Districts Push Cross-Cultural Teaching Skills

Ensuring that teachers have the best techniques to teach the county’s ever-increasing number of students from different cultures and who speak limited English would seem to be just good policy.

And Orange County school districts now are setting time limits for their teachers to get such training and certification.

But for thousands of veteran educators--many of whom already have skills acquired over decades of working with such children--getting the required state certificate in cross-cultural teaching may amount to another time-consuming hurdle on top of already demanding jobs.

“We’re talking about teachers who are already qualified--many of our teachers have master’s degrees,” said Jim Harlan, executive director of the West Orange County United Teachers, which is proposing exemptions for experienced educators.

“We keep loading on more and more and more and wonder why they don’t have the time to teach,” Harlan said.

Both state and federal regulations require school districts to employ teachers who understand how best to instruct children of various cultural backgrounds as well as how language is learned.

“It’s a big push now for everybody in the state to become certified, and we think it’s good for teachers to have,” said Michael Miller, director of certified personnel in Garden Grove School Unified School District. “The [cross-cultural] strategies are just good teaching strategies.”

This month, Santa Ana Unified School District notified its teachers that they must begin earning certification needed to teach children who speak limited English. About 700 of the district’s 2,440 teachers have until the end of the month to inform the district that they are enrolled in courses, although district officials say there is no hard-and-fast deadline.

Yet cross-cultural training is proving to be a delicate matter, particularly at a time when many school districts are trying to hire enough teachers to fill their classrooms. As administrators craft policies that push their teachers toward certification, most try to do so without alienating their existing labor pool or getting a reputation as an unpopular place to work.

“We want to be sensitive about how we write [a policy] because it’s something teachers haven’t had to have in the past and you want to be fair,” Miller said.

The rub is that while newly trained teachers generally have the needed credentials, many veteran teachers must go back to school--on their own time.

Depending on a teacher’s past education, this could be a formidable task; for example, people who took no foreign language in college would be required to get 90 hours of such instruction.

That’s why the West Orange County United Teachers, which represents educators from Ocean View and Huntington Beach elementary and high school districts, has asked the California Teachers Assn. to push state legislation to grant experienced teachers waivers from cross-cultural certification.

In seeking the waivers, the union is not saying teachers don’t need specific skills to teach English learners, but rather that many teachers already have them.

“Some folks who don’t have the strategies and are not doing it right need to be trained,” said union President Kathy Iverson, a 28-year science teacher at Westminster High School. “But long before there was [cross-cultural certification], there were teachers who have had to teach children who didn’t know how to speak English; they learned these strategies as a way of survival.”

Although often linked with bilingual education, cross-cultural training techniques most often are used by teachers to help limited-English speakers taking English-only classes, said Howard Bryan, Santa Ana’s director of bilingual education.

Those techniques range from breaking down complex components of a lesson into simple concepts, to using more pictures and speaking more slowly.

“A lot of these are just very good techniques in general,” Bryan said.

The West Orange County United Teachers’ waiver request, which is being reviewed by the California Teachers Assn. board, calls for classroom evaluation of experienced teachers to determine whether they already have the necessary skills.

The CTA, which represents 295,000 educators, has supported cross-cultural training, but with some caveats. CTA officials emphasize that school districts should implement policies in such a way that causes a minimum of stress and upheaval to teachers and students.

“We take the position that [cross-cultural] training is valuable,” CTA’s Justo Robles said. “But school districts have to make good-faith efforts” to determine exactly how many teachers need to be certified and provide teachers with incentives to take classes with high numbers of English learners.

Some school districts lower class sizes for teachers who have large numbers of English learners, recognizing their work is more labor-intensive. Such class-size reductions also provide longtime teachers with an incentive to teach classes with generally less advanced students.

“What we do not like is a unilateral and, in many cases, arbitrary assignment of teachers to work with any student, not just [limited-English-proficiency] ones,” Robles said.

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It’s a particularly sensitive issue for districts with high numbers of students who are learning English.

In Los Angeles Unified School District, about 55% of the district’s 33,228 full-time teachers--18,143--either hold certification or are in training to receive it. About 45% of the district’s students are English learners, a good ratio, according to Norm Gold, head of the state’s language proficiency and academic accountability unit.

“Los Angeles is in pretty darn good shape,” Gold said. “There will be some schools at some grades that don’t have these teachers with the right kids, but L.A. Unified has done a tremendous job of training and hiring [certified] teachers.”

Elsewhere in the state, the process is going more slowly.

“The big picture is that in most of the rest of the state, teachers for the last few years have understood they need some special training and authorizations,” Gold said. “It’s clear there seem to be some teachers who feel strongly they don’t need them or want them, but it’s the law.”

So far, no district in California has fired a teacher who refused to get the training and certification, according to Gold. In many school districts, teachers without certification opt to be moved to assignments that don’t involve teaching high numbers of English learners.

This fall, Capistrano Unified School District, which has far fewer students learning to speak English, will notify new teachers that they must have cross-cultural certification within two years of their hire date.

But Santa Ana Unified, because of its large population of limited-English students, needs about 2,000 of its teachers to be certified.

The district has not threatened to fire teachers, Bryan said. But he said teachers who don’t get certified probably will face reassignment.

“Theoretically, if you didn’t have [a teaching] assignment, there could be no place for you,” Bryan said. “But we haven’t been planning on working that way, not at all.”