Search on for bilingual education leader

Washington state is looking for a new director of migrant and bilingual education after the recent resignation of Alfonso Anaya, whose appointment in March 2006 was welcomed by Latinos concerned about disparity in education.

Anaya, whose resignation was effective Aug. 27, said he left the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for personal reasons, including the desire to spend more time with his family in California.

But he also said the Washington system of educating minority-language children “needs to be revamped,” and he could not commit himself to the five or 10 years the overhaul would take.

“There has to be a dramatic change,” both in funding and accountability, Anaya said of the state’s nearly $70 million bilingual education program, which stresses language proficiency but not dual-language instruction in core curriculum.

Contacted at his home in Monterey, Calif., Anaya said he was grateful to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson for giving him the opportunity to work in migrant and bilingual education in Washington, where he once picked apples as the son of migrant farmworkers.

Bergeson said she would move quickly to fill Anaya’s position and also promised to bring in experts from around the country “to do a management and program review of the whole program.”

Part of Anaya’s criticism was directed at Washington’s locally controlled educational system, which he said has resulted in inconsistent bilingual curriculum among school districts and a lack of instructors trained to work with minority-language children.

“I came to find there was a misunderstanding about how minority children should be educated and also a lack of consistency,” said Anaya, a former superintendent of the Alum Rock School District in San Jose, Calif., and a former member of the board of directors of the California Association for Bilingual Education.

Last October, Anaya told the state Commission on Hispanic Affairs that of the 87,000 English-language learners in Washington schools, nearly 70 percent are Hispanic and 89 percent are in remedial programs.

These programs are taught, he said, by noncredentialed teachers or paraprofessionals.

In the 2004-05 school year, the last year for which data are available, the state spent $67.4 million on transitional bilingual education.

“We are spending all this money and yet if you look at the scores and dropout rate, we haven’t made a dent,” said Uriel Iniguez, director of the Hispanic Affairs Commission.

Iniguez said Anaya’s resignation was a disappointment.

Latinos, he said, hoped that Anaya’s expertise in English-language acquisition would help turn around an apparent disparity in which only 60 percent of Washington Latino students graduate from high school and where Latinos rank lower than any ethnic group in 10th-grade Washington Assessment of Student Learning scores.

“We finally had somebody that was fully qualified, who understood the issues, who could make these programs more efficient,” Iniguez said.

Most transitional bilingual instruction program funds are spent on salaries and benefits, according to an OSPI report, yet relatively few students receive instruction in their primary language because of a shortage of qualified teachers who speak a language other than English.

This year, the state allocated $848 per English-language learning student, amounting to $848,000 for the 1,000 English-language learners in the Spokane school district.

The actual expense of teaching these students is about $2.3 million, said Howard DeLeeuw, English-language development coordinator for Spokane schools.

Unlike Central Washington, where Spanish is the dominant second language, Spokane schools must contend with 47 language groups, DeLeeuw said.

He said Anaya tried to extend help for English-language learners beyond the minimum standard of language proficiency to include helping to ensure these students have the cognitive proficiency to be successful on the WASL.

“In his short year he set a really good tone,” DeLeeuw said. “He had a real vision.”

Bergeson said she, too, was disappointed to lose Anaya, who came out of retirement from the California educational system to take the job, but she is “determined to find a strong leader to build a coherent, researched-based program.”