Arizona’s public schools chief is taking the governor and attorney general to court in an over how English Language Learner students should be taught.

On Wednesday, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court asking the judge to settle a disagreement over the interpretation of state law between his office and Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes.

At the heart of the disagreement is whether a teaching model authorized by the State Board of Education and used in as many as across the state complies with a law approved by Arizona voters more than 20 years ago. The 50-50 Dual-Language Immersion model is one of four methods used to teach students who aren’t yet proficient in English, known as English Language Learners. Under the model, students are taught half the day in English and the other half in another language, often their native language.

Horne, long an opponent of bilingual education, argues that the 50-50 model violates Proposition 203. The measure, which voters approved in 2000, mandates that all students be taught only in English until they’ve achieved proficiency. Acting on that interpretation, Horne from schools using the 50-50 model.

Democrats Hobbs and Mayes disagree with Horne’s stance and strongly support dual language models. In a issued just a month after Horne’s warnings, Mayes said his office has no ability to withhold funding and assured schools that the 50-50 model is protected by the authority of the State Board of Education, to which Horne can, at most, report violations of board rules. She pointed out that a , passed by legislators concerned with the academic struggles of English Language Learners, ordered the board to develop alternative, research-based teaching methods.

That directive ultimately paved the way for the adoption of the 50-50 model and gave the board sole authority over how to teach English Language Learners.

The State Board of Education affirmed shortly after Mayes’ opinion that it had no plans to make any changes to its adopted teaching models or punish schools for using the 50-50 model.

The question of whether the 50-50 model falls afoul of the provisions in Prop. 203 was not discussed in Mayes’ opinion, however. And Horne returned to the conflict in his lawsuit. The Arizona Constitution protects voter-approved initiatives from being amended by lawmakers unless the changes are made in the spirit of the original initiative, and neither the State Board of Education nor the legislature has the power to override the will of the voters, Horne said.

“No governmental body can override a voter-protected initiative,” reads his lawsuit. “The voter protected initiative specifically requires that instruction be in English until the student tests as proficient in English, or a parental waiver is obtained.”

The only exception baked into Prop. 203 is for parents to waive the requirement of an English-only education annually, in writing and in person. While the State Board of Education has said it won’t require waivers, it has also stated that it is within Horne’s power to begin doing so. And, according to Horne, schools that employ the 50-50 model without asking for written waivers are doing so illegally.

“The voter-protected initiative specifically requires that English-language learners be taught English by being taught in English, and that they be placed in English-language classrooms,” Horne’s attorneys wrote. “Dual language classrooms, in the absence of a statutory waiver, are therefore prohibited by the voter-protected initiative.”

In a declaration added to the lawsuit, Margaret Garcia Dugan, Horne’s deputy superintendent who has served under him for two terms and helped draft the language of Prop. 203, said the inclusion of a waiver requirement underscores the English-only aspect of the initiative.

“Had the intended purpose of the initiative been to allow students to be taught in a language other than English throughout the school day, then there would have been no need for the waiver provision,” she said.

Clearly, Dugan said, Prop. 203 was never meant to promote bilingual education, and the efforts from lawmakers to allow the State Board of Education to adopt the waiver-free 50-50 model are nullified as a result.

“Some have interpreted legislation passed by the legislature in 2019 as authorizing dual language classrooms. If that is true, the legislation is invalid as a violation of the Voter Protection Act,” Dugan said. “That is because it does not further the purpose of the initiative, which was to make sure that students are taught English through the school day so that they can learn English quickly and then go on to academic success.”

A common refrain from opponents of dual language models is that it hinders the progress of students learning English, and that argument is present in Horne’s lawsuit, which was also filed against Creighton Elementary School District.

Horne said that the English proficiency rate of Creighton’s English Learner students is dismal, at 5.1% last year, compared to elementary schools in other districts, like Catalina Foothills Unified District, with 33.03% proficient, or Scottsdale Unified District. which saw 23.87% of students become proficient.

But both of those districts are significantly different from Creighton, which has a student body that is , and poor — about in 2022. The demographic makeup of Catalina Foothills Unified, which is similarly sized, is and only 11% of the district’s students qualified for free and reduced meals last year. Scottsdale Unified, which is three times larger than the two other districts, has a . About 22% of Scottsdale Unified students qualified for the free and reduced meal program in 2022.

Research indicates that the dual language models are , albeit at a slower pace than fully immersive methods. Importantly, studies show that full immersion models can for English learners, including depression and anxiety.

Horne requested that the court declare the 2019 law unconstitutional if its purpose was to permit dual language instruction. He also asked the judge to settle the disagreement between his office and those of other state leaders by dismissing Mayes’ opinion as incorrect and declaring that the currently approved 50-50 model is contrary to the provisions of Prop. 203 if there are no waivers being required.

A spokesperson for Mayes declined to comment, saying her office is still reviewing the lawsuit.

Christian Slater, a spokesman for Hobbs, said she will continue to back the 50-50 teaching model as a critical support for students across the state and Arizona’s future workforce.

“Dual language programs are critical for training the workforce of the future and providing a rich learning environment for Arizona’s children,” Slater said. “Governor Hobbs is proud to stand by dual language programs that help ensure the next generation of Arizonans have an opportunity to thrive. She will not back down in the face of the superintendent’s lawsuit.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne doesn’t have the power to punish schools for using dual language instructional models, according to Attorney General Kris Mayes.

But this won’t be the end of the matter, as Horne is preparing to sue schools teaching students in two languages.

Last month, Horne, a Republican and long-time foe of bilingual education, from schools using the 50-50 dual language model. The model is one of four instructional strategies approved by the Arizona State Board of Education in 2020 to teach students not yet proficient in English. Under it, students are taught in English for half of the school day and in their native language for the other half.

As many as across the state, including , employ the 50-50 model and were poised to lose critical funds if they didn’t retire the teaching method. With the start of classes just weeks away, school officials and public education advocates over the uncertainty sowed by Horne’s statements.

But on Monday, Mayes dismissed the threat to schools, saying Horne doesn’t have the legal authority to withhold state dollars or make any decisions about the model’s validity.

“The Superintendent’s and the (Arizona Department of Education’s) role…is limited to monitoring and referring school districts and charter schools to the Board,” Mayes in a formal opinion issued in response to a request from Democratic legislators.

Mayes, a Democrat who was elected in 2022, concluded that Horne is responsible for overseeing and reporting on the implementation of English learner programs in Arizona, but no state law gives him the authority to take action against schools or decide the fate of certain programs.

The most a state superintendent can do, under , is compile reports on noncompliant schools and refer them to the State Board of Education. Only the State Board of Education has the power to modify or invalidate a teaching method. And until the board decides to eliminate the dual language model, Mayes said, it remains an option for schools seeking a way to teach their English language learner students.

At the heart of Horne’s criticism of dual language programs is that they violate the English-only standard set up in Proposition 203, a law overwhelmingly passed by Arizona voters in 2000. It prohibits teaching English learners in any language other than English until they’ve achieved proficiency. The only exception is for students whose parents fill out a yearly waiver allowing them to be taught in a bilingual program.

But four years ago, state lawmakers, alarmed over the dismal academic outlook of English learners, that gave the State Board of Education permission to branch out into new, research-backed teaching models. One of those was the dual language model that’s increasingly popular today.

Mayes points to the laws which govern English language learner programs as evidence that only the State Board of Education has the power, given by the legislature, to do away with a teaching model.

“The Board has sole statutory authority to delete or modify an SEI (Structured English Immersion) model,” she wrote. “Neither the Department nor the Superintendent has statutory authority to reject an SEI model approved by the Board or to declare its illegality. Nor does the Superintendent or the Department have authority to withhold monies from school districts or otherwise impose consequences on schools for utilizing the Dual Language Model.”

Mayes declined, however, to rule on the question of whether a conflict exists with the provisions of Prop. 203, writing that such a “fact-dependent analysis” is outside the scope of interpreting Arizona law in a formal opinion.

“This Office declines to attempt such a fact-dependent analysis in the context of an official request for an Opinion, which does not involve public hearings or other taking of evidence,” she wrote. “The Board has approved the Dual Language Model as a model of SEI instruction, and school districts and charter schools remain entitled to rely on that approval.”

Doug Nick, a spokesman for the Department of Education, which Horne leads, said the next step is likely to take place in court.

“We are in the process of reviewing the opinion and we expect to deliver a court challenge,” he told the Mirror.

Shortly after Mayes issued her opinion, the State Board of Education affirmed that it would neither modify the teaching models currently in use across the state nor punish schools for implementing the 50/50 dual language method. Making any changes to currently approved teaching models or even eliminating them requires a majority vote of the board’s 11 members, which includes Horne.

“The Board will not be taking action to change the approved models,” Executive Director Sean Ross said in an emailed statement. “The Board will also not take action against schools for using the approved models.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

This wave of backlash, forced by America’s culturally anxious fretting over whether “their” country is too fast for their liking, is nothing new. In fact, the anti-immigrant, anti-Black pendulum swing in the United States, usually after periods of progress, is about as predictable as it gets. 

Fortunately, there’s ample evidence that this — the ugly, illiberal drama — too may pass. The United States continues to grow more racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally , and this panoply of human riches is showing up in our schools. This is particularly clear when it comes to languages on campus — there are over in U.S. schools than there were in 2000, and their . 

Dual language classrooms offering academic instruction in two languages (and often English learners and English-dominant children) . This is of American public schools today — plural, polyglot campuses adjusting their pedagogies to meet the needs of a wide range of learners. 

And yet, it’s no simple matter to make those adjustments. While talk of national teacher shortages appears to be premature, demand for has long outstripped supply. American teachers are disproportionately and monolingual — a major stumbling block for schools hoping to offer more bilingual learning opportunities. The country can’t have more bilingual schools, let alone dual language programs, unless it trains, hires and retains more teachers who can work proficiently in languages other than English. 

Policymakers are working on the problem. The U.S. Department of Educationin Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program grants to support the training of more racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse teachers. The dozen grantees chosen in this round of the competition encompass a large number of institutions prioritizing teacher diversity that includes language considerations. is using its $1.5 million grant to train, certify and place more than 100 bilingual teachers. Importantly, its program will include cohorts of Spanish-English bilingual teacher candidates and Haitian Creole-English bilingual teacher candidates. is using its grant to recruit Latino teachers to work in bilingual settings. 

These investments will help expand access to bilingual education around the country, a goal with myriad benefits drawn from multiple fields of research. First, a raft of studies show that English learners do best in schools that support their emerging bilingualism. Dual language is the for helping English learners maintain their bilingualism, , and . It also appears to support . 

Further, studies that students gain academically from having teachers who match their racial or ethnic identities. Dual language programs may produce unique benefits in this regard if members of their linguistically and culturally diverse teaching staff resemble the identities of their students. And indeed, a large majority of dual language schools offer instruction in — and regularly rely upon large numbers of Spanish-dominant Latino teachers. Most English learners are . 

Finally, that often , like an improved ability to . And that’s to say nothing of the and advantages the country gains from fostering a polyglot society. 

But all of this research — and correspondingly high family demand for bilingual instruction in communities around the country — won’t lead to expansions of bilingual and dual-language schooling on their own. As one of us outlined in , many state training and licensure systems remain largely hostile to multilingual teacher candidates, existing dual language schools are sometimes established to provide bilingual instruction to English-dominant children — even as English learners are consigned to English-only instruction, and so forth. 

So there’s more for policymakers to do. Federal and state leaders should consider prioritizing investments in teacher training programs with a track record of producing high-quality bilingual teachers. This must include alternative teacher training programs, which tend to be than traditional programs. Indeed, in March, the Biden administration the country’s investment in the Augustus F. Hawkins grants from $15 million to $30 million. 

And state policymakers should consider updating their teacher licensure systems to remove chokepoints — like English-only licensure exams — that prevent linguistically diverse teacher candidates from reaching the classroom. States should also optimize the linguistically diverse staff already serving in their classrooms — many of whom are aides or paraprofessionals — and fund pathways to help them become lead teachers. 

Or, you know, they could ignore the challenge of growing our bilingual teacher corps — an opportunity sparked by genuine progress and improvement in American schools — and focus their energies on demagoguing over the book selection in elementary school libraries. This really shouldn’t be a tough choice. 

In the years leading up to the pandemic, dual language immersion was . Dual language programs teach academic content in two languages, and — optimally — balance their enrollment roughly equally between native speakers of each language. 

In those “two-way” dual language immersion classes, native English speakers and (for example) native Spanish speakers learn both languages together — and learn academic content in both languages. 

These programs don’t just facilitate integration. They are also to support the linguistic and academic development of English learners. But the of these programs with , English-dominant, often white families (including my own) means that the reality often falls short of that ideal. 

In August, a new dual language school in Nashville, Tennessee will aim to bring that ideal to their community. To learn more about Aventura Community School, the first local charter school to be approved in more than five years, I recently spoke to two of its co-founders, executive director Natalie Morosi and family engagement director Diana Aguilar. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: How did you come to education? How did you come to Nashville? How did you get excited about bilingual education? What’s the story that brought you to this room here?

Natalie Morosi: I grew up here in middle Tennessee, in an English-speaking family. I started to study languages in high school—my counselor told me that learning a second language would open doors and open the world to you, and she was right! 

Through opportunities to travel and study and things, I just really saw the value of being bilingual or multilingual; also because it helped me build meaningful relationships and enjoy art in different ways. So when I began my career in education, there was an existing bilingual school here in Nashville, so I signed up to teach at that school. 

I was there for nine years, but it serves mostly English-speaking families. I really saw potential, with the success of the school and the interest in the school, it seemed that our district would likely add a second bilingual option, ideally in the part of town that has diverse families that have diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

And then, after a while, seeing that the district hadn’t done that, we kind of decided, maybe it was time to start our own bilingual charter school. So we navigated that application process over the 2020-2021 school year, and here we are ready to open in August.

Diana Aguilar: I’m originally from Ecuador. I spent 18 years of my life there and then I moved here. So definitely bilingualism is very important for me, because you know, it was my lifeline.

All through elementary and high school, English classes are taught in Ecuador, because people are aware that kids need it to become successful adults. But I never went to an actual bilingual school. So when I got here, it was a little bit terrifying taking the SAT.

But it worked out and I got into education. I majored in Spanish — my goal was to teach Spanish.

But then my mentality kind of changed, as I noticed all of the English learners who needed to see somebody who looked like me, that understood where they were coming from. I decided to get my degree in EL instruction.

I worked as a translator for a few years, and then I went to teach kindergarten for three years, and then I taught third grade with Natalie, which is where we met. I still remember her then: her creative mind and her ideas and passion for education, equity and justice.

It’s been a nice journey to see all of those come to life in this school. I showed up at a session Natalie was doing for prospective Aventura parents — I didn’t even tell her I was coming, I was just there — and then I kind of lingered at the end and I told her, just sign me up to help for whatever. I wanted to jump on board. Because I just feel there’s such a need for people to open their minds and see all the benefits that come with being bilingual and being able to communicate with another person and to connect with that person at a deeper level. 

Also, I have kids of my own now, and it is so important for them to keep that connection to our language and culture. Most of my family speaks Spanish. How else are they going to talk to each other?

You’ve both mentioned equitable access to bilingual education as a part of why you’re starting the school. Tell me about the community where Aventura’s going to be located. Tell me about the students there. 

Morosi: Yeah! We’re opening in Southeast Nashville, which is the most diverse area of Nashville. Our goal is for Aventura to be reflective of the community. 

For our dual language model, we will hopefully have around 40 to 50 percent of students who speak Spanish at home and around 40 to 50 percent of students who speak English at home. And then there are families who speak other languages. In Nashville, the most common of other global languages would be Arabic or Kurdish.

Families see the value in developing literacy in English and Spanish: both from an economic perspective, and also a ‘being able to interact authentically with my neighbors’ perspective. We focus on global competence, and bilingual education is a big piece of that, but we’re also bringing a really purposeful approach to project-based learning. We’ve developed collaborative partnerships with many, many community organizations even prior to opening. Students will be working on projects in Spanish and English each quarter and creating some sort of a product, to the benefit of their community.

With more than a decade of education experience here, as well as abroad, this is the education I want for my own kids. Even better, so many other families tell us they are also excited about this opportunity.

You’re both sending your children to Aventura, no?

Morosi: That’s right! I can’t wait for the first day of school in August. My daughter will be in first grade and my son will be in kindergarten. 

Aguilar: My son didn’t make the cut — he’s already in second grade and we’re just launching with kindergarten and first—but he’s been volunteering since day one. And I have a 3-year-old — she’s already talking about when she gets to go to “Commuty School”— that’s how she says it.

Morosi: And then our third co-founder, Katie Castellon, her son is going to be joining for kindergarten next year. So we’re all very, very invested in this model.

Tell me about the model—it’s a two-way dual language immersion school, right? 

Morosi: Yes. In kindergarten we’re going to start with 80 percent of the day in Spanish and 20 percent of the day in English. They’ll always have English literacy in English, of course, and then one of our enrichment classes also — P.E. or music or something like that — and then everything else will be in Spanish.

And then we’re going to kind of stair step more English each year, so it’ll be 70 percent in Spanish in first grade, 60 percent in Spanish in second grade and then from third grade through eighth grade, instruction will be half of the day in each language — always focused on developing literacy in both languages at every level.

Why take the charter route? 

Morosi: It’s really important for us that we have the freedom to implement all the details of our model in the way that the research suggests is best for both our native English- speaking students and our global language speakers. We also really believe in project-based learning, so we wanted to be able to select our own instructional materials. 

So, we adopted a curriculum that really supports this model and that we’re able to implement in both languages. We picked an assessment system that helps us track the literacy development of our students in both languages and provide support. 

Being a charter school gives us so much more freedom and independence in selecting the tools that best serve our program.

I’ve heard this sort of thing a lot from dual language charter schools. 

Morosi: It also speaks to the professional piece: staff recruitment and development. The freedom and independence as a charter school is just going to allow us to find, hire and support teachers who are prepared to execute our precise, wonderful, complicated school model.

How are you finding teachers? I know that dual language schools can be tough to staff. 

Morosi: Sure. All of our classroom teachers need to be bilingual and we’re aiming for at least one of those classroom teachers to be a native speaker. But I think our unique program has drawn people to us. We hear lots of “Nashville has needed something like this for a long time, how can I get involved?’” type of things. 

So, ha, obviously it’s hard to launch a new school, and, ahem, it’s probably more than a little harder to start one in a pandemic. So, um, how’s that going? 

Morosi: Well, Aventura had been a dream for a long time, and informal conversations with educator friends and parent friends and many conversations with my husband, but we were living in Madrid, we had been there for three years. When the pandemic hit, after about two weeks we realized, ‘This is going to take a while. We have to move home to Nashville.’ 

And then, we had to figure out what the heck we were going to do for work when we moved back, and thought, ‘Ah, that school that Nashville has needed for so long, maybe now’s the time to learn how to submit a charter application and test it.’

So I connected with the which has a fellowship to support leaders who want to open new intentionally diverse charter schools. So we started writing the charter application in summer of 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. 

I would say it’s been challenging from a student recruitment standpoint. We haven’t been able to reach larger numbers of families and hold the types of events that we would have liked to, but we were lucky to be able to host some fall events and collaborate with some of our community partners, especially during .

You’ve both talked about this a little already, but … how is Nashville responding as you get closer to launch? 

Morosi: I was nervous about the politics, because we had both been public school teachers and so we know that charter schools can be political for one reason or another. So we worked really hard to communicate with the grass-tops and the grassroots in the community, so to speak, because this is a school model we really believe in. And we were the first charter school to be approved locally in more than five years.

People are excited about this school, even those who might not be inclined to support charter schools. I think it’s because this is a school that is really serving populations intentionally in a new and needed way.

Aguilar: One mom called me and she said, ‘I was so excited you guys are going to open. I was planning on taking my kid to Mexico in second grade for a year, so that he will learn the language.’ And I was like, ‘You don’t have to move your family! You can stay!’

It’s bilingual education, but it’s also the community focus, the global competence. We’re really bringing things that are innovative into the school system. I’m an educator and that’s what I want to see for my own kids and all kids. 

As I think about them, I think about so many immigrant families who have been here for a long time who have not seen these kinds of opportunities for themselves and their kids. 

Morosi: Yeah. I love that quote that ‘Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.’ That really speaks to the intentionality in our model and that’s our political perspective. This model of education is going to prepare the students to be the types of leaders that we need.

That’s John Dewey, right? 

Morosi: Yeah. 

Tell me about the partnerships you mentioned. How are you collaborating with community organizations? 

Morosi: We want to have these very tight relationships with local organizations that can support our families. For example, we’ll be able to connect families with health or legal services, whatever they need. We want partnerships that help us connect with and build on the strengths that are already in our communities. 

So what’s the 10-year dream? It’s 2032 and we’re talking again. How are you describing how the school’s going? What’s it doing?

Morosi: So exciting! We will have been at scale for three years by then, so I hope that we’re making an impact on our city by then. We believe that Aventura students are going to be sought after by Nashville’s secondary schools. They’re going to bring intellectual curiosity and a demonstrated record of engaging, impactful, multilingual community projects. 

Aguilar: Well, my 3-year-old is gonna be a 13-year-old by then, and I’m just looking forward to seeing all the opportunities available for her. Hopefully, there will be a bilingual high school by then that I can send her to! 

As far as our students … I just feel like they’ll have so many years of this amazing opportunity to be around other people who may not look like them — but they will still be able to communicate with them in two languages. They won’t have to wait until they grow up for that. Sometimes, for one reason or another, students’ natural curiosity gets dismissed or pushed to the side, but if you give them access to opportunities to grow, they can step up to the plate. So my hope is that people will look at our program and say, ‘What are they doing at that school? We want that too.’

Morosi: Right. Our students will have the knowledge that their ideas are important, that they make an impact. And that will serve as an inspiration, not only for our community, but for surrounding communities, to have this more respectful, integrated approach to educating children. 

We think a lot about wellness in our organizational culture, for our students, our staff and our families. We believe that the academic measures that are traditionally valued will naturally result when you have a really supportive community that also has high expectations.

Get together a bunch of policy researchers, though, and what do you have? It’s one of the less well-known ones. When we gather, we’re a “fracas” of policy wonks. Not an ounce of cohesion in the bunch. This is most fully true at the most focused levels: the more specific the topic, the more fractious the fracas. 

It’s certainly the case in my field, English learner policy, where years of serious research and debate have not yielded anything recently like a coherent manifesto or policy agenda to guide federal education leaders. Our work is too often vague and detached from English learners’ real needs. 

To that end, I spent much of the past year sharing a short draft of policy recommendations with more than 100 folks who know and care about English learners’ success — educators, researchers and advocates — to collect feedback and develop a slate of concrete reforms to significantly improve how the country and its schools serve these students. The result, , was published at The Century Foundation today. It provides a much-needed starting point for overhauling the Every Student Succeeds Act and other federal policies governing English learners’ education.

Above all, the report calls for a significant expansion in federal English learner investments. In the field of education policy, it’s not exactly fashionable to be direct about this. Policy wonks generally earn their way in this work by creatively reimagining existing systems, not simple, direct calls for resources. But in a moment when nearly one-quarter of U.S. children speak a non-English language at home, it’s clear that English learners deserve more federal funding. Much more.

, ESSA’s Title III, the core funding stream dedicated to English learners’ linguistic and academic development, was never sufficient to adequately support their success. It’s even failed at a more rudimentary level: since its inception in 2002, Title III funding hasn’t even kept pace with growth in the English learner population. The $664 million appropriated that year worked out to roughly $175 for each of the ~3.8 million English learners in U.S. schools in 2002. As of 2018 — — there were more than 5 million English learners, so the $737 million appropriated that year worked out to just $147 per child. What’s more, this analysis doesn’t take inflation into account. 

It’s not a complex situation: the United States is spending less per pupil on English learners now than we did in 2002, and that base amount was paltry to begin with. The solution should be commensurately simple: , Title III should at least triple in size, to roughly $2.2 billion per year (still just $440 in federal dollars per student). 

Atop this fundamentally critical funding increase, the report also calls for a series of targeted federal investments to shift how English learners are educated. Above all, these focus on rewiring the federal “English-only” approach to these students’ learning to instead support students’ English development and their emerging bilingualism. This tracks the suggesting that well-implemented bilingual education programs are the best means of supporting English learners’ linguistic and academic development. In particular, that integrate English learners and native English speakers in bilingual settings to be . 

Here’s the good news: public demand for bilingual education has grown in recent years. Here’s the bad news: every local and state effort to expand access to bilingual programs has been limited by the of the American teaching force. There simply bilingual teachers to go around. And, of course, scarcity almost inevitably produces inequity in public education — true to form, suggests that are increasingly slipping away from linguistic integration .

The project of expanding dual language programs in the United States is, at base, a subset of the broader goal of increasing teacher diversity. To that end, the report recommends two new federal grants programs: 1) a $200 million investment in creating and growing linguistically diverse teacher training pipelines, and 2) a smaller, $50 million funding pot for states willing to “pilot, redesign, and implement new bilingual teacher certification and licensure policies.”

As the country works to finally get the educational inputs right for English learners — more funding and better instructional programs — it’s also critical to update . At present, American schools only track the performance of linguistically diverse students up until the point when they reach their state’s definition of proficiency in English. After that, they are soon “reclassified” as former English learners and “exited” from that defined student group — meaning that their academic progress gets lumped in with the general student population. But this offers an incomplete picture, since former English learners’ performance in U.S. schools  tends to improve with their English abilities.

To address this challenge, the report recommends including “former English learners” in federal requirements for school transparency and accountability systems. That is, local and state leaders should be required to keep track of how English learners perform academically after they become proficient in English. This would provide a more complete picture of their linguistic and academic development — and how well schools are supporting each.

To be sure, today’s report doesn’t fully represent the views of any one of the scores of people who read and responded to it. Everyone suggested fixes, and no one person’s changes were wholly adopted — I even cut a few of my own favorite ideas. But the document does include a battery of ideas supported by most of the English learner stakeholders who engaged with the text. The ideas are as specific and actionable as we could keep them, and — if adopted by policymakers in Congress and the U.S. Department of Education — would make a real difference for millions of linguistically diverse children across the country.