How Communities Can Support the Training and Development of Foreign Born Teachers

Eligio’s story*

Eligio Ramirez Sandoval is a Head Start teacher in Southwestern Minnesota. But his path to this career has been full of challenges.

Eligio had always wanted to be a teacher. But in his home country, Guatemala, he faced violence and political persecution that kept him from career opportunities. Eventually these realities also led him to flee to seek out a safer and better life for his family.

Although Eligio speaks English now, when he came to the U.S. in 2006 he did not. Eligio grew up speaking Mam at home, which is one of the Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. He learned Spanish as a second language when he was in grade school there but never learned English. He earned a degree in urban education in Guatemala but still, without English language skills, his work options in the U.S. were limited and so he began working in a meatpacking facility. The work was dangerous, his wages were low, and he was away from his children during much of the day.

In 2016, Eligio’s two youngest children started pre-K in Southwestern Minnesota Opportunity Council (SMOC) Inc’s Head Start program and he began volunteering there. His ability to bridge language barriers in the classroom and his own life experiences and cultural background were huge values to the classroom. “At the time, I was still working at the factory, which was 30 minutes away,” he explains. “I would take a few hours off from work to drive to the school and volunteer. I wasn’t getting paid but I enjoyed it. I was feeling like I was good at something.” The program’s leadership then encouraged him to become more involved and he eventually became a teacher at the center.

Across the nation, there are many foreign born community members who would be huge assets for early education and care programs , particularly due to their ability to communicate and culturally understand children from their communities. As of 2018, there were 44.8 million foreign-born people living in the U.S., a number that includes naturalized U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, temporary migrants (such as foreign students), humanitarian migrants (such as refugees), and unauthorized migrants. Unfortunately, barriers to entry—both financial and language-related—make it difficult for foreign born individuals in the U.S. to pursue a career in teaching and advance in the profession. Here, we offer one educator’s journey to illustrate common barriers that would-be teachers face when seeking to earn a college degree in early childhood education—simply because they were born outside of the U.S. We also discuss how intentional support and dedicated pathways can make all the difference.

Eligio's barriers to entry

There were many up-front expenses for Eligio when he began his path towards a career in education. For example, he needed to submit records of his immunizations, but in Guatemala, no one kept immunization records. This meant he would need to get immunized all over again, and each shot would cost several hundred dollars. Getting his education records from Guatemala was also very expensive—it was $275 just for one page.

Although Eligio was able to begin teaching without a college degree, he knew that it was something that he would need to remain as a lead teacher and to eventually further his career. However, he faced several obstacles to earning a degree. For example, tuition at his local college was an expense that he was not able to afford.

Then there were struggles that weren’t financial. The college entrance exam was only offered in English, which slowed down the whole process. In addition, he lacked familiarity with technology which made taking courses online challenging. “I grew up in Guatemala in a poor community. We didn’t have electricity there. I never touched a computer before coming to the U.S.”

Eligio summarized the challenges that many immigrant early education professionals face, “A lot of people like me want to go to college and get their degree to become teachers, to move beyond being an assistant. But it’s hard. Any degrees that we have from our home countries may or may not count, so we will have to go back to school and make up for the gaps. Many of us have children to care for. It’s hard to pay for college, especially when early childhood education teaching salaries aren’t high.”

Luckily, his employer, SMOC, had the resources and capacity to support Eligio on his path. They recognized his desire to grow as a teacher and to lead as an advocate in his community. When Eligio started thinking about the credentialing process and the associated costs, SMOC helped him pay the costs—either by covering expenses or by helping him find other resources. For example, SMOC helped Eligio find a donation-based clinic where he was able to get his vaccines done at a low cost. When he needed a scanner to prepare application materials, they had one that he could use. Regarding tuition to go back to school, most scholarships are for people who enroll full-time, but this was not possible for Eligio, who had to juggle his studies with work and caretaking. SMOC helped him cover the expenses. When Eligio looks back at his path into a career in education, he recalls the little details that created hardship for him. “If I hadn’t had help, I probably would have left the program.“

The bigger picture: Common barriers to program entry and completion

Eligio’s story helps to illustrate a central tension in the effort to help early childhood educators earn credentials—that the higher education system is not always set up to support the needs of non-traditional students who speak a language other than English and have varying experiences with postsecondary education. As the population of dual language learners, children under the age of five who are learning English in addition to their home language, continues to grow, the Early Childhood Education (ECE) system will continue to need multilingual teachers that can support these children and their families.

New America’s Education Policy Program has been researching and writing about teacher pathways for multilingual individuals for several years. Our 2017 report Teacher Talent Untapped highlights the myriad financial, academic, linguistic and familial barriers that multilingual paraeducators working in PreK-12 school systems face in becoming a teacher. Many of these challenges can also be applied to multilingual early childhood educators working in Head Start, center-based programs, and in-home providers. While ECE educators are not required to earn a bachelor’s degree in order to teach, there has been a national push to raise credential requirements to enhance the competencies and skills of the workforce and create well articulated roles and career advancement pathways. Programs such as Head Start seek for no less than 50 percent of lead teachersto have a bachelor’s degree and require a minimum of an associate degree in early childhood education, child development, or equivalent coursework.

To be sure, these approaches have faced some resistance due to fears that some educators would be pushed out of the profession entirely due to a lack of support structures. Some of these concerns have been addressed at the local level through dedicated funding to support scholarships, the development of pathway programs, such as apprenticeship, and other strategies. But to support multilingual educators who speak a language other than English, more efforts are needed to remove barriers and increase access and attainment of credentials.

How Grow Your Own programs could help

Grow Your Own (GYO) educator programs are designed to help members of the community earn a teaching degree and often provide wraparound services to help them succeed in reaching their goals. While SMOC does not have a formal GYO, the support and services offered to Eligio are illustrative of the strategies used by these programs to help individuals succeed in becoming credentialed teachers in their own communities. In Eligio’s case, he had SMOC there to offer support with expenses, with language barriers, and with help through the administrative processes that are inevitable in getting a professional credential. Indeed, GYO programs may offer mentorship, assistance with admissions and enrollment, dedicated bilingual navigators to work one-on-one with program candidates, tutoring and test preparation, and financial support. They provide the help that nontraditional teachers might need to push through the barriers they face and stay with their credentialing path. Since GYO aims to meet the teacher workforce needs of local communities, programs often consist of partnerships between local school systems (or ECE programs), educator preparation programs and/or community based organizations. Together, these partners provide comprehensive wrap around support designed to address the needs of individual candidates and prepare the teachers communities need.

Currently, much of the state-level work on GYO has focused on K-12 teachers, which has resulted in related policies and funding leaving out the early childhood and care workforce. However, states can use federal Preschool Development Grants and recovery funds to invest in staff development and credentialing. In addition, both Early Head Start and Head Start funding can be used to support staff in earning additional credentials and advancing in their careers, including GYO programs.

Looking forward

Eligio recalls his father telling him that, “no matter where you live, you can always work to help your community and make it a better place.” This remains his North Star and in addition to teaching, Eligio helps under-resourced parents in his community access basic necessities. Currently, SMOC has eleven foreign-born, bilingual employees working toward their Early Childhood Certificate with funding from Head Start grants. Eligio dreams of one day leading a preschool program of his own that would serve Central American families. Having been able to jump over the initial hurdles, he’s now in a position to not only support preschool programs but also to lead them and to even expand their reach.

*Note: The New Practice Lab met Eligio Ramirez Sandoval while conducting a design sprint in Minnesota in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Education. The goal of the sprint was to help the Department develop strategies for making its subsidized pre-K programs more accessible to families from communities within the State that face marginalization. Special thanks to the New Practice Lab sprint team that first captured Eligio’s story: Erica Dorn, Monee Fields White, and Maisha Giles. Another thanks to SMOC and to the Minnesota Department of Education, which invited the New Practice Lab in to help them think about how to make state-administered pre-k programs more accessible to marginalized communities across the state. And finally, to Eligio for sharing his story.

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