One clear mission for dual-language schools
SAN DIEGO — When families are deported from the U.S. to Mexico, it becomes the job of Mexican schools to teach their children.
But schoolteachers in Baja are finding that hard to do, officials say, because even while many parents may be Spanish speakers, many of their children can speak only English well.
Baja public schools only really started to focus on teaching English as a subject as recently as five years ago, said Cristina Alfaro, a San Diego State professor of bilingual education and leader of international bilingual education development efforts.
“Many of these students were born here and their education was here, but then because of our antiimmigrant and deportation situation that’s going on right now, the parents are getting deported so the kids have to go,” Alfaro said. “But they don’t speak Spanish. So now they’re in these classrooms, maybe they’ve had six years of English-only instruction, and then the teachers over there are saying, how do I teach this?”
This dilemma applies to many of the approximately 53,000 Baja students who are from the U.S., Baja education officials say.
So teaching professors and education leaders from both sides of the border have teamed up as part of a binational partnership that will develop more bilingual teachers in Baja who can teach these students well.
Instead of just getting more Baja teachers to teach English as a separate, single subject, officials in this partnership are working on developing dual-language schools, ones that can immerse all students — both native English speakers and native Spanish speakers — in the two languages.
As part of the partnership, teaching professors from San Diego and Baja together are writing a special curriculum on how to prepare bilingual teachers on both sides of the border. In October, San Diego State professors and education students met with Baja education students and toured schools that Baja officials want to turn into bilingual schools.
Last week, about five dozen Baja professors and teaching students visited Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School, Chula Vista’s first public dual-language school, to observe how its teachers educate students in both English and Spanish.
The partnership involves many players, including San Diego State, the education departments for both California and Baja, the University of California-Mexico initiative, UC San Diego, the California Assn. for Bilingual Education and Patricia Gándara, co-director of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, Alfaro said.
Although dual-language immersion has become increasingly popular in San Diego County and elsewhere in California, there are no public dual-language schools in Baja, said Yara Amparo López, state coordinator for Baja’s binational migrant education program. There are only private dual-language schools in Baja, but those are largely accessible only to the elite.
Drawing on the new partnership, López said officials hope to start Baja’s first public dual-language school in Tecate, with more planned for Tijuana, Ensenada and elsewhere.
California has been increasingly recognizing the value of bilingual instruction especially since 2016, when voters repealed a controversial law, Proposition 227, that required English learner students to be taught the language in English immersion classes. Many educators say the law was oppressive, treated other languages as deficits rather than assets, and effectively told students that their languages needed to be replaced with English.
“The problem with that is that we’re not really building on the assets that students bring,” said Alfaro, who has led the bilingual teacher development efforts of the new partnership. “When students come to you and they only speak English, you don’t take the English away. You build on the English. When students come from Mexico and they only speak Spanish, we don’t take the Spanish away. We build on it and we develop dual-language learners.”
Some educators suggest that dual-language schools do more to reinforce the dignity of students by treating them as language learners, not just those who don’t speak English. For example, the educators at the charter school never use the term “English learner” to describe students, which is how California identifies students whose primary language is not English.
“For us, it’s dehumanizing,” said Eugene Yepis, principal of Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School’s high school. “It labels them as a certain type of student.”
Instead, the charter school treats every student as a language learner who is learning not just English and Spanish, but the languages of science, math and more, said Jorge Ramirez, founder and chief educational officer of the school.