12,000 Teachers Short and Counting

Bilingual education is needed to help immigrants make the transition into American life, but a shortage of teachers poses a crisis for schools in California. About 5,000 educators met in Anaheim last week at the annual conference of the California Assn. for Bilingual Education to consider what one sobering report called “the predictable failure” of hundreds of thousands of students, with many more to follow.

One needed to look no further than the host county to measure how the state’s teacher pool is being taxed by an influx of immigrants. Orange County was once a bastion of suburban homogeneity; today, its Department of Education reports that one in five students is not fluent in English. And last year alone there was a 23% increase in students entering the system with limited English skills, mostly in the lower grades.

The report, prepared for the conference, projected a statewide trend, noting that California already was 12,000 bilingual teachers short and that there was “an approaching disaster” for 1.5 million new students expected to arrive by the year 2005.

What should be done? University education departments have trained bilingual teachers but must expand. Another good idea: Train paraprofessionals already in public school systems as teachers. A multicultural California must do what it can to help immigrants avoid certain failure.