UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education opens this year’s “Policy Goes to School” lecture series on Monday, October 22 from 5 pm - 6 pm in room 1207 Education Building. Lucrecia Santibañez, Associate Professor at Claremont Graduate University's School of Educational Studies, will give the lecture “Bilingual Education on the Rise: Will the Teachers Be There?” The talk is free and open to the public. The lecture series is hosted by Michael Gottfried, Tine Sloan, and the Department of Education.
Bilingual teachers have a set of specialized knowledge that benefits English Learners, one of the nation’s most vulnerable student populations. Yet hiring bilingual teachers in states with large proportions of ELs is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly after the passage in the early aughts of anti-bilingual education policies. Santibañez uses data from the Schools and Staffing Survey to test the impact of state language policies on the supply of bilingual teachers in states where voters passed anti-bilingual legislation: California, Arizona, Colorado, and Massachusetts. In the current context, with exploding growth in bilingual and dual-language immersion programs, her results highlight the potential consequences of a constrained supply of teachers with these qualifications on districts’ abilities to provide ELs with the teachers they need.
Lucrecia Santibañez (Ph.D. Education, M.A. Economics, Stanford University) is an Associate Professor at Claremont Graduate University's School of Educational Studies. During the Fall of 2017 she was a Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Previously she was Education Economist at the RAND Corporation and Professor of Public Policy at CIDE in Mexico City. She studies how to improve teacher policy and school-level resource allocation to increase learning among vulnerable populations. She has conducted research in Mexico, Colombia, Laos, Mozambique, and the United States. Her academic research has been published by Economics of Education Review, Teachers College Record, Review of Educational Research, Education Policy Analysis Archives, International Journal of Behavioral Development, and the International Journal of Educational Development. She publishes in both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking journals. As Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator she has received research grants from the Spencer Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund, The World Bank, J-PAL, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.