Last year, she arrived 15 minutes early to her first fall class with an internship and campus job already in tow, plus a mental map of Cal State University Dominguez Hills, a sprawling, nearly 350-acre institution in the Los Angeles area’s South Bay. 

The already confident student possessed even more motivation to make the most of her time on campus because of a program she took last summer: The First-Year Experience Summer Program.

“Everything was so easy to me, and I’m really grateful, because I know it was because of that First Year Experience that I was able to do that,” said Menera.

The summer program is one of several strategies Cal State Dominguez Hills seeks to expand as it combats a half-decade enrollment slide that’s unraveling its finances. But it’s not the only approach to fiscal right-sizing. Nor is Cal State Dominguez Hills alone in combatting large drops in its student population. 

That’s because the money that the country’s largest public four-year university system needs to properly educate its students isn’t there. Now, California State University is embarking on a detailed, sweeping plan to enroll more students as part of an all-out push to bring much-needed cash to the workhorse system of 22 campuses that educates 471,000 students.

Ten campuses, including Dominguez Hills, saw double-digit enrollment declines in fall of 2025 compared to fall 2020, when the first full academic year of the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

The loss of enrollment is a major driver of the financial struggles many of the system’s campuses face. The Cal State’s chancellor’s office says the system is facing a $2.3 billion budget gap in the current academic year. There’s a bright spot, though: Cal State officials say the system overall is on pace this year to beat state enrollment targets for the first time in four years.

Still, a key state lawmaker admonished the system’s under-enrolled campuses for missing its enrollment targets.

“I’m concerned that these campuses may be overfunded,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista, at a December legislative hearing about Cal State’s finances. He is chairperson of the Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education and a key player in deciding how much state money universities receive. His worry? Other campuses with rising enrollments need the money to educate their ever-growing student body by hiring more professors, tutors and other staff to support students.

The state funds campuses based on how many Californians they enroll; by educating fewer students than what the state pays per student, the campuses are technically collecting more revenue than their enrollment levels would permit. That’s because the state pays schools for the number of California students they’re supposed to enroll, not how many they actually enroll.

By that measure, San Francisco State last year collected close to $50 million more in state dollars than its enrollment levels indicate it should receive — the campus enrolled about 5,300 fewer Californians than state goals stipulated in 2024. Cal State Dominguez Hills was taking about $7 million more. Conversely, Cal Poly Pomona was down about $20 million, because they enrolled 2,500 more students than the state’s target.

California is also eyeing multi-billion-dollar budget deficits, putting even more pressure on lawmakers and school systems to use money wisely.

The Legislature last year required Cal State to submit a report by March 1 detailing how campuses with enrollment struggles plan to attract new students and meet their state targets. Campuses sent their turnaround plans to the system’s chancellor’s office by December. 

CalMatters conducted a dozen interviews and issued six records requests for this story.

Spotlight on Cal State Dominguez

Cal State Dominguez Hills’ enrollment is down 20% compared to 2020 and its finances have suffered. As a result, campus officials laid off 38 non-faculty staff and managers in 2025.

The school projects it will lose an additional $8 million this year, cutting deeper into its reserves, which have dwindled from $46 million in 2022 to a projected $10 million this summer. 

The campus’ graduation rates fall below the systemwide average. And the campus historically has posted lower retention rates, meaning more students quit after one or two years compared to other campuses in the system. Dominguez Hill’s retention rate has grown in the last year, however. 

The school enrolls the highest share of undergraduate students in the system who receive the federal Pell grant for low-income students — 69% compared to a Cal State average of 51%.  Systemwide, those Pell students graduate at lower levels than students who don’t receive the grant.

Dominguez Hills’ turnaround plan includes a campus goal of enrolling about 800 more students to hit its enrollment target by 2027-28. More students plus planned systemwide tuition hikes and a new student-approved campus fee are projected to generate $25 million in additional money. 

To reach its enrollment goals, the campus will lean on approaches that have demonstrated success, including the First Year Experience summer program, which Dominguez Hills started in 2022. Through the program, about a quarter of the freshman class enrolls in up to two free college courses during the summer before fall term. These are all general education courses required for graduation, with an emphasis on teaching students how to study well. The program also engenders a sense of community among students and campus staff. 

Other strategies include attracting new students and keeping more of its current students. Another is to re-enroll students who’ve previously dropped out. It’s an approach that’s top of mind for campuses across the state: California is home to about 3.5 million adults with some college credit but no degree. Even a miniscule bump in the students who return to school could eradicate a campus’ enrollment woes.

Another budget-stabilizing effort may mean additional job losses. Campus professors are now meeting regularly to find ways to combine courses and run fewer sections of the same course. This helps the school average more students per course, but it’ll likely mean fewer lecturers — instructors who lack the full-time benefits and job safety of tenured professors.

Systemwide, 63 degree programs were discontinued by the Board of Trustees in 2024.

Dominguez Hills in February reversed course on terminating six majors, including art history and philosophy. Student advocacy spurred the restoration. The school also determined that cutting individual programs made less sense than reviewing all majors to find other ways to integrate academic programs, said Kim Costino, the school’s interim provost, in an interview.

“Everyone is hopeful that we are going to be able to create a more economically efficient curriculum that serves students better,” said Terry McGlynn during an interview. He is a biology professor at Dominguez Hills who is chair of the academic senate, a faculty group that shapes campus academics. 

But “there’s clearly going to be some pain involved,” he added.

Summer session to keep students longer

The school cited in its report to the system that expanding the The First Year Experience program is one way to increase enrollment. 

The campus spends $635,000 annually to run it. Almost 84% of students in the program  advanced to their second year of college in fall 2024 — well above the 66% for students who didn’t sign up for the First Year Experience, according to data the campus shared. For a school desperate to undo its enrollment slide, keeping the students it has — and their tuition dollars — is a key strategy. 

Any incoming freshman can enroll in the First Year Experience.

One reason Menera knew the campus so well when fall classes began? An extra-credit assignment for her environmental studies course over the summer required her to identify every vending machine on campus. 

The First Year Experience also features activities that reinforce what students learn, such as a field trip to a museum for an English course led by a guest author whose book the professor assigned to students. For her environmental studies class, Menera said that she carried a trash bag for more than a week to visualize how much waste people accumulate. 

The school also awards a $150 scholarship to students who complete a summer-experience course. But for students who work over the summer or help care for family members, that amount alone may not be enough to persuade them to attend the program, said Costino. She ran the summer program until December. 

The summer courses are long. Most meet twice weekly for four hours, so a student in two courses is in class for about 16 hours a week. Menera worked anyway that summer, maintaining the job she had during high school at TJ Maxx in Anaheim, some 20 miles from campus. She continues to work now, logging 17 hours a week at a campus convenience store on top of a full academic load. The summer program mentally prepared her for long school and work days, she said.

Costino thinks the program’s growth won’t be in students enrolling the summer before freshman year, but instead in students who earned a D or F in a course their first year and need to make up the class the following summer. While students can presently retake classes, they have to pay for them. Providing free make-up courses that either replace or average out a previous low grade helps the school retain more students who are on academic probation or just lost academic confidence after a bad first year, Costino said.

Re-enrolling students who dropped out

Cal State Dominguez Hills is seeking to expand its efforts to re-enroll students who’ve dropped out. Since 2021 the school has re-enrolled nearly 1,100 such students for fall term through its “Once a Toro, Always a Toro” program, named after the campus mascot.

While these students represent a tiny portion of the campus’ annual enrollment, they lead to instant revenue for the school from tuition and fees. It’s a few extra million dollars for the school,  and it costs about $300,000 to $600,000 annually to maintain the re-enrollment program.

Once these students return to Dominguez Hills, most graduate. Data the campus shared with CalMatters show that earlier cohorts of the re-enrolled students have graduation rates of around 50% three years after they return. The numbers grow to about 70% after six years.

Graduation rates for CSU Dominguez Hills students who re-enroll after dropping out

CSU Dominguez Hills has been re-enrolling students who dropped out since at least 2016. In recent years, the school has brought back more students each fall. The entering fall class of re-enrolled students has risen from about 150 to 300 students the last few years. So far, about half graduate after three years back at school.

The school is now targeting any student who dropped out in the last 15 years or so, said Sabrina Sanders, the program director of Once a Toro. 

She maintains a list of 10,000 formerly enrolled students. Annually, about 1,000 apply, around three-quarters are admitted, and roughly 300 to 400 enroll. Some who were admitted don’t enroll for several reasons, including prior low GPAs that make them ineligible for financial aid.

One of the students who returned is Wynette Davis. The 27-year-old is four classes away from finishing her bachelor’s degree in psychology after dropping out two years ago. 

Davis transferred to the university from community college in 2022. She was on track to earn her bachelor’s in 2024 and even walked the stage during the spring graduation ceremony, needing just a few more classes that summer to finish her degree. But tragedy struck: Her daughter’s father died in spring 2024, and the shock derailed her academics. That spring and summer, she failed four classes. Davis left as a result.

She tried to re-enroll a year later, but learned she owed the university tuition money and couldn’t qualify for financial aid because her failing grades dropped her below the campus’ threshold for aid eligibility. Davis was ready to give up on earning a bachelor’s until an email from Once a Toro entered her inbox.

A staffer with the program helped Davis receive a waiver for her past-due account balance as long as she promised to pass her classes for the year, Davis said. The staffer also worked with the school financial aid office to reinstate her eligibility for financial aid for her spring classes after her grades improved.

Last fall Davis retook the classes she previously failed, passing them all this time. She’s in two classes this spring and will need two more next fall to earn her bachelor’s degree.

“If it wasn’t for the Once a Toro, Always a Toro program, I probably would not have been back in school right now,” Davis said. 

Another setback is the changing nature of academic requirements. Students who were gone for a decade may have pursued majors that don’t exist or were heavily altered, so the courses they took toward their majors might not satisfy new requirements. Sanders and the school’s advising teams collaborate with academic department deans to convert the re-enrolling students’ old coursework into the updated expectations for existing majors. Or re-enrolled students pursue an interdisciplinary major that combines old coursework with new.

“There’s a sense of shame that comes with dropping out of college and having someone there to kind of put those thoughts and put that inner dialogue to rest” was key, said Stephanie Esquivel, a returning student who re-enrolled in 2022 after leaving the campus her freshman year in 2007. 

She credited Sanders with helping her transfer her community college units to her university major. To Esquivel, a team like Once a Toro shows that the campus desires returning students and invests in the social infrastructure to help them, she said.

The post How one Cal State campus is trying to break out of a doom loop of declining enrollment appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

But since the state started testing students on the new Next Generation Science Standards in 2019, the first time ever California assessed students in science, test scores have barely budged, with stark gaps among some groups of students.

“In large part, science has not been viewed as a priority. It’s been moved to the back burner,” said Jessica Sawko, education director at the research and advocacy organization Children Now, and former head of the state’s association of science teachers. “But science needs to be a priority. How will we prepare our kids to make sense of the world around them?”

In 2019, three years after most schools began teaching the new science curriculum, only 30% of students met the standard on the state exam. Last year, the number had inched up to only 30.7%.

Wide gaps exist among student groups. Among students whose parents graduated from college, 42% met the standard, compared to 17% of those whose parents never went beyond high school. Fewer than than 21% of low-income students met the standard. Only 15% of Black students met the standard, compared to 61% of Asian students.

There’s a few reasons for the stagnant scores, experts said. Pandemic school closures set achievement back significantly for all subjects, but it especially affected science because so much of the new science curriculum centers on hands-on projects, which were nearly impossible to conduct over Zoom.

And after the pandemic, schools focused their recovery efforts on literacy, math and attendance, the most glaring challenges as students returned to in-person learning. Chronic absenteeism, for example, soared from 10% pre-pandemic to 30% in 2022. 

Another reason for the low science scores is accountability, Sawko and others said. For the first few years of the new science test, the scores were not posted on the state’s Dashboard — the primary means of publicizing students’ academic performance. The rationale is that the test was new and the state was still working out the kinks.

Last year, the results were posted at the bottom of the Dashboard in an area marked “informational purposes.” Unlike the other features of the dashboard, such as math and English language arts scores, science was not color coded to indicate the performance level of individual schools or student groups. The science results were solid gray.

When the new scores are released this fall, science will be color-coded on the Dashboard, but science still falls short of full accountability, advocates said. Low-performing schools won’t be singled out by the state for extra assistance, although that might change next year.

Another obstacle has been teacher training. After California adopted the new standards, it didn’t invest any money in professional development until 2023. For many years, districts used their own funds or found private grants to pay for teacher training, but by fall 2020 at least 30%-40% of teachers had received no training in the new standards, according to a survey by the California Association of Science Educators. Teachers at low-income and rural schools received the least training.

In 2023 the state allotted $85 million to improve math, science and computer science education, but only about $1.5 million went to train teachers in science. The rest went to train teachers in math and computer science – which also recently got new standards – and to host family STEM nights and other activities. The money went to county offices of education to distribute locally. 

The grant expires in 2027, and it’s crucial that the state continue that investment, said Shari Staub, co-leader of the California Math, Science and Computer Science Partnership.

“We are daily faced with public health challenges, climate challenges, equity challenges — all the things a scientifically literate population should be able to address, not just for California but for the world,” Staub said. “If we’re not investing in science, we are not preparing students for the world they are entering.”

Three-dimensional learning

The Next Generation Science Standards were created in 2011 by an education nonprofit called Achieve, with help from 26 states and dozens of science education experts. The idea was to make science more engaging and “three-dimensional,” as the authors put it, by combining concepts from multiple scientific disciplines so students could discover patterns and systems. Students would gain critical thinking skills and a solid understanding of scientific concepts, largely by doing hands-on projects rather than listening to lectures.

Many school districts in California have embraced the new standards and seen scores improve. In fact, California public schools — particularly those in tech hubs — have some of the top science programs in the country. California students routinely win the National Science Bowl, Science Olympiad and other national competitions. 

For the most part, those districts invested their own funds early in the rollout to train their teachers. And they have strong support from parents, financial and otherwise. That amounts to PTA funds that teachers can use to pay for science field trips or extra help in the classroom, plenty of parent volunteers and an overall expectation that science education is a priority. 

None of the top-performing schools were Title I low-income schools, but they weren’t all homogenous affluent schools, either. Some had 25% or more low-income students, large percentages of English learners and diverse student populations. They might have PTA support, but they don’t receive much extra money from the state because they don’t have large numbers of high-needs students.

La Cañada Unified near Pasadena, for example, received only $13,700 per student last year from the state, about $5,000 less than the state average. But more than 77% of students met or exceeded the science standards last year, some of the highest scores in the state. 

Each elementary school in the district has a science lab and an aide to assist with science projects. A summer camp called “STEM-nauts” pairs older students with younger ones for science-themed games and experiments. The high school offers five Advanced Placement science classes and a host of science-related extracurricular activities, including an astronomy club, neuroscience club and chemistry club. Students can do internships at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is a quarter-mile from the high school.

“In our district, the science kids are the cool kids,” said James Cartnal, assistant superintendent. “Science is part of the culture here. We work intentionally and very hard to make it that way.”

‘Think like scientists’

At Lawson Middle School in Cupertino, science is nearly everyone’s favorite subject. The science classrooms are boisterous places with students conducting experiments and trying to figure out solutions. The shelves are well stocked with beakers, scales and microscopes. Colorful tapestries of the periodic table hang from the ceiling. Anime renditions of the elements — including xenon, helium, germanium, cadmium — adorn the walls.

One recent afternoon, students in Emily Adams’ eighth grade science class did a lesson on measurements. Adams started by asking them why accurate measurements are important. Their answers: so astronauts know how much fuel is left in their rocketship; so truck drivers know if their vehicle will fit under an overpass; and so doctors know how much medicine they’re giving a patient.

Then they worked in groups to measure various objects, using an infrared thermometer, an electronic scale and other tools.

“This class is fun. I like all the labs, figuring out how things work in the real world,” said student Neil Dhaman. “P.E. is my favorite class, but this is second.”

Adams said the class was typical, in that she spends about 10 minutes explaining a few main concepts and the students spend the rest of the class on projects related to the concepts. “I want them to focus on skills and critical thinking, not just regurgitate facts,” Adams said. “I want them to think like scientists.”

Cupertino is in the heart of Silicon Valley, home to the Apple computer headquarters and dozens of tech start-ups. Google and Facebook are a few miles away. Despite the lure of six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley, Cupertino Union School District has very little turnover among science teachers, a key reason the science scores are so high, said Marie Crawford, the district’s director of instructional leadership and intervention. 

“The teachers know each other, work together, help each other out,” Crawford said. “It makes a big difference.”

Like La Cañada, Cupertino Union School District does not receive a lot of money from the state. Last year, the state provided $16,400 per student, far below the state average.

In teacher Maryhien Pham’s class, eighth grader Aanya Dhar and her classmates demonstrated how to find the mass of a marble by dropping it into a cylinder of water, and weighing the cylinder before and after. The answer: 3 milliliters. 

“I might want to be a scientist when I grow up,” Dhar said. “I like learning about new things, experimenting, getting to know how things work.”

The post California changed the way it teaches science. But test scores remain low appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

But only until she got there.

“I walked out,” Flores recalled recently. She got to her grandmother’s house a few blocks away, furious. “Son mentirosas,” she said. “No entiendo nada. Y jamas voy a regresar.” You’re liars. I don’t understand anything. And I’m never going back.

Flores only spoke Spanish. As the grandchild of Mexican immigrants, she didn’t find her language or culture welcome in the school. But little Bárbara didn’t get her way. And, after depositing her daughter back in the classroom, Flores’ mother asked the teacher a question: Aren’t you paying attention? My daughter walked out. The answer felt like a slap and became a part of family lore. All these little Mexican girls look alike. I didn’t notice.

Flores returned to her old school this fall; the building she walked out of still stands, but almost everything else has changed. Now students speak Spanish because their teachers require them to. Little Mexican girls see their culture celebrated on the walls of every classroom.

Washington students will graduate knowing how to speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, joining a growing number of “dual-language immersion” schools in California. Flores’ eyes open wide as she describes the about-face her alma mater has taken.

“We were punished for speaking Spanish,” she said. “We were hit with rulers, pinched, our braids were pulled. Now the whole school is dual-language.”

The path has not been linear. When Flores was a child, California still had an English-only law on the books from the 1800s. As governor, Ronald Reagan signed a bill eliminating it. Then the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new era of bilingual education, and the California Legislature went further, requiring the model for students still learning English from 1976 until the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1990s. Voters banned it again in 1998, only reversing the latest prohibition in 2016.

Researchers have found bilingual education helps students learn English faster and can boost their standardized test scores, increase graduation rates, better prepare them for college and much more. California has removed the official barriers to offering this type of instruction since 2016, and the state now champions bilingualism and biliteracy, encouraging all students to strive for both. But eight years after repeal, California schools have yet to recover. A decades-long enrollment slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline. And underinvestment by the Legislature, paired with a hamstrung state Education Department, has limited the pace of bilingual education’s comeback. 

The result? A rare case in which Californians can say Texas is inspiring. Both states enroll more than 1 million students still learning English — but last year, the Lone Star State put 40% of them in bilingual classrooms. California managed that for just 10%.

In 1987, Flores didn’t think state policy would go this way. At the time, both states required bilingual education. She was a professor, helping build a bilingual-education teacher prep program at Cal State San Bernardino. Her home state could have kept pace with Texas.

But it didn’t.

The English-only years: 1998 to 2016

By 1998, the bilingual-teacher prep program was flourishing. Flores helped aspiring teachers understand how students learn to read and write in two languages, sending them off into classrooms with binders full of instructional tips. Her daughter, then 10, was learning both English and Spanish through bilingual classes in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Flores was on a parent committee organizing broader support for such programs in the face of a statewide campaign to get rid of them, bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz.

Proposition 227, which passed with 61% of the vote, required schools to teach only in English with students who were still learning the language, something that may sound like a good idea but often ends up unnecessarily putting students’ grade-level learning of other subjects on pause while they master English. Flores saw the impact immediately. Faculty on campus called for the elimination of her program, an effort that ultimately failed but showed, she said, “the intensity of the discrimination and language racism that was prevalent.” Enrollment in bilingual-teacher prep programs across the state plummeted.

Flores also watched local school districts respond. “I was shocked at superintendents in the area,” she said. “They just made everybody throw away their Spanish books. It was horrendous.” As she recalls, every single school district in the Inland Empire got rid of its bilingual programs except San Bernardino City Unified, where parent activism helped ensure the district took advantage of an exception to the new law.

Dual-language students outperform their peers in San Bernardino City Unified

At the time, student achievement data from San Bernardino City Unified had shown that bilingual programs were helping kids succeed. And over the next two decades, researchers studying programs across the United States released a steady stream of evidence about the benefits of bilingual education, especially a version called “dual language.” Traditional bilingual education essentially lets students use their first language while they learn English. Once students become fluent, their schools shift entirely to English instruction, which was the goal all along. Dual-language programs, by contrast, set bilingualism as the goal. Students continue to take courses in Spanish or another language for about half of the school day until they leave the program.

While dual-language programs often stop after elementary school, the “bilingual advantage” stretches through students’ K-12 years and into their working lives. Dual-language students have been found to score higher than their peers on both math and English language arts exams by middle school. They also get higher scores on the ACT in high school, setting them up to be more competitive in college admissions. And importantly, a team at Stanford found that native Spanish speakers were more likely to test out of English-learner services if they took bilingual classes, a coveted goal because of how well “former English learners” do. University of Chicago researchers just released data showing that Chicago high schoolers in this group had higher-than-average GPAs and SAT scores, high school graduation rates, and community college enrollment and persistence rates.

Patricia Gándara co-directs the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which has published similar findings, and has spent decades of her career cataloging the bilingual advantage. She laments the narrow value placed on bilingual education in the U.S., where it has historically been pursued as a way to help kids who don’t speak English learn the language more quickly and then succeed in English-only classes.

“That’s a very shortsighted view,” Gándara said, “particularly from the research that we’ve done that shows kids who get a strong bilingual education are more likely to go to college, they’re more likely to complete college, they’re more likely to have better jobs and better opportunities.”

Yet while policymakers didn’t catch on right away, well-off and well-educated white parents did, seeing the economic benefits of bilingualism for their children very clearly.

Glendale Unified School District launched its first Spanish-English dual-language program in 2003, going on to add programs in six other languages while official state policy was to ban them. Last year, 85% of the students enrolled were fluent English speakers, according to program director Nancy Hong.

Immigrant families, weighed down by the pressure to speak English and make sure their children do too, have been hard to recruit. Hong said immigrant parents have long been concerned that letting their children spend half the school day or more hearing their home language will get in the way of learning English, even though research has shown it can make the whole process go faster. “The goal is to dismantle those myths and misperceptions,” she said. But even though about 20% of students districtwide are English learners, only about 10% of them are in dual-language programs.

Many immigrant families, however, have become strong advocates for the programs. José Sanjas, a Mexican-born father in Madera Unified School District, takes his 6-year-old daughter past her neighborhood school every day en route to one of the district’s dual-language programs. He and his wife want to preserve their native language as their daughter grows up here, but the draw isn’t only personal; Sanjas also sees how bilingualism will benefit his daughter in the workplace.

“She can help more people in the future,” Sanjas said. “Professionally, she’ll be able to serve everyone.”

Spurred on by support like his, a diverse coalition of school leaders in Madera Unified had, by 2016, come to see dual-language education as key to turning around the district’s chronically low performance, especially among the children of immigrants. Flores had helped make the case, inviting school board members to the annual conference of the California Association for Bilingual Education. And in Flores’ hometown, U.S.-born, white families were among those speaking up in support of the programs, knowing even if the immigrant students’ test scores had the most room to grow, their children could benefit too.

Statewide, public opinion had swung in the other direction; that November, about 74% of California voters said yes to Proposition 58, officially allowing bilingual education back in California classrooms.

“It was a relief we [could] finally move forward for our children,” Flores said. “We lost a whole generation of kids — quite a few generations, really — because of English-only.” 

The next generation, however, is still waiting.

A limping recovery: 2016 to 2024

Flores spent 40 years training future teachers before retiring in 2019. Across three institutions and 32 years at Cal State San Bernardino, she likely taught 10,000 students, many of whom remain sprinkled throughout the state’s bilingual-education system. But if anything defines the legacy of Prop. 227, it is the shattered teacher pipeline it left in its wake.

Gándara, of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, said the current state of affairs is “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ … I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.” 

California colleges are not producing nearly enough teachers to meet the state’s bilingual-education goals. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — across all languages. Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the second-most-common language in California schools that year. And it actually gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.

The Legislature has not ignored this problem entirely. In 2017, it funded six grants, totaling $20 million, to help districts coach up bilingual staffers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms. But Edgar Lampkin, CEO of the California Association for Bilingual Education, said seeding such “grow your own” programs falls far short of addressing the statewide need. “That’s not systemic,” he said.

In 2022, the National Resource Center for Asian Languages, based at Cal State Fullerton, got state money to train 200 teachers over five years. They’re on track, and the center’s director, Natalie Tran, is proud that their programs are not only increasing the number of teachers certified to teach in Asian languages, but also diversifying the languages they speak. She expects to certify teachers who speak Tagalog, Hmong and Khmer this school year. Still, she said, the state needs to do more to train additional teachers of Asian languages, including the less common ones. “We’re going to need help from policymakers to make this happen,” Tran said.

She isn’t the only one calling on lawmakers to be part of the solution. Anya Hurwitz is executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit that got its start as an initiative of the Sobrato Family Foundation to address achievement gaps between immigrant and native-born children in Silicon Valley. She says the state underfunds education, which gets in the way of doing what’s best for kids who don’t speak English.

In 2022, the last year for which federal census data is available, New York spent almost $30,000 per student. California spent about $17,000. And besides its support for teacher training, the Legislature has only given districts $10 million extra to start or expand dual-language programs. In Massachusetts, home to about one-tenth the number of kids still learning English, the Legislature disbursed $11.8 million for the same work, kicking off its own recovery from an English-only law.

“Funding is not the solution to everything in and of itself,” Hurwitz said, “but at the same time, we can’t build capacity without funding and resources.”

Back in Flores’ hometown, Madera administrators have been able to use state and federal money earmarked for their sizable number of immigrant families and those living in poverty to achieve their dual-language goals. But startup costs for dual-language programs are expensive. Teacher preparation programs, Superintendent Todd Lile said, are not producing graduates who are ready to do this work, leaving districts like his with steep professional development costs.

A residency program with Cal State Fresno has given Madera a solid pipeline of teachers, but the recent grads have to clear all the usual hurdles of being new to the profession while also adapting to using Spanish in the classroom. While these new hires at Washington Elementary School grew up bilingual, they went to school through the Prop. 227 years, meaning most of them didn’t develop an academic vocabulary in Spanish.

Viviana Valerio, a kindergarten teacher, said that history made bilingual education an intimidating proposition. “I commonly speak Spanish at home, but then when I was thinking about teaching, I was thinking, ‘OK, academic terms, I don’t know how to translate that,’ or ‘Parents ask me a question and I can’t think of it, I’m going to want to transition into English,’” she said. “For me, that was the scary part.”

Texas, too, lacks bilingual-education teachers, echoing a shortage present in much of the country, but the state is far ahead of California; many districts are able to recruit their own alumni because their programs have been around so long. Texas also continues to invest in bilingual education, helping districts comply with state mandates to offer it. Like California, Texas gives districts more per-pupil funding for every student still learning English; unlike California, Texas offers an additional premium for each of them enrolled in a dual-language program.

As an extra incentive to start and maintain these programs, Texas has started bumping up funding for the native English speakers enrolled too. Research shows the programs work better when classes are evenly split between native English speakers and speakers of the program’s second language. Then, not only are students learning their second language from the teacher but from their peers as well. Conveniently, this also makes for more integrated classrooms, something Gándara said California needs.

“We haven’t been able to take advantage of that, in large part because people don’t pay attention to that as a major issue and also because we don’t have the teachers to pull it off,” Gándara said.

Indeed, districts across the state cite staffing as a major barrier to starting or expanding their programs. Some have gone abroad to recruit. Others have been forced to scrap their plans entirely. Newark Unified School District, in the Bay Area, got rid of its dual-language program this year because it couldn’t find teachers to staff it. “We tried everything,” said Karen Allard, assistant superintendent of education services.

For more than a decade now, the state’s Education Department has tried to champion bilingual programs. Students who can prove their fluency in two languages before graduation get a special seal on their diplomas. The department also implores schools to help the children of immigrants maintain their home language while learning English, building that recommendation into its 2017 English Learner Roadmap. By 2030, it wants half of California students on a path to becoming bilingual.

Yet all of this largely amounts to cheerleading. The department is minimally funded and staffed, a result of the state’s commitment to sending almost all K-12 funding directly to school districts, and its support for bilingual education has not come with any firm demands.

Conor Williams, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently found himself — a self-described “professional lefty” — in the surprising position of celebrating Texas’ policy over California’s. Besides following Texas’ lead on funding, he said, California should rethink teacher licensing. The state requires college graduates to pass a suite of tests to become teachers, but Williams points out the tests don’t lead to better instruction and can keep good teachers from classrooms. Getting rid of the requirement could bring more bilingual adults into the profession and expand the teacher pipeline.

Hard to overcome, however, is California’s shift toward more local control over schooling. Williams doesn’t always agree with what the Texas education department does with its power, but the state’s centralized approach means it has “enough power and muscle and will to set rules and hold districts to them,” he said. California’s Local Control Funding Formula is widely popular and has ensured districts get more state money to serve students still learning English as well as those in foster care and low-income households. But, Williams points out, local control has its limits.

“You don’t win civil rights battles by leaving it up to local school boards,” he said.

Still, districts like Madera are moving ahead on their own. In 2020, Flores’ alma mater, Washington Elementary, became Madera Unified’s second dual-language school, welcoming its first class of kindergartners who are expected to leave proficient in both English and Spanish.

Mateo Diaz Zanjas was one of them. He’s now a fourth-grader and speaks in easy Spanish about the school and his long-term dream of going to Harvard. Upon hearing that he and his peers speak very good Spanish, he eagerly replies: “We also speak good English.” And he proves it, going on to answer questions in English about his favorite subjects and the languages he speaks with certain friends.

Administrators, however, are still waiting for the data to show that their bet on bilingual education will pay off in student achievement gains. The pandemic interrupted their early years and set them back, and the oldest students aren’t doing as well as district leaders would have hoped. Commitment to the programs, however, has not waivered. Students’ overall test scores remain low, but their growth scores — or how much they learn over the course of the year — are high.

The district is helping students learn English more quickly, too, meaning they are becoming “former English learners” faster with the newer supports and joining the district’s highest-performing student group.

In the meantime, Madera teachers are using bilingual education to give Spanish speakers grade-level material, knowing that once they sharpen their English skills, all that information will transfer.

“Kids can learn math in Spanish; it’s still math,” Lile said. “They can learn social studies in Spanish; it’s still history and geography. These subject matters don’t exist only in English.” 

During Flores’ recent visit to Madera Unified, she heard Lile describe his long-term goals for the district, including higher graduation rates and better college readiness for the children of immigrants. She looked on proudly, sure her hometown district was finally getting it right.

An uncertain future: 2024 and beyond

A few years ago, Flores introduced Lile to Margarita Machado-Casas, a professor at San Diego State’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education, which has long been a top producer of the state’s bilingual teachers. Machado-Casas is helping the district figure out what concrete steps teachers and administrators should take to follow the high-level recommendations of the state’s English Learner Roadmap. They started out with “Principle 1,” which asks school and district staffers to see immigrant students’ language and culture as assets rather than seeing their lack of English proficiency as a deficit. Pointing to Madera’s long and painful history of discriminating against immigrant students, including Flores, Machado-Casas said this principle unexpectedly took the entire first year, requiring “courageous conversations” — including asking staffers to think deeply about whether they believed in the work enough to stay in the district.

Machado-Casas is helping educators in Madera understand both how to help immigrant students tackle grade-level material and convince them that the students can handle it.

Flores hopes the work ends up being a playbook for the entire state — which could soon need one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the road map’s guidelines and report on their progress.

This planning process guarantees California will be over a decade into its recovery from the English-only years before the state even considers holding schools accountable for changing their practices. When New York passed a blueprint for how to serve English learners in 2014, it followed it up with new state regulations that same year, creating stricter policies for serving students who were still learning English, including a broader mandate for bilingual education, which had already been required for decades.

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez leads the California Education Department’s multilingual support division. She said state budget limitations have gotten in the way of implementing the English Learner Roadmap and said any call to require bilingual education like Texas or New York would have to come from the Legislature, not the department. “That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.

Advocates caution such a mandate would have to come with enough funding to help districts create high-quality programs, but many agree it would be a win for California students. Children from immigrant families speak 108 different languages, according to the Education Department, but 93% of them speak one of 10. To require bilingual programs, the Legislature would likely tweak the current law, which says if the parents of 30 or more students in a single school request a language acquisition program, the school has to offer it “to the extent possible.” Texas, Illinois and New York have similar laws, but instead of requiring bilingual programs in response to parent advocacy, they do so based solely on enrollment.

Flores thinks the state is at least moving in the right direction. And Madera Unified gives her hope. During her recent visit, she was flooded with memories: She saw the tree she and her friends used to circle while playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” She visited the classroom she walked out of as a 5-year-old, where the walls are now decorated with vocabulary in Spanish as well as English. She suffered in that room 70 years ago. Now, little Mexican girls do not.

“We don’t stop,” she said. “We keep plugging away. That’s our tenacity. That’s our grit. And our motivation, of course, is for our children.”

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