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“ Yo me siento muy feliz porque yo hace mi proyecto ,” says a small blond third grader, sitting on the carpet (“I feel very happy because I does my project.”)
“ Hice mi proyecto ,” corrects teacher Maria Lomeli, speaking through a microphone linked to speakers set off to the side of the gathering (“I did my project”).
It’s a calm start to the 100th day of school at Desert Sands Unified School District’s Ronald Reagan Elementary, in Palm Desert, California. It’s Lomeli’s fifth year working on campus, and she has the classroom set up to foster a tranquil atmosphere. As students share how they’re feeling that day, the speakers play gentle piano music overlaid with nature sounds—chirping birds and rustling leaves.
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Relaxed, untroubled, and bilingual —it’s remarkable, particularly in the context of California’s history of roiling language education politics. From 1998 to 2016, Lomeli’s peaceful bilingual classroom would likely have been illicit, framed by political pressures, and—above all— illegal under California law .
For most of the past thirty years, English-only advocates waged a pitched battle to prevent schools from offering bilingual education to the state’s English learners (ELs). In 1998, conservative activists— supported by large majorities of white voters and Republican voters —imposed an English-only mandate on the state’s K–12 schools, arguing that bilingual education was ineffective at advancing ELs’ linguistic and academic development.
Some argued that schools’ cultivation of non-English languages separated children from their English-dominant peers and slowed immigrant childrens’ integration into their schools and broader society. Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles teacher whose work inspired the movie Stand and Deliver , emphasized this point , arguing that “California schools [were] forced to use bilingual education despite parental opposition” in the years before the English-only mandate.
Nonetheless, the data on California’s English-only experiment were largely discouraging . That’s why, in 2016, voters repealed the statewide mandate imposing English-only education. Since then, California schools have— in fits and starts —begun to rebuild a new, multilingual K–12 system. This time, the state is growing a wide variety of bilingual programs—including popular dual language immersion (DLI) models—to appeal to a range of priorities from different families, regardless of the languages they speak at home.
Perhaps Lomeli’s classroom’s pervasive calm stems from that change—bilingual learning opportunities are now offered as an option for families to choose, rather than as a blanket mandate. Career educator Daniel Salinero, in his fourth year as a first grade teacher at Reagan, thinks so. “One of the differences between now and the ’90s, when I taught in bilingual ed,” he says, “Back then, they were kind of funneled that way. Here, the parents want their child in the program.”
There are good reasons for families to choose DLI, a version of bilingual education where students learn academic content in both languages and proficiency in both languages is a key goal. Research suggests these programs are the most effective way for schools to support ELs—particularly when they are linguistically balanced, enrolling native speakers of both languages. In California— and around the country —many English-dominant families are also attracted by the possibility of raising their children bilingually.
Desert Sands launched its DLI programs in 2019 as a way to better serve its ELs—who make up more than 20 percent of the Reagan student body . Meanwhile, at Jackson Elementary, the district’s other DLI program, nearly 50 percent of students are ELs who speak Spanish at home.
The first year was rocky—standard issue for the implementation of any new educational program—but the pandemic dramatically raised the difficulty of teachers’ work. “I transferred from a school where I was teaching fourth- and fifth-grade to Spanish-speaking students to [here], where I was teaching kindergarten to non-Spanish speakers who had no clue what I was saying,” says Lomeli. “And then we had to close and I had to teach online and…”
She trails off. Salinero offers, “It got worse.”
But as the pandemic wound down and campuses reopened, Desert Sands’ DLI programs moved towards full implementation, growing by one grade each fall. The kindergarteners who inaugurated the program in 2019 will round out their elementary school years as increasingly bilingual fifth-graders at the end of the 2024–25 year.
“I think also what has helped a lot is the parental support,” says Reagan first-grade teacher Juan Gutierrez. “We’re very lucky to have that. All the parents are very invested…They want the kids to be in the program. It’s not like the students are being chosen by the school. The parents are, like, actively seeking the dual language program so their kids can become bilingual and biliterate.”
Desert Sands leaders say that this is one of the virtues of California’s new, burgeoning bilingual education moment: it gives families the chance to opt into bilingual or DLI programs on the strength of these programs’ many virtues. The district aims for diverse, balanced DLI campuses with one-third of students who are Spanish-dominant, one-third who are English-dominant, and one-third who arrive in kindergarten with emerging bilingual proficiencies in both languages.
This is an achievable goal here, in Riverside County, where over half of households speak a non-English language at home. This is also DLI operating precisely as promised. In a prescient 2009 article, researcher Laurie Olsen noted , there is real potential in presenting “culture and language as assets for children and families, two languages as better than one, and cross-cultural competencies as necessary for all students in a 21st-century global society.” By making bilingual programs a choice available to families of linguistically varied backgrounds, rather than a mandatory assignment, state and local education leaders have broadened the base of political support for bilingualism.
That approach is creating calm classrooms like Lomeli’s, but it also carries costs. Foremost among them: the state’s bilingual teaching force shrank considerably during its English-only period, and it has not yet invested enough in building it back . This makes it difficult to rapidly regrow the state’s bilingual and DLI classrooms. The resulting scarcity of bilingual seats produces a challenge: when districts make room for English-dominant families in their DLI programs, they may inadvertently reduce English learners’ access—and key opportunities to develop their emerging bilingualism.
“We have a diverse population,” says Salinero, “we have native Spanish-speakers and native English-speakers, and they have different needs and they bounce ideas off of each other.” By clarifying local priorities from the start in its Multilingual Learner Master Plan and insisting on treating Spanish proficiency and English proficiency alike as valuable assets, the district is taking advantage of new terrain California voters opened up in 2016.
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