At the beginning of her now nearly 30-year career, Leslie M. Gauna was given a warning: Bilingual education wouldn’t be a viable career option in the long term.

Yet nowadays the need for Spanish-speaking teachers in the United States is as strong as ever, with districts around the country struggling to hire them fast enough.

The dearth of bilingual teachers is especially counterintuitive in Texas, where Gauna is a professor and where she conducted a qualitative research study on what she calls the “The Leaking Spanish Bilingual Education Teacher Pipeline.” In the paper, Gauna and her fellow researchers identified major life experiences that bilingual Latino teachers said made their paths to becoming educators all the more difficult. Gauna is an associate professor of bilingual/ESL and multicultural education at the University of Houston-Clear Lake’s College of Education.