An English-only mandate for ELs has been reversed after 18 years, but progress has been uneven.
By Conor P. Williams, The74
This article was originally published at The74
California is, by almost every measure, one of the United States’ most diverse and vibrant states. The country’s most populous state, it also has no majority racial or ethnic group.
The combination of public investments in the University of California system and the state’s welcoming approach to immigration have created a dynamic, technology-infused economy that is the largest of any U.S. state. Its diverse public education system also reflects that dynamism, serving more English learners (ELs) than schools in any other state. In 2021, California enrolled more K–12 ELs than Indiana enrolled students.
And yet, from 1998 to 2016, the state’s schools belied its cosmopolitan reputation, enacting an English-only mandate for ELs amid a late-1990s surge in anxiety about immigration. Unsurprisingly, the policy did little to change the state’s demographic trajectory — and even less to improve student learning.
That’s why California voters passed Proposition 58 in 2016, a referendum that reopened the possibility of bilingual education for California’s ELs. Supporters sold the measure as an opportunity for the state to deliver a multilingual school system befitting its reputation as a plural and diverse society preparing students to succeed in the global economy.
This is the first in The 74‘s series on California’s effort to build a bilingual education system worthy of its culturally diverse reputation.
Eight years after Prop. 58’s passage, progress towards that vision has been uneven. Nearly two decades of actively subtracting languages from the state’s classrooms created myriad challenges. And yet, the state’s embrace of bilingualism has brought public narratives closer to the research consensus on the benefits of learning multiple languages. California launched the now-national Seal of Biliteracy, which provides public recognition for K–12 graduates who demonstrate proficiency in more than one language. Efforts like these are changing California’s public discourse around languages and increasing demand for bilingual learning opportunities.
Part 1: An 18- year ban on Bilingual Education in California begins
When Proposition 227 made California an English-only state in 1998, some polling suggested that roughly half of Latino voters supported the move. Subsequent exit polls suggested a somewhat more complicated story, but the measure passed all the same.
The number of ELs in bilingual education classrooms dropped by nearly 70 percent from 1998 to 2003. While the new English-only policy permitted communities to offer bilingual education if enough ELs’ parents “opted out” of English-only education, only a small fraction of schools were able to meet that threshold. Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and other non-English languages vanished from schools.
But the state’s decision didn’t erase many Californians’ desire to have their children’s emerging bilingual abilities recognized and cultivated at school. Persistent demand from Latino parents launched and/or maintained bilingual and DLI programs, such as Los Angeles’ Camino Nuevo Charter Academy’s Burlington campus.
The school opened in 2000; community interest in bilingualism pushed leaders to prioritize students’ development in both English and Spanish. “We were getting kids that were coming from programs that were all over the city,” says former Camino Nuevo CEO Ana Ponce. “And parents wanted their kids to keep their native language. We were not bound by Proposition 227’s limitations because we were a charter, so we embarked on exploring different bilingual education models.”
The school settled on a DLI model that begins with a majority of instruction in Spanish and gradually increases English-language instruction until the languages are evenly balanced in later elementary grades. Decades later, the Central Los Angeles campus effervesces with chatter swinging from Spanish to English. Fourth-graders pair off to practice division problems in math class to decide who goes first by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors or Piedra, Papel, Tijeras.
“I hope that God keeps these schools from disappearing, because they really help our children,” says 13-year Camino Nuevo parent Maribel Martinez in Spanish. “I don’t want to talk down the district’s schools, they also teach well, but their big mistake was cutting bilingual education…two languages are worth so much.”
Some of that value is academic. Research suggests that dual language immersion programs are the best way to support young, non-native English speakers in U.S. schools. But Camino parents say that this is only one of the reasons they prize their children’s emerging Spanish and English skills. Gloribel Reyes’ first child started at the school twenty years ago and her youngest is enrolled in fourth grade. “It’s very important that the children learn both Spanish and English,” she says in Spanish, “because if they only learn English, they forget their own language, the language their parents speak. Some of their parents don’t speak English—how can we speak with them?”
Martinez agrees—and notes that the school’s bilingualism makes it easier for Spanish-dominant families to engage with teachers and staff. That is, decades of hiring to staff Burlington’s DLI program have produced a fully bilingual staff.
After years of serving as a bilingual outpost, Camino Nuevo has become a bilingual quarry for other schools to mine. Kylie Rector, Camino Nuevo’s Director of Biliteracy and English Learners, says that “the buzz to invest more in bilingual education” has brought administrators from districts from San Diego to Northern California to the school.
Still, while bilingual and dual language immersion (DLI) programs are relaunching across the state, they are not growing anywhere fast enough to meet the state’s 2030 goal of building a system of at least 1,600 DLI programs to have “half of all K–12 students…participate in programs leading to proficiency in two or more languages.” Last year, the state devoted $10 million in new grant support for launching new DLI schools — the state estimates it will produce 55 new programs.
This is partly because California’s eighteen-year ban on most bilingual programs also flatlined the job market for bilingual teachers. This meant that K–12 school systems produced more monolingual, English-dominant graduates, and it meant that the state’s bilingual teacher training programs largely shuttered.
This presents California leaders with a chicken-and-egg problem. They cannot grow bilingual classrooms around the state without more bilingual teachers, but the state’s K–12 system remains mostly English-only and is not producing enough bilingual graduates to rapidly grow the linguistic diversity of the state’s teaching force. As a result, California’s K–12 teaching force is much whiter and more native English-speaking monolingual than California’s K–12 student body. Just 27 percent of California teachers speak a non-English language at home, compared to 40 percent of California K–12 students.
The increased demand for bilingual educators has also made Camino Nuevo staff valuable across California’s public education sector. Some erstwhile Camino Nuevo employees have gone on to launch dual language schools of their own, like Yu Ming Public Charter School founder Sue Park. Others are working in schools across LAUSD and other California districts. Still others are working in education advocacy at non-profit organizations like Great Public Schools Now, TNTP, Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, NewSchools, and the Cesar Chavez Foundation.
Cross-Pollinating Bilingualism in San Diego County
Just a ten mile drive from the U.S.-Mexico San Ysidro border crossing, Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School’s (CVLCC) campus is another hotbed of bilingualism. The school was founded by the Chula Vista Unified School District in 1998 as a way to maintain bilingual options once the state’s English-only mandate arrived.
Eddie Caballero joined CVLCC a year later as a 5th grade teacher. “It was a rough start,” he says, as the school struggled to focus its academic and linguistic instructional approaches. But by 2004, the school had coalesced around a vision — putting extra campus emphasis on foundational early literacy skills in both languages simultaneously.
In 2005, Caballero moved to San Diego Unified School District to work in administrative roles. In 2008, a number of families of ELs were organizing to sign waivers to start a bilingual education program at Sherman Elementary, on San Diego’s east side. The school needed an experienced bilingual educator; Caballero was a natural fit. He was eager to use what he’d learned at CVLCC to replicate high-quality bilingual education — now in a district setting.
Just as at CVLCC, “We didn’t see success immediately,” Caballero says. He warns that just any bilingual education program won’t automatically succeed just by virtue of being bilingual. Too often, he warns, district leaders think they can “rebrand” their schools by launching DLI programs, “but no, you have to implement it carefully.” This requires careful planning around curriculum, staffing, family engagement efforts, and much more. That’s why, in 2016, Caballero hired former CVLCC teacher Nicole Enriquez to be his assistant principal; she stepped in as principal when he left San Diego Unified.
Now, in 2024, Caballero is back as CVLCC’s CEO, which continues to serve as a flywheel for the local bilingual education ecosystem. He says that bilingual teachers often come to his school from nearby districts with the goal of developing their expertise teaching in bilingual or DLI settings. However, many leave after five years, because staying longer would cost them contractual seniority back in the districts where they began their careers.
“CVLCC is an exemplary dual language school that not only has a culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum—but also prepares students’ global critical consciousness through innovative and impactful approaches,” says Cristina Alfaro. “At its inception…we called it the Dream School.”
Building Back
In the 26 years since California voters launched their state’s monolingual era — and eight years since they ended it — it’s clear that the ground of public opinion has shifted. Polling before the 2016 Proposition 58 referendum found that more than two-thirds of California Latino voters supported restoring bilingual education.
Meanwhile, a 2023 Abriendo Puertas/Open Doors survey found that 65% of Latino families “would enroll their children in a bilingual program if it were available.” In a separate 2023 poll of mostly Spanish-dominant Californians, Keep Learning California found that 59% of respondents listed “access to bilingual programs” as an “essential” or “high” priority for their families.
Bilingual strongholds like CVLCC and Camino Nuevo are essential resources for helping make that hope realistic for more of those families. “I’m second-generation Chicana,” says Sherman principal Enriquez. “And this generation of parents says things like, ‘I never got this opportunity as a kid. I wish that I could speak more Spanish. I want my kids to be able to be bilingual, to get the opportunity that I never had.’ And I’m that parent too! I brought my kids here, through Sherman, so they could be bilingual.”
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Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
