In a small office at a California university’s teacher education department, a single faculty member is doing the work of an entire department: recruiting bilingual candidates, writing bilingual curriculum, teaching classes bilingually, arranging bilingual student teaching placements in bilingual classrooms, and personally mentoring every bilingual student in the program. There is no staff. There is no dedicated budget line. This one person is a bilingual authorization program coordinator, and in most cases, that person’s commitment is the primary reason California’s bilingual teacher pipeline exists at all in that region.

We know this because we spent the better part of a year asking. As researchers affiliated with the California Association for Bilingual Teacher Education (CABTE), we interviewed coordinators from all 49 state-authorized bilingual preparation programs, spanning from rural areas in Northern California, the Central Valley, the Bay Area, and the urban southern areas of the state. We convened focus groups and surveyed practitioners across our diverse state. What we found is the basis for a policy brief we are releasing this month with Californians Together, and it shapes everything we want to say here.

The people holding the pipeline together are doing so at personal cost, and the pipeline remains fragile as a result.

California has made genuine progress toward its Global California 2030 goals, 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, hitting 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. These gains are real, and they were built by tireless educators and advocates who refused to let the vision die.

The question we bring to this conversation is not whether progress has happened. It has. The question is whether the structures we have built are strong enough to sustain it.

Read the full article about building a pipeline of bilingual educators by Eduardo R. Muñoz-Muñoz, Nirmla Griarte Flores, Clara Amador-Lankster, Danna Moreno at EdSource.