a single reality shown in the opening scene: the pipeline is only working as well as it is because individuals are carrying it, often without support built for the long haul.

The researchers also connect their findings to an upcoming public conversation. Californians Together and CABTE are hosting a webinar launching their new brief. “Toward 2030: A Grounded Call for Action to Strengthen California’s Bilingual Teacher Pipeline. ” with a scheduled time of noon on May 26. The brief is being released this month.

The authors point back to that first image—one coordinator in one small office—and insist it is not an anomaly across the state. Dedicated professionals are holding up something California has said it values but has not yet fully invested in. They argue that the foundation is already here, and what remains is a decision to build on it.

Eduardo R. Muñoz-Muñoz, PhD., is an associate professor in the critical bilingual authorization program “Bilingüismo y Justicia” at San José State University’s Lurie College of Education.

Nirmla Griarte Flores, EdD., is an assistant professor in the Education Department at Cal Poly Pomona, where she also serves as Bilingual Coordinator.

Clara Amador-Lankster, PhD., is a professor and director of the Master of Bilingual Education program at National University. She previously worked as a teacher and bilingual coordinator in LAUSD and the Los Angeles County of Education.

Danna Baldwin Moreno is a retired supervisor and lecturer of the Department of Teacher Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she observed, coached, and evaluated bilingual and non-bilingual student teachers.

The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors.

bilingual teacher pipeline CABTE Californians Together Global California 2030 bilingual authorization coordinators student teaching placements CSET Spanish exam multilingual students State Seal of Biliteracy dual language immersion