Hilda Maldonado served for six years as the Executive Director of the Multilingual and Multicultural Education Department at the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In this role, she oversaw policy, leadership, and instructional issues affecting students for whom learning English can be a barrier to accessing college, career opportunities, and a path out of poverty. A former teacher and school principal, she wanted to explore how we might leverage the many languages spoken in Los Angeles as assets rather than deficits. She aims to influence not only LAUSD, but also parents, employers, and broader society.
* Hilda transitioned out of her role at the Multilingual and Multicultural Education Department in 2018.
Fellowship Summary
The Challenge: Los Angeles Unified School District is the second-largest school district and is the nation’s largest English Learner (Emerging Bilingual) enrollment district, with over 93 languages spoken throughout the District. The City of Los Angeles has a diverse population with a myriad of languages. I am interested in the question of how we might leverage these many languages as assets rather than deficits. As part of my inquiry, I would also like to answer the following smaller questions:
- Why is literacy such a strong barrier for many students in the US when some Third World countries have higher literacy rates?
- How might Los Angeles leverage its languages to improve outcomes for its residents and help lift youth and their families out of poverty?
- Why do so many of our students fail to thrive in our school system? How do language and poverty impact their learning?
The Hunch: I wanted to figure out how an education system could address the challenge of educating students in a language they didn’t yet understand, and students who were showing severe delays in mastering literacy and reading comprehension. I also wanted to learn more about how these students’ home languages might be valued and leveraged to learn a second language. My hunch was that other educators, systems, and countries might have solutions that I hadn’t yet thought of, or they might have approaches our district had not yet implemented.
The Proposal: As the leader of policy and programs in LA Unified, my position gave me a bird’s-eye view of the systemic inequalities and barriers that many educational practices created for students, teachers, and school leaders. The Stanton Fellowship provided me with the opportunity to take a step back. I thought I may have become too bureaucratic and had lost sight of how to keep pushing our organization to improve our delivery of services to families and their children. As I researched, read, reflected, and met with other leaders, I began to bifurcate my thinking between a systemic view and a professional leadership view.
Additionally, in the middle of my fellowship, voters in California passed Proposition 58, which eliminated the decades-old education code requiring English-only instruction for public school students. This windfall legislation completely changed many of the restrictive language policy practices. However, implementing this law proved to be more difficult than expected, and the lack of knowledge and interest among leaders and educators presented a whole new set of challenges. I noticed that many bilingual leaders were not feeling hope and pride but fear and shame in their work with English Learners. I, too, recognized that I felt the same way as a student.
The Stanton Journey: My process consisted of convening English Learner leaders, reviewing research, and interviewing experts, practitioners, and students. I attended a conference in Mexico City and visited Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia in Spain to observe and interview education leaders working with dual-language and bilingual education. I found that the way I approached my duties as executive director began to change as I learned more about the outside influences and stakeholders that impact education.
As an example, once voters passed Proposition 58, I put together a transition team consisting of representatives from all central offices such as Human Resources, Budget, etc. I also reached out to labor partners and parent representatives. It was through continuous relationship-building that I began to realize my role and its impact could evolve. As the Proposition 58 team began to form, we were able to convene level-alike groups of parents, teachers, and principals. Through the convening, we listened and learned that the tools we needed to create had to be simple and to the point.
Reflecting during my self-retreats on the process of my own learning, I realized I was making things too complicated. I was rule-bound rather than person-bound in the development of these resources and in my approach to the work. I was asked to join a statewide coalition of leaders in California to work on a new state plan, and found that as a result of my growth, my voice for advocacy started to change. I began to speak from a place of pride and courage. The organizational and transformational leadership that was needed to support students came to life, and I no longer just felt like the immigrant child that had become the executive director. Instead, I felt like a worthy human being that came from a culture and family that offered a lot to this country and city. Just like the process of becoming a butterfly, I felt myself-metamorphose into a more calm and confident leader through the work of building relationships, gathering information from experts, and listening and learning at both a personal and professional level.
Where You Are Now: At the end of my fellowship, I convened with a consultant. My purpose was to ascertain the outcome of the leadership retreat that I had gathered one final time in the spring. The consultant conducted a survey and set of interviews with the retreat participants, and she found that:
“It is not enough to know the native language. Leaders must be willing to understand bilingualism and see it as an asset, engage in research-based strategies, and engage families and collaborative strategies to better understand how to leverage and learn from the assets of emergent bilinguals.”
She also identified common actionable themes when working with our population, such as: social-emotional learning, valuing multilingualism and multiculturalism, family connections, and building alliances and relationships. But most importantly, the interviews revealed that learners and leaders in this work suffer from trauma, compete against one another for limited resources, and lack sufficient support. Leaders have to leverage laws to push for multilingual-friendly legislation and recognize students’ cultural capital that schools so often devalue and suppress.
It is my intent to further understand the work I continue to pursue. Not only for myself, but in service of the students and leaders who enter our classrooms every day. Overall, school environments must shift from instilling fear and shame to cultivating pride and courage. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly at the right time and under the right conditions. Accelerating or delaying the process only results in loss. The Stanton Fellowship gave me wings and the ability to use my voice for the benefit of others.
