Why Can’t New York Keep Up With the Demand for Bilingual Teachers?

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 one in three 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 percent 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 percent, while the state’s overall graduation rate was 86 percent. That’s likely because there aren’t enough bilingual education programs and the state has high-stakes testing requirements, Menken said.