Students perform at CLIC’s Festival de Las Americas.

The principals of a charter and a district elementary school that share a Baldwin Village location have teamed up to bring dual-language educators together this weekend to learn from each other and share best practices, strategies and resources.

About 60 educators from the LA area have signed up to attend Saturday’s free half-day “unconference,” in which participants that day collectively choose the main topics to be discussed. Dual Language Los Angeles will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Hillcrest Elementary School, an LA neighborhood school in Baldwin Village in South Los Angeles that also is home to City Language Immersion Charter (CLIC), a 3-year-old public charter school founded by parents from West Adams.

“The principals made this happen,” said Valerie Braimah, executive director of City Charter Schools, which runs CLIC plus a middle and high school. “They were discussing how to collaborate on professional development and came up with the idea together.”

The event is a unique charter and district collaboration, Braimah said. “There is so much conflict between charters and the district, but I see a lot of ways in which, on a person-to-person level, those tensions are overcome for the greater good.”

Another motivation, she said, was “because dual-immersion programs are so dispersed geographically. This is the first time we have ever done anything like this. There are state and national bilingual language conferences, but we haven’t seen a lot of opportunities locally.”

Although the principals of CLIC, Raul Alarcon, and Hillcrest, Anthony Jackson, already provide professional development to their teachers separately, they saw their co-location as an opportunity to solve problems and serve teachers together.

“I hope that this type of collective learning and leadership can be a model for the district,” Alarcon stated in a news release. “We hope to show what happens when we work together to solve common challenges with the goal of better serving all of our students.”

Jackson added, “Our reciprocal model of collaboration and partnership just makes sense. We both offer dual-language immersion programs. We both share the school’s location. It makes sense to grow our knowledge and that of visiting educators, and practice together to benefit our scholars and their families.”

The half-day unconference is still registering participants at dualla.weebly.com. Walk-ins are welcome. For more information, contact Raul Alarcon, ralarcon@citycharterschools.org, (323) 294-4937, or Anthony Jackson, anthony.c.jackson@lausd.net, (323) 296-6867.

The rise of revanchist xenophobia on the campaign trail — currently embodied in Donald Trump’s campaign — isn’t new either. American concern over immigrant integration is an old, cyclical story. To a degree, November’s election will be a referendum on how the country should respond to its growing diversity: Are immigrant families best understood as problems, or in terms of their potential?

Fittingly, in California, the campaign season will include a subplot — and perhaps a denouement — from one of the last rounds of American immigration anxiety. In 1998, Californians anxious about a recent influx of immigrants passed Proposition 227, a ballot measure that mandated English immersion for nearly all of the states’ multilingual students. This year, as the country argues over whether to build a wall on our southern border, Californians will vote on the Multilingual Education Act, a new ballot initiative that would update and improve Prop. 227 by expanding the availability of bilingual education models (including popular dual-immersion programs) for English language learners.

The new initiative is the result of a 2014 bill, “The California Education for a Global Economy Initiative” (“The Ed.G.E. Initiative”) drafted by State Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens). The bill maintains English instruction programs, but also empowers parents “to choose a language acquisition program that best suits their child” and requires districts with sufficient numbers of English language learners (ELLs) to launch the multilingual programs with parents’ support. It only takes effect if approved by voters this November.

The Ed.G.E. Initiative would affect a large number of students. Fully 1.4 million California students are classified as ELLs, which is about 23 percent of the state’s K-12 student population. Or, to slice it another way, California enrolls about one-third of the United States’ ELLs. Before Prop. 227, around 29 percent of the state’s ELLs were enrolled in bilingual education. That dropped to 11 percent in 2000 and is currently around 5 percent.

These children are the state’s future workers, taxpayers and homebuyers. “Ultimately,” writes USC demographer Dowell Myers, “the most feasible path to continued California prosperity is to invest in the economic productivity of our youth.”

So: how can schools help these young, multilingual students reach their full potential?

There is little evidence that the move to more English instruction supported better results for ELLs. In many cases, it consigned them to low-rigor coursework and content-light English-immersion classes. Research consistently shows that these students do best when they’re taught both in English and their home languages. Bilingual education programs help ELLs access high-level academic content, develop critical thinking skills, learn English, continue improving their home language and — yes — earn more money as adults.

Some of the best of these programs enroll both ELLs who speak a non-English language at home and native English-speaking students. These classrooms are set up to build everyone’s bilingualism by making the most of the complementary language abilities of all students. Multilingual education is good for students and the California community.

Will the Ed.G.E. Initiative pass? Well, many things have changed since 1998. Exit polls showed that Hispanics opposed the measure, and there are more of them in California now. But the climate around multilingual education is shifting as well. Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools and Future is Now Schools (and a possible Los Angeles mayoral candidate) says that times have changed. “What a dramatic swing we’ve had in the past 15 to 20 years…there’s a real draw towards being multilingual.”

Barr also notes that the prevalence of high-performing schools of choice has helped to raise some Hispanic parents’ expectations for what schools can be. “Now, in Los Angeles, you have Green Dots and [other charter schools] in almost every neighborhood. You have these great examples,” says Barr. “And you have a whole generation of activists. I think there’s a more vocal activism which is so healthy.”

However, empowered parents and expanded multilingual options in California schools are only two pieces of the puzzle. UCLA professor Patricia Gándara explains that the new ballot initiative’s effects will be limited unless California gets serious about rebuilding its career pathways for bilingual teachers. “Without the teachers, it will be impossible to take advantage of [the ballot initiative],” Gándara wrote in an email. “The annual credentialing of bilingual teachers in California has fallen to one-third of what it was a decade ago. And the numbers continue to drop. Today we have 85,000 individuals who graduated high school in California with a seal of biliteracy. Why are we not encouraging them into teaching and bilingual teaching?”

This is a major challenge: bilingual teachers are in short supply everywhere. And policies allowing parents to choose bilingual education are toothless if there aren’t enough teachers to offer those programs in the first place. If the Ed.G.E. Initiative passes, California policymakers must make the establishment of strong career pathways for multilingual teachers an immediate priority.

So: what does all of this mean for our beautifully plural, increasingly diverse national experiment? The Republican Party’s prolonged dance with Trump’s bile is twirling it ever further from the younger, more diverse crowd of voters it needs to attract to have a chance at taking back the White House this fall. Interestingly, Trump’s rise is partly proof of — and reaction to — the United States’ changing demographics. Much of his support has come from white Americans who find the country’s growing diversity unsettling.

And yet, like most emotions stirred by the color of others’ skins, Trump’s energy — and that of his fan base — is misplaced.

The human faces driving these demographics shifts — young children, many with immigrant parents — are best understood as resources, not as threats. As Myers notes, California and Los Angeles are lucky to have these students. States that are less attractive to immigrants (my native Midwest, for instance) are struggling to maintain their populations in the present, which bodes ill for their tax bases in the future.

Fortunately, the Ed.G.E. Initiative gives Californians the chance to improve their schools for ELLs and native English-speakers alike by increasing their opportunities to become bilingual. This isn’t just about helping them succeed in school. It’s, as Lara’s bill puts it, about making all California students “more competitive in a global economy.” And that — surely — is the sort of market-based payoff that even a blustery, demagogic New York real estate mogul can understand.

This essay was published in partnership with The74Million.org. Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University.