Is this a bad thing? The New York Times reports that many school districts in the south and midwest are having a hard time finding ESL and bilingual education teachers. On the latter-I think this is great. ESL is more of a mixed bag. I think that in areas where the concentration of non-English speaking students is high, it will be more difficult for them to absorb English from their environment and ESL teachers might do some good. But if these schools can't get these teachers-the best strategy is to split up the non-English speakers between the classes, and perhaps even make them become part of separate reading groups. If kids who don't speak English are deprived of an easy default communication outlet-they'll speak the only language around, English.