From Albuquerque to Albany: How Public Schools Are Cashing In on the Bilingual Boom

On a Tuesday morning, the cafeteria of a public elementary school in Albuquerque smells like floor wax and green chile. A young boy is reading a tattered paperback in Spanish to a young girl, who primarily responds in English. This doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to either of them. Neither does their teacher, who is holding a coffee and leaning against a folding table. This scene might have been a curiosity ten years ago. It’s a line item today.

From the high desert districts of New Mexico to the brownstone-lined neighborhoods of Albany, New York, public schools in the United States are quietly but unmistakably profiting from bilingual education. Superintendents who previously viewed dual-language programs as a soft, nice-to-have offering seem to now view them as a growth strategy. In public education, enrollment is the key, and it turns out that bilingual classrooms are packed.

The figures contribute to the explanation. The state’s Bilingual Multicultural Education Act provides substantial per-pupil funding for New Mexico’s bilingual programs, which are supported by a “English Plus” state policy and serve sizable Hispanic, Navajo, and Zuni student populations. Districts are pursuing more than just pedagogical victories when they submit applications for new program implementation to the State Department of Education each spring. They’re chasing money and, more often than not, students whose families would otherwise choose private or charter options. For years, demand has exceeded supply for the Dual Language and Heritage Language programs offered by Albuquerque Public Schools alone in grades K–12.

Albany recounts the same tale in a different way. Although less obviously bilingual than the Southwest, the capital region of New York has been gradually expanding Spanish-English dual-language tracks, in part to keep Latino families and in part because wealthy monolingual parents have realized what wealthy parents in places like Brooklyn and Austin realized ten years ago: a bilingual diploma is a kind of long-term asset. It’s difficult to ignore how the discourse has changed. What was once presented as a service for new students is now openly marketed as enrichment.

There are tensions associated with that change. The original goal of making immigrant children feel “heard and validated”—as stated by Belen Delgado of the Dolores Huerta Foundation—may be compromised as districts pursue enrollment, according to authors and educators who advocated for bilingual classrooms long before they became a budgetary strategy. Even though demand in classrooms has increased, bilingual children’s books with Latinx protagonists still only account for about 7% of the U.S. children’s publishing market. Teachers are aware that the pipeline of culturally relevant content is far behind that of new programs. Photocopies, imported books, and whatever a parent like Rocio Gonzalez can find at a San José community book fair are used to fill the void.

The bilingual moment doesn’t seem to be a moment at all to investors in the larger ed-tech industry. There are concerns about who exactly benefits from a movement that started in immigrant homes as curriculum companies, assessment vendors, and translation-tool startups have been subtly repositioning around dual-language schools. It’s still unclear if bilingualism, like so much else in American education, will eventually be packaged, scaled back, and sold back, or if the public schools in charge of these programs can maintain them rooted in the communities that created them.

The classrooms continue to fill up for the time being. A girl in Albuquerque slides her book across the cafeteria table after finishing her chapter. A kindergarten teacher in Albany writes the date in two languages on the board. Even though no one in the building is quite sure what to call it, you get the impression that something long-lasting is taking shape as you watch this develop.