Texas officials are making progress toward creating a new bilingual special education teacher certification, which advocates hope will set a national example for states serving students dually identified as English learners and students with disabilities.
In 2021, the Texas legislature passed House Bill 2256, mandating the creation of a bilingual special education teacher certificate. After years of development, the state board of education formally adopted the standards for the new certification in September 2025.
The exam for the certification is expected to be in practice in 2028.
“I think the certification represents a very historic shift in how we prepare teachers to serve emergent bilingual students, especially those kids with disabilities, because it’s not as if it’s two separate populations. It’s the whole child whose language, culture, and learning differences intersect,” said Lizdelia Piñón, an emergent bilingual education associate for the Texas-based advocacy nonprofit Intercultural Development Research Association, or IDRA. Piñón helped develop the certificate’s standards.
While some universities in Texas and elsewhere already offer bilingual special education certifications, and states including Texas already offer bilingual teaching certifications, the new certificate would fill a persistent gap in both English-learner and special education services, Piñón said.
“It’s a landmark approval for the dual needs of these students,” she added.
Training teachers to support dually identified students
The goal of the certificate, Piñón said, is to ensure educators can distinguish between language differences and disabilities; design dual-language, individualized education programs grounded in students’ cultural and linguistic strengths; foster collaboration between language-acquisition educators and special education teams; and implement asset-based, inclusive, and research-aligned practices in every classroom.
Currently, many teachers struggle to correctly identify students’ needs, questioning whether a student needs linguistic support or special education services, Piñón said.
The new certificate would help teachers better understand these intersecting needs and fill existing gaps in training, as in the case of the Brownsville Independent school district in the Rio Grande Valley.
The district served more than 36,000 students last year, and about half its special education student population is bilingual, said Carlos Olvera, the director of bilingual education for the district.
As the district works to increase the number of bilingual certified teachers overall, Olvera said the majority of teachers without bilingual certification are special education teachers.
The district offers educators professional development opportunities, test prep, and even reimbursement for the bilingual-certification exam, but some are still unable to pass.
Nonetheless, they are excellent special education teachers and are continuing to work toward getting that bilingual certification, said Beatriz Hernandez, the chief academic officer for the district.
Olvera hopes that the new bilingual special education certification can better prepare future teachers entering the workforce while also offering specialized coursework and training for in-service teachers.
Barriers remain ahead for bilingual special education certification
Although Olvera and Hernandez welcome the new certification, they question how many in-service teachers will be able to pass its exam, given their struggles with the preexisting bilingual-certification exam.
Piñón also noted that in-service teachers will need ongoing support to earn the new certification, and ideally, the state will track not only how many educators earn it but also who has access to it and how it affects student outcomes.
The special education student population at Brownsville and across the state continues to grow, Hernandez said, with many of these students also having cultural and linguistic needs. Yet, fully certified teachers remain hard to recruit.
A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality found that 5.3 million K-12 students in 2022-23 were English learners, and 7.5 million students had disabilities. Yet, special education has remained the top educator shortage area for roughly 30 years across the country, and teachers for English learners have stayed among the five scarcest for at least 20 years.
About 16% of the English-learner population also has disabilities.
Piñón and others hope the new certification will prepare future educators to meet the needs of this growing student population.
