Why can’t New York keep up with the demand for bilingual teachers?

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Bilingual education is the fastest-growing department in the Hudson Valley’s Suffern Central School District — but hiring for it is tough.

It took three years for the district to find a bilingual math teacher, and a job opening for a Spanish-speaking psychologist posted last month hasn’t elicited a single application, district officials said. The need for the psychologist emerged after nearly 100 multilingual students enrolled this summer.

“When we sat down as a district in the spring planning for this, our numbers were completely different than our prediction,” said Patricia Balbuena-Rivera, Suffern’s multilingual education director.

School districts across New York state have long struggled to find qualified bilingual education teachers, and the problem has worsened over the past two years, as hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and asylum seekers arrive.

Federal and state laws require school districts to provide language services to students learning English, but districts say they can’t find educators to fill necessary roles, because teachers aren’t incentivized to pursue specialized programs. In some cases, new students speak languages for which teaching certification exams don’t even exist.

Not including New York City or charter schools, more than 110,000 English language learners from about 200 language backgrounds were enrolled in the state’s public schools in the 2021–22 school year, a recent audit by the state comptroller’s office found. In some districts — like Kiryas Joel, East Ramapo, Hempstead, Wainscott, and Port Chester — more than 1 in 3 students are learning English.

The numbers have likely swelled since then: More than 200,000 asylum seekers have entered the state since 2022, and multilingual student enrollment outside New York City increased 8% between the 2019–20 and 2022–23 school years.

New York is struggling to keep up. The audit, which focused on the State Education Department’s lack of oversight of bilingual education programs, found that seven out of nine districts visited didn’t have adequate programs.

“It’s not new. It’s years and years and years of shortages,” said Tamara Alsace, a co-chair of the New York State Association for Bilingual Education’s advocacy team and the former director of multilingual education for Buffalo Public Schools. “It’s even more critical now, after the pandemic.”

The scarcity of bilingual teachers goes back more than 20 years, when bilingual programs came under political attack amid broader anti-immigrant rhetoric, said Kate Menken, a linguistics professor at Queens College.

While New York fought to keep these programs, backlash across the country contributed to a shortage of training programs throughout the United States.

A 2014 change to New York’s regulations for bilingual instruction sparked a sudden surge in demand for educators. Previously, multilingual students were taken out of a classroom to work in small groups across grade levels. The change, which is still in effect today, required schools to provide language support to multilingual learners within the classroom. As a result, bilingual teachers started working in general education classrooms.

There’s a well-documented achievement gap between multilingual students and the overall student population. New York’s English language learners have among the lowest graduation rates nationwide. During the 2022–23 school year, multilingual learners had a graduation rate of 57%, while the state’s overall graduation rate was 86%. That’s likely because there aren’t enough bilingual education programs and the state has high-stakes testing requirements, Menken said.

Research shows that English-learning students who have access to bilingual education programs tend to outperform other multilingual students who learn only in English, Menken said.

They also experience academic and socioemotional benefits. It may seem counterintuitive, but using a child’s home language can help them learn English, she said.

In New York, any school district that has more than 20 students with the same language background in a grade must provide a bilingual education program in both English and the students’ home language.

“It’s largely understood that bilingual education programs are the best possible approach for multilingual learners,” Menken said. “Why would we not want to ensure that these programs are being provided?”

Suffern

The number of new arrivals caught the Suffern Central School District by surprise a few years ago, said P. Erik Gundersen, the district’s superintendent.

With a student population of about 4,000, Suffern was one of the districts tagged in the comptroller’s report for not being fully compliant, because it didn’t have a Spanish program at every grade level.

Suffern now has about 900 English language learners, up from 349 during the 2019–20 school year.

The district has come into compliance now that there’s a bilingual education program in kindergarten through 12th grade, Gundersen said.

Schenectady

In the Schenectady City School District, which has 465 multilingual students among nearly 9,000 overall, students speak more than 20 languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, and French.

The audit also found Schenectady noncompliant, but the district is working toward opening a dual language program for the 2025–26 school year in which all students learn both English and Spanish. Still, hiring poses an obstacle: Two job openings have so far received one applicant between them, district officials said — and that applicant wasn’t certified in bilingual education in New York.

District Superintendent Carlos Cotto said the bilingual education program is part of a broader effort to serve immigrant families.

“We want to make sure that we welcome all of our families as they come into our community, and we embrace them and provide them with, not just the academic end, but all aspects of how we can support them,” he said.

Mineola

Unlike in Schenectady and Suffern, the audit found that Mineola Public Schools, on Long Island, has a full Spanish dual language program and is in compliance with legal mandates. But even there, staffing is a challenge, according to Sara Ortiz, the director of curriculum, instruction, and learning.

Educators need bilingual certification as well as certifications in any specialty subject areas they teach.

“The pool just gets smaller and smaller the more boxes that need to get checked,” Ortiz said.

The district also has smaller numbers of students who speak Portuguese, Bengali, Mandarin, Malayalam, Turkish, Hindi, Ukrainian, and French. More than 30 teachers work to support the dual language program, Ortiz said.

New York City

The teacher shortage is affecting the five boroughs, as well.

New York City’s Project Open Arms, a program meant to support the arrival of asylum seekers, has distributed nearly $27 million across 600 public schools as of April 2023, according to a report last year by the city’s Independent Budget Office.

About half the schools that received funding had no bilingual teacher, according to the IBO report. But the city opened an additional 57 bilingual programs during the 2023–24 school year and has plans for more, according to the city Department of Education.

A New York State Association for Bilingual Education member survey this spring found that more than 70% of respondents said that the shortage of bilingual educators is the main challenge they’ve encountered when trying to serve newly arrived multilingual learners.

The shortage of other bilingual staff — counselors, school psychologists, and teaching assistants, among others — was the second most commonly cited challenge.

“We need multilingual social workers, psychologists, speech therapists, special educators,” said Alsace, the former multilingual education director in Buffalo. “Then those create a pipeline for administrators who understand and know how to meet the needs of multilingual learners.”

But teaching certifications for some languages simply don’t exist: There are no such exams available in Burmese, Karen, Kinyarwanda, Nepali, Somali, and Swahili, and therefore no teachers certified to teach in those languages, according to the state audit.

Five school districts — Buffalo, Rochester, Rush-Henrietta, Syracuse, and Utica — met the threshold for requiring a bilingual education program in at least one of those languages.

State education officials said they lack the resources to establish programs for some languages because there is not enough demand for them, according to the comptroller’s report, although the state will create a new exam if a district superintendent submits a statement of need.

In a response to the audit, State Education Department officials said they pushed for a regulatory change, which was approved for two years by the Board of Regents, that would help currently certified teachers earn supplementary teaching certificates.

The Education Department also said its Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages subsidizes the tuition for college students to incentivize them to enroll in a graduate-level language instruction program. In the 2023–24 school year, the department partnered with 16 institutions of higher education.

Over the last 10 years, those programs have enrolled more than 1,400 students working toward certification to teach English language learners, the department said.

In a statement to New York Focus, the Education Department said it continually seeks to implement policies and programs that will increase the number of teachers qualified to teach English Language Learners.

In 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul launched the Empire State Residency Program to help address teacher shortages, including for bilingual education. Her administration has also given $4.3 billion to help local governments support asylum seekers, according to a statement from her office.

NY-AFFIRMs, a statewide coalition of groups that advocates on behalf of multilingual learners, is proposing that the state create a $6.8 million pilot program to increase access to certification for bilingual education programs. The funds would be used to offer free undergraduate degree programs at higher education institutions.

“While bilingual education isn’t the only issue, it’s one that’s been neglected for so long,” Alsace said. “Most people will not disagree that multilingualism is valuable, and knowing another language is a benefit to people.”