Systemic Racism Keeps Native Speakers From Teaching Language

We have plenty of qualified individuals, but our system prevents them from teaching

Everybody’s reaction to the story I’m about to tell is to let out a groan of frustration and disgust. Maybe it should be anger.

My wife was born and educated in Lima, Peru. She is a native Spanish speaker, and she worked as a teacher for ten years until we relocated to the United States. She is now a US citizen and has been working as a family services facilitator in the local school district since 2011.

In 2019, she decided she wanted to get back into teaching. So, we went through the arduous process of getting her degree accredited, and she was issued an emergency license to teach ELL. She was accepted into an accelerated program to earn her teaching credential, and they evaluated her degree.

Upon reviewing her transcripts, their conclusion was that she had the necessary qualifications to teach English but not Spanish.

Huh?

My wife’s degree is in business administration. English is considered a business language in Peru, so she had English classes every semester.

All of her other classes, tests, lectures, and compositions were entirely in Spanish.

However, because she didn’t take a series of Spanish dedicated courses, she is not recognized as having a sufficient education in Spanish to teach the language.

Frustration with academia

It is not without precedent that qualified people are awarded teaching positions, even though they do not hold the requisite degrees. For example, Neil Armstrong taught Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati despite only holding a Master’s Degree.

Neil Armstrong is one of only a handful of people who have actually been in a position where an instinctive understanding of Einstein’s equations meant the difference between life and death. Of course he was qualified to teach Aerospace Engineering! However, if the rule of law was applied to his case as it has been to my wife, he should have been excluded.

There are many differences between Armstrong’s situation and my wife’s. My wife has never walked on the moon. She is a woman. She isn’t white.

The deplorable state of US language education

I lived in Lima, Peru for 10 years, and I also consider myself fluent in Spanish. On a number of occasions, I have observed licensed Spanish teachers in the state of Wisconsin teach high school classes. The results have been shocking.

Many people with Spanish degrees simply can’t speak Spanish.

I’ve often felt that US language programs are intentionally incompetent. It’s sort of like how other nations have access to bullet trains that provide necessary market competition to ensure airlines provide a competent and economically priced flying service. But we don’t have bullet trains in the US because the concept is always sabotaged by powerful figures.

By the same token, there seem to be forces at play that work around the clock to make sure our children don’t have access to foreign language acquisition.

Why might that be? Are they afraid US citizens might all of a sudden have access to a variety of foreign news services? Would it make it harder to control the narrative? Maybe US citizens would start to figure out health care is available abroad for an infinitesimal of what it costs here.

What about a test?

Yes, I understand that competency must be established before a person is allowed to teach a subject. But why don’t we have a simple test? When you have individuals who are highly educated both in a professional field and as teachers, it’s ridiculous to put obstacles in their way to prevent them from teaching a foreign language.

If testing is meaningless, why is it used as a formal class evaluation?

There are multiple tests teachers have to take to prove competency. Why can’t we have test-based accreditation too? Based on my research into teaching requirements, test-based accreditation for foreign language is not available in Wisconsin (if you know of a program, please share it in the comments). We were informed by her licensure program that she’d have to attend a university to earn the required Spanish credits if she wanted to teach the language.

What sense does that make? Taking university classes amounts to little more than passing exams. The primary difference is that it also requires a huge amount of money and time.

We don’t have a shortage of qualified individuals

It’s almost as if our educational system only wants to grant jobs to individuals with enough disposable income to spend a year or two paying for classes rather than working.

We can’t do that. We are adults with children, we don’t have the flexibility to spend tens of thousands of dollars to learn something we already know.

Everywhere you look, there are people lamenting the “shortage” of qualified foreign language teachers. Spanish is always a shortage area, although there are many educated, qualified people that are prevented from being awarded these jobs.

Based on the recent focus on the systemic racism that plagues our nation, I’m no longer inclined to dismiss this situation as “just the way it is.”

Let’s make a push for common sense

Foreign language competency should be evaluated differently from other subject areas. A person with a degree in Physics, for example, is almost certain to have a better core understanding of the subject than a person who has not engaged in formal study.

However, four years of formal education in a foreign language does not come close to providing the same level of subject mastery that can be displayed by almost any native speaker. Sure, there are other reasons a native speaker could be disqualified as a teaching candidate, but a lack of subject comprehension should not be one of them.

The simple fact is that there are plenty of qualified individuals who could provide a great service teaching foreign languages to our children. Any claims of a “teacher shortage” is due to a systemic failure to make common sense exceptions for people with diverse cultural backgrounds.

Ask yourself this question, do you think there would there still be a Spanish teacher shortage if more native speakers were white?

More on my wife’s US education journey: