We’ve suffered through the creep of a dynamic known as “,” where conspiracy theories, falsehoods and wildly distorted views of reality become easier for some Americans to embrace than the demonstrable facts of our present moment. 

Recently, a House subcommittee hearing offered a new flavor of the problem, as Republicans and their conservative witnesses tried to win political turf by substituting facts about one group of students — English learners — with beliefs about children in undocumented families, a very different group of students. 

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government’s March 11 hearing was titled, “.” That struck down a Texas law that would have blocked districts from using state education funding to teach undocumented children. In a 5-4 decision, the court held that children are covered by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and could not be denied a public education based on their families’ legal status. 

Writing for the majority, , “The Equal Protection Clause was intended to work nothing less than the abolition of all caste-based and invidious class-based legislation. That objective is fundamentally at odds with the power (Texas) asserts here to classify persons subject to its laws as nonetheless excepted from its protection.”

The congressional hearing was a culmination of years of work by organizations like , who seek to overturn that decision. After nearly 44 years, they’re getting closer. This spring, Republicans in the Tennessee legislature passed a to erode the Plyler ruling. 

The Tennessee House of Representatives adopted a bill that would require schools to gather data on students’ citizenship and immigration status, while the state Senate approved a measure that would allow public school districts to to students who lack legal documentation. , as time is running out in the state’s legislative calendar, and lawmakers are jockeying over how to reconcile the two bills. 

This was Tennessee’s second push to restrict immigrant children’s access to public schools — it’s unlikely that it will be its last. Other states, like and , have made similar efforts. It seems inevitable that conservative state legislators will eventually succeed in enacting a bill along these lines, which will then face a legal challenge from advocates for immigrant families, civil liberties, and/or children’s data privacy. Ultimately, this may open the door for the court’s current conservative 6-3 majority to erode or remove Plyler’s civil rights protections. 

Why would anyone want to keep kids out of school? What could possibly be gained by punishing children for their families’ decisions to migrate? 

In the congressional hearing, conservatives’ main answer to these questions was financial. Republican Subcommittee chair Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and his fellow conservatives claimed that undocumented children represent a large drain on public education budgets. Critically, the evidence they provided for this relied heavily on confusing undocumented immigrant children with all immigrant children and/or with English learners. 

As a prelude to his questions, Roy claimed, the national debt is “now cracking $39 trillion, and I would note that there are a lot of reasons why, and this is one of them … we continue to have this fanciful notion that we can just say, ‘Anybody can come into the United States and it doesn’t have an impact on our overall budget.'”

that Texas schools enroll roughly without legal documentation, adding, “for every English learner, Texas schools receive $616 or $950 for those enrolled in a dual language program.” He then asked the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Mandy Drogin, one of the witnesses called by Roy and his Republican colleagues, “How much does that cost?” Drogin estimated that this cost Texas around $830 million per year.��

, this is wildly irresponsible data use. That $830 million isn’t being spent on the estimated 100,000 undocumented children in Texas. It’s being spent on the state’s . 

Meanwhile, those 100,000 undocumented children are a diverse group, with some who are likely currently classified as English learners, others who have already become proficient in English and have moved out of that group and some who spoke English well enough upon their arrival in U.S. schools that they were never classified as English learners in the first place.

Data on English learners that are . In other words, conflating spending on English learners with spending on undocumented children is a bit like claiming that a public library is wasting money on foreigners just because international tourists sometimes come in to use the public WiFi network. 

What’s more, because the overwhelming majority of English learners are U.S. citizens, if Plyler were reversed and undocumented children were blocked from school, major budget savings. Texas schools would still enroll well over a million English learners with citizenship and/or legal residency documentation. The state would still — hopefully — want to maintain these U.S.-born students’ linguistic and academic success.

That last bit is key. Texas schools are with linguistically diverse kids — regardless of their citizenship status or their families’ immigration statuses. In the Lone Star State — and the  — data show these do well. That academic success produces better prepared graduates who go on to contribute more to the economy than they would have if blocked from school — earning more, paying more taxes and spending more in their local communities.

 This is why of immigration nearly always find that newcomer families — — grow the economy and than they cost to public service programs.

These recent assaults on kids’ access to public schools exacerbate a concerning conservative trend — policy research organization KFF studied during the 2024 election and found widespread public confusion. Their researchers polled the public and found that Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to agree with false, negative claims about immigrants. 

When presented with the false statement that “Immigrants are causing an increase in violent crime in the U.S.,” fully 45% of Republicans responded that this was definitely true and 36% said it was probably true. By contrast, 39% of Democrats believed that the statement was definitely false — and another 39% believed that it was probably true. 

Look: Research is not ambiguous on this question — immigrants are to commit violent than U.S.-born adults. As a National Policing Institute summary of the evidence , “political scapegoating and hyperbole are no substitute for scientific evidence.”&�Բ�����;

For leaders serious about improving schools for all kids, that’s obviously true. But the subcommittee’s attacks on Plyler show that a perverse inversion of that line may also be true: When it comes to ambitious demagogues, evidence is no match for the allure of xenophobic, hyperbolic scapegoating. 

The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations. 

What gets discussed far less often is that this pattern rarely begins in third or fifth grade, when participation gaps become easier to see. It begins in children’s first classroom experiences, where they learn whether speaking feels safe, whether mistakes are survivable and whether the classroom has room for the way they enter language.

The problem is not simply that some children talk more than others. It is that schools often mistake fast, public participation for understanding and then build opportunity around that mistake. A child who speaks quickly and often is usually read as engaged, confident and capable. A child who hesitates, watches or offers little is more likely to be read as uncertain, underprepared or less able.

Yet speaking in front of others is not a simple measure of understanding. It requires children to process a question, organize language quickly, tolerate public attention and respond while everyone is listening. For multilingual learners, it may also mean searching across languages while monitoring pronunciation and trying not to make a visible mistake.

What can look like “just talking” is often thinking under pressure.

When schools confuse reduced public response with reduced competence, they begin shaping a trajectory. That trajectory is rarely built through cruelty or obvious exclusion. More often, it emerges through small instructional decisions that seem reasonable on the surface. When participation in whole-group discussion decreases, teachers—often out of care—may call on certain students less, simplify questions or stop asking for elaboration. Meanwhile, other students are invited to explain, justify, extend and defend their thinking.

Each decision appears minor, but over time they accumulate. Opportunities to demonstrate complexity expand for some students and quietly contract for others. This is how underestimation takes root in schools — not through overt exclusion, but through a subtle redistribution of opportunity.

The problem deepens when educators collapse many different experiences into the single category of “quiet.” From the outside, quiet students can look similar, but the reasons beneath the silence are not. Some are fluent and expressive in low-pressure settings but constricted in public ones. Others understand directions in two languages and still shut down the moment speaking becomes public.

In everyday classroom moments — during snack, in play, or beside one trusted peer — these same children often become animated and engaged. Expression can expand quickly when pressure is lowered, home language is welcomed, or an adult creates space for response.

In one kindergarten classroom, a child who rarely spoke during group instruction began, almost invisibly, by moving his chair a few inches closer to the circle each day. The teacher noticed and named the shift without demanding more than he was ready to offer. “You came closer today,” she told him, and later, “I see you’re staying with us.”

Within days, he began whispering answers to a partner, and within weeks he was participating in small-group discussion. His language had not suddenly changed. The environment had. That is the point schools too often miss: Participation begins before speech.

In early classrooms, many children participate long before they do so in polished verbal form. They move closer to the group, track the teacher’s face, point instead of answering, imitate actions, sort materials, whisper to peers or respond through gesture and gaze. These are not lesser forms of participation. They are participation in its earliest form.

Yet schools often reward only the most visible and verbally fluent version of engagement, while everything that comes before it is treated as secondary. For multilingual learners and other cautious children, this creates a profound mismatch: their bodies are already engaged while the classroom waits for a kind of public speech they are not yet ready to produce.

If schools want to turn this around, they do not need an expensive new program. They need to stop treating the fastest and most exposed form of response as the clearest proof of understanding.

That shift begins with classroom routines. Before asking for a public answer, teachers can build in real “think time” —10 or 15 seconds that give students a chance to process before the quickest voices take over. They can let students rehearse with a partner before whole-group discussion, so the first public response is not also the first act of language formation.

They can ask students to point to evidence, sketch an idea, jot a sentence or sort materials before speaking aloud. They can return to a child after another voice has entered the conversation, instead of treating one missed moment as closure. And they can widen what counts as participation so that gesture, writing, peer explanation, and home-language processing are recognized as evidence of thought.

Teachers can also lower the social risk built into participation by slowing the pace when questions become more demanding, avoiding rapid-fire questioning that rewards only the quickest responders, and making hesitation less punishing. “Take a second and think” invites participation differently than “Come on, you know this.” “Show me first” opens a door that “Use your words” can close.

Just as important, teachers can look for patterns instead of drawing conclusions from isolated moments. A student who is silent in whole-group discussion but expressive in play, writing, small groups or in another language is not showing an absence of understanding. That variability is information: It shows that expression is conditional, not fixed, and that classroom conditions shape what becomes visible.

These moves do not lower rigor — they make it more accurate. Rigor is not how fast a child can speak in front of others. It is whether a classroom can recognize thought before it arrives in its most polished, public form.

When silence is misinterpreted early, the consequences extend far beyond one discussion. Expectations drift downward. Opportunities narrow. Referrals increase. Children acquire identities they did not choose: hesitant, low, disengaged, behind. What begins as a participation gap becomes an opportunity gap, and over time the system names what it helped create.

The student who lowers her hand is not always unsure, unmotivated or disengaged. She may be calculating whether the room is safe enough for the way she speaks, whether there is time to find language without being rushed, and whether what she is about to say will be met with patience or correction. If schools want more students to participate, they should stop treating voice as something children either have or do not.

Participation is not a trait — it is a condition. Quiet students do not need louder prompts. They need safer entry points. If schools understood that earlier, they might stop asking why some students do not raise their hands and start asking the more important question: What have we taught them participation will cost?

That moment carried more than joy. It carried years of waiting lists, missed explanations, language barriers and advocacy in systems that were never designed with her family in mind.

Sofía’s story is not unique. Across the country, Latino families navigating special education often encounter structural barriers that make access more complicated than federal law intends. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, schools are required to provide timely evaluations and ensure meaningful parent participation. Yet the lived experiences of many multilingual families suggest that implementation is uneven.

In 2022, launched , a community-based research initiative that trains Latino parents to document and analyze the realities facing families like their own. Parents are not research subjects in this model; they are the researchers. Two years later, ISLA — working within its parent-led research model, Padres Investigadores, and supported by research consultants — trained a new team of Latino parent researchers to design and conduct a statewide study examining how families in North Carolina navigate special education.

highlight important gaps in communication and access.

For many Latino families, entering special education means navigating two unfamiliar systems at once: disability services and English. Parents in our study described four stages in their journey: recognizing developmental differences, securing evaluations and diagnoses, accessing services and navigating schools, and managing communication challenges that created delays, confusion and stress.

More than half of parents were the first to notice developmental concerns in their children, not teachers or doctors. Yet many said those concerns were initially dismissed. While IDEA establishes timelines for evaluations, over 40% of families in our study reported waiting six months or longer. Nearly half identified language as their biggest barrier to accessing quality services.

In early childhood, time matters. Delays in evaluation and intervention can shape long-term educational trajectories. When families do not fully understand what services exist, what documents they are signing or what rights they hold, special education becomes harder to access equitably.

Language access is not simply a courtesy; it is essential for meaningful participation. Families described inconsistent interpretation, incomplete translations and meetings that moved forward without ensuring comprehension. One father told us, “They talked about my child’s future in a language I couldn’t speak.”

Importantly, families were not disengaged. They attended meetings. They asked questions. They took notes. What they sought was clarity and partnership.

The parents in our study consistently named three priorities: clear multilingual information, culturally responsive communication and timely access to evaluations and services with reliable interpretation. These requests align closely with on effective special education practices.

One of the most powerful findings from this work is that when parents are included as partners in research and problem-solving, trust grows. Padres Investigadores shifts the dynamic from extraction to collaboration. Parents design questions, gather stories and interpret findings within their own communities. In doing so, they reveal insights that might otherwise remain invisible.

Natalia, who once felt overwhelmed when she heard the word “autism” connected to her son, is now one of those parent researchers. She supports other Spanish-speaking families navigating the same systems she once struggled to understand. Her leadership did not emerge from policy alone; it emerged from access to information and genuine inclusion.

Sofía’s first word through a device represents possibility. But possibility should not depend on a family’s fluency in English or familiarity with educational terminology.

Equity in special education is not only about compliance. It is about ensuring that families understand the process, feel respected in it and are able to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their children.

When language access, cultural understanding and parent partnership are treated as foundational, not supplemental, special education systems move closer to fulfilling the promise embedded in federal law.

Listening to families like Sofía’s is not an act of charity. It is a necessary step toward building systems that work as intended — for every child.

Cardona, a fellow at the , through his speeches and other appearances, continues to tell students their ability to speak more than one language is an enormous asset. Not only can it bring them career success, he says, but it deepens their . 

His praise for the multilingual community runs counter to the current administration’s agenda: President Donald Trump issued an executive order in July designating , a pronouncement that immediately sparked efforts to “minimize non-essential multilingual services (and) redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation.” 

Trump and his allies also rolled back longstanding that kept federal immigration agents . Children and their parents have been arrested during pickup and drop-off times, causing absenteeism to spike. And the schools and other groups that serve immigrants are scrambling to stay out of the spotlight, curbing outreach in many cases. 

The dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, too, has left the country’s 5 million English learners with little protection or as to their : After a historic round of cuts, the department’s Office of English Language Acquisition, for example, was left with . 

Cardona, who also works to shore up the leadership skills of other educators through his , said he’s hurt by what has happened to the department whose leadership he left in January 2025.

But even amid the chaos, Cardona sees hope. Trump’s power is temporary, he said. Education lasts a lifetime. 

“Despite what we’re hearing from this administration, the opposite is true,” Cardona said, when asked how he would advise multilingual learners today. “Just wait it out. You don’t have to change your stripes to be successful. I didn’t. Having two cultures and two languages is one of your greatest strengths.”

I caught up with Cardona last week and asked him about the future of multilingual learner education in the U.S. The 50-year-old, who began his career teaching fourth grade in his hometown of Meriden, Connecticut and will be a featured lecturer at Harvard, where he recently at the Kennedy School, was candid in his responses.

What are your three biggest concerns about the state of multilingual learner education right now?

That multilingualism is not being valued as a superpower, that the funding for basic support is up in the air and that it continues to be an ancillary afterthought in many of our communities, as opposed to a tool to provide a skill for students that can serve them well in a globally competitive society.

Programs serving multilingual learners are being sidelined. What’s happening here? 

It reminds me of when the Supreme Court made a decision about affirmative action and there was an extrapolation of intent. They said, “Now, we can’t have programs that support students from different backgrounds because that goes against what the Supreme Court said.” And so they extrapolate, they make up what it means for implementation.

It’s analogous to what is happening here. “Well, we’ve got to cut DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) so that means no parent support, no translating documents, no language line. We’re going to cut those things from the budget because we’re not sure that we want to continue to support ESL programs because the new secretary said no DEI, that we can’t favor one group over another.”

They’re extrapolating or blaming up to get away with cutting things that they don’t understand — or agree with in the first place. There is an overprescribing of an intent that was really never there. Part of it is to justify budget cut decisions or because in some places, now it’s not chic to promote multilingualism. So why bother?

There are places in our country — Arizona, for example — where there are . So, they took it further. This is what California went through in the ’90s and 2000s with (a voter-approved measure that required schools to teach immigrant children only in English). And so you have people doing underground work of multilingual education, which is sad, that in 2026 we have people hiding what they’re doing to promote multilingualism when in every other country it’s almost a prerequisite.

Because of what’s happening at the federal level, people have permission now to kind of get rid of some of the programming that we know supports students and families who are learning English — or multilingual programs where students are learning another language.

What is causing some districts and schools to do this? Is it racism or budgetary concerns? 

From my perspective, it’s a little bit of both. “Why are we spending money on these programs when we could spend it on something else?” It’s the low-hanging fruit, and quite frankly, you’re not going to see too many parents of Latino students speaking up at board meetings if they’re worried about being harassed by immigration. Because the browner you are, the more you’re subject to vilification. 

It starts at the top. You’ve got the president , murderers, painting a picture that immigrants are bad people.

To exclude racism would be Pollyannaish on my part, but to think that it’s only that would be minimizing the nuanced realities that many districts face, saying, “If I have to cut, I’m going to cut where I’m going to get the least resistance.”

How does it make you feel to see the Education Department dismantled? 

It hurts because I know the impact it’s going to have on the students furthest from opportunity. The damage that has been done in the last 12 months will take decades to correct. 

Why do you think it will take decades to repair what’s happening to multilingual education? 

I’ll start with the Office for Civil Rights. When you take out the arm of enforcement that ensures students’ civil rights are being protected, accountability is gone. So what does that mean? That it could be the Wild West and no one’s paying attention because we closed seven of the 12 offices whose job it was to make sure students’ civil rights were not being violated. 

When you cut — or threaten to cut — (English Language Acquisition grants) or you run applications for grants through an AI scanner to pick out the words “diversity” or “equity” to make sure you’re not giving grants to those grantees, you’re basically creating a culture of “don’t do this — or else.”&�Բ�����;

And people, in order to get the funding they need to provide the basic needs in their districts, are going to move away from programs that could be viewed as helping address disparities in access and outcomes. 

And what about other moves inside the department? 

I see special education going to HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), and I often say they’re sending it to the least competent Kennedy. So, let’s look at what’s happening there. That department has been downsized as well. When you take 50% of the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and you dismiss half the people and then you take the other half and you send them over to the HHS, where they’ve diminished their staff, and now you’re asking them to do the supervision, oversight and support. When you remove that, you’re left with great variance throughout our country in the ability to provide services, support, and accountability. 

I would argue that the red states, the ones who voted for this administration, are the ones that are going to suffer the most — the rural communities where they only have their local public school. They don’t have other options. 

This administration will only last for a finite amount of time. How might a new administration roll back these changes?  

I have hope in not just the federal government picking up where it left off, but I am very encouraged by my conversations with the multilingual learner community. They’re building alliances that do not rely on the federal government — because they checked out. 

They’re developing a framework. For example, , (an advocacy group for multilingual learners) is led by the same people that fought Proposition 227 30 years ago. They built an alliance back then and they created what’s called the State Seal of Biliteracy. So, when they , they said, “We’re going to acknowledge that if you’re multilingual, you’re going to get a State Seal of Biliteracy, a badge of achievement.” And when I was secretary, all 50 states adopted that seal. 

The pendulum is going to swing back, but the federal government is only going to be one player. I’m counting on these coalitions to accelerate the remediation and innovation around English language development. I see that happening across the country.

If you could speak directly to multilingual learner teachers, what would you say? 

Consider yourself blessed and fortunate that you’re serving at a time when our students need you, where you’re providing that emotional safe harbor. Your words are the ones that they’re going to remember — not what’s being said on CNN or Fox News.

Absenteeism is rampant in the immigrant community. How can schools get these students back in the classroom?

This is not the answer for that question, but the first thing that came to mind is vote. We need to get off our asses and see the impact that this had on our students, and we need to be angry. We need to not allow for this to continue any longer than it needs to.

With regard to the students that are right now home, I struggle to look a parent in the face in a community where they’re being harassed by ICE and say, “Send them to school, don’t worry, they’re 100% safe,” because we know that’s not true.

What I will say to those families is know your rights. And also, know the culture in which you’re sending your children. Is that school protecting your child? Will you have alert calls? Does your district have a practice to prevent schools from becoming hubs of immigration (enforcement) efforts? 

In many parts of our country, we’re not protecting our students from having our schools be the places where these raids are happening. I had a student in my hometown get picked up when he was going to an immigration center to check in, as he was supposed to. He missed graduation because he was following the rules.

What do you make of this moment for us as a nation?��

We’re going through a period right now where a lot of the fundamental principles of democracy are being questioned. It’s a stain on our beautiful country’s history. The pandemic of prejudice that we’re dealing with now is harder to lead through than the pandemic of disease that we went through five years ago. We got through the pandemic of disease because we came together. What’s happening now is this pandemic of hate and prejudice is pulling us apart. But if you look deeper, you see stories of resilience and of the power of unity.

For decades, ELs have been defined by what they lack, with schools focusing on their challenges. English-first policies reinforce the notion that ELs are problems to fix rather than students with valuable assets.

And yet, decades of research show that multilingualism is not a barrier, but a benefit. Students who speak more than one language develop stronger cognitive flexibility, better problem-solving skills and higher levels of academic achievement. Bilingual students also have and bring critical global skills our country needs.��

across the U.S. also proves that two-way, dual-language programs can not only narrow the academic gap, but in some instances fully close it. Longitudinal studies show that multilingual learners often outperform their English-only peers in math, literacy, and graduation rates once reclassified.

If multilingualism builds stronger students and communities, then schools must treat it as the asset it is. That means adopting curricula that support both language development and content learning, instead of watered down instruction. 

Rhode Island proves what can happen when schools invest in their EL community. the state experienced the largest percentage growth in its EL population, which now makes up. Instead of lowering expectations, state leaders changed how they approached curriculum and support by considering the needs of their EL population.

As a result, students who achieved English proficiency now meet or even outperform peers who are native English speakers on . According to the , in 2018 and 2019 ELs who had achieved higher English proficiency scores also earned higher ELA and math scores than their English-only peers. When provided with quality and opportunity, ELs don’t just catch up, they surpass expectations.��

California has seen similar outcomes, and with its upcoming opportunity to adopt new materials, the state could see even greater results. In California, are ELs and an another 910,000 have achieved English proficiency. That is one in three students who are either learning English or have successfully done so.

of students in California reveal that by eighth grade,  ELs who have mastered English outperformed their non-EL learning peers in math, attendance and other measures.

For the first time since 2014, California is adopting a new math curriculum and conducting a follow-up literacy materials adoption in the coming year. Leaders have the rare opportunity to demand materials that serve ELs from the outset, allowing these students to engage in complex texts and tasks. Instructional materials should support that and not treat them like an afterthought.

The English learner status is intended to be temporary. With high-quality materials providing intentional language support, students can grow. Unfortunately, shows that students who don’t reach English proficiency by eighth grade face negative consequences, such as being misidentified for special education. They have lower academic achievement and attendance numbers and have a greater risk of falling behind and off track completely for graduation.��

Contrary to perception, student outcomes improve when strong curricula are used consistently and effectively. Materials do not need to be “dumbed down” for English learners. Research and classroom experience shows that when materials are designed for them, they benefit all students in the classroom.

These students aren’t less capable, but the education system has failed them. This is why it is essential to provide schools with quality educational materials that support both language and content and value the assets and strengths of multilingualism. 

We cannot allow the push for English-only policies to overshadow the years of data and research around the power and potential of speaking more than one language. To do so is to deny opportunity to millions of students and to weaken our collective future. Multilingualism is one of America’s greatest strengths. Our schools and curricula should reflect that truth.

California education officials are tasked with a difficult mission over the next few months — finding the best way to figure out which 4-year-olds need extra help learning English.

What makes this a challenge is that children at this age are still developing language skills, and they aren’t used to tests. In past assessments, children would sometimes cry and put their heads down on the desk.

When children enroll for the first time in California’s TK-12 schools, families must fill out a survey about the languages they speak at home. If a child speaks a language other than English, the school is required to use the English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC) to determine whether the student is an English learner.

Up until last school year, students in transitional kindergarten, or TK, had to take this test as well. But the California Legislature exempted these children after educators reported that 4-year-olds were , and advocates said young children were being identified as English learners simply because they were too young to answer the questions on a test not designed for preschoolers.

An  by the California Department of Education found that transitional kindergartners were more likely to have a low proficiency score in English on the ELPAC. In 2023-24, the last year that the ELPAC was required in TK, 81% of TK students tested were at the lowest level of English proficiency, compared to 67% of kindergartners tested. 

Beginning last year, transitional kindergartners were not assessed for English language proficiency, a decision many TK teachers celebrated.

For now, California has no formal way of determining transitional kindergartners’ English proficiency, which means schools miss out on federal and state funding for English learners. Schools are not required by law to provide students with language services or report their academic or language progress on the California School Dashboard.

But this summer, the state Legislature set aside $10 million in the budget to select a new screener for schools to use to identify TK students who need more help learning English. The state superintendent of public instruction has to select a list of screeners by , which will then be tested in some districts in 2026-27 before requiring screening in 2027-28.

“We are still in the early stages and details about the screener selection process are coming soon,” said Michelle Hatfield, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education.

The Legislature also made a temporary fix to help schools recover what they lost in state funding for TK English learners until 2027.

Teachers wary of testing

There’s some controversy over whether a new screening instrument is necessary for children this young.

“Technically, they’re all learning English at this age,” said Jacquilla Burris, a TK teacher in the Fresno Unified School District. “There’s not a lot of difference for a child who is a non-English speaker.”

She and other teachers interviewed by EdSource said they are relieved that students are no longer required to take the ELPAC and questioned why the state needs another assessment.

“I think it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. For TK? Really?” said Paula Merrigan, who teaches TK in Castro Valley. 

She said all children in her class are working on developing their vocabulary and language skills, no matter their native language. For example, she frequently stops to clarify what words mean when reading a book, she said.

“Today I said, ‘Do you know what grin means?’ They said no. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a smile,’” Merrigan said. “Even my native English speakers need the skills because they don’t have the vocabulary.”

However, many researchers and educators say schools need a way to identify which students need more language support.

“Some people might say we’re all learning language in TK,” said Bernadette Zermeño, professor and multilingual specialist with the California Early Childhood Mentor Program. “That’s true, and our multilingual geniuses, as I like to call them, need extra support.”

Screening can also help schools target materials and training for teachers.

“We need to ensure that we’re providing those tools and resources to schools to help support not just English but also the home language,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of policy at Early Edge California, a nonprofit that advocated to exempt TK students from taking the ELPAC.

What tools exist

A screening instrument for this age group should focus more on speaking and understanding, rather than reading and writing, since most children have not yet learned those skills, researchers said. In addition, the vocabulary used should be more basic than for an older age group, and the assessment should be short and engaging, using games, stories and conversation. Researchers also said the most accurate assessment of a child’s language skills comes from observing how they interact with others.

Teachers said it is crucial that young children be observed or tested in an environment and with a person with whom they feel comfortable. Otherwise, children may be too shy or anxious to get accurate results.

A 2024  by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and New America found that 15 states require screening of preschoolers to identify whether they are English learners. Most use one of five screeners — , , ,  and  — most of which were not developed specifically for students who speak languages other than English.

“It’s all over the place,” said Rebecca Bergey, principal researcher for AIR. She said some states, like Texas and Illinois, require screening to identify English learners in preschool in part because they have laws requiring schools to provide bilingual programs if they have a certain percentage of English learners, and to prioritize how to use funding.

Other states have chosen not to identify English learners until kindergarten, partly because bilingual children are developing both languages simultaneously at this age, she said.

“Language in this time frame is developing so rapidly and changing and dynamic. So I think there’s some caution. Even the best-designed assessment is going to be limited in what it tells us. And there’s a risk of inappropriately identifying students,” Bergey said.

California’s preschool survey

California already has a family language survey, with a follow-up interview, used in state-subsidized preschools, which serve the same age group as TK, for identifying preschoolers who are . The term is used to recognize that a child is learning both English and their home language at the same time at this age. 

“There’s this continuous missed opportunity of alignment with our preschools, that’s not addressed enough,” said Zermeño. “We shouldn’t be a whole separate entity.”

However, she and others said the survey and interview need to be complemented by teacher and parent observations to pinpoint areas where students need extra support. She recommended that TK teachers have paid time to visit families’ homes so they can observe how the child speaks English and other languages with different family members. Those observations can then be complemented by observation of how a child interacts with peers and teachers.

Several TK teachers said the survey alone should not be used to identify students as English learners, in part because parents don’t always disclose the languages other than English spoken in the home to avoid their children being labeled an English learner, which they sometimes perceive as a disadvantage.

At the same time, teachers said, other parents report that a language other than English is spoken at home, but in reality, though adults may speak another language, the children only speak English.

Even some students who only speak English have a hard time passing the English proficiency test, teachers said, which is one reason they are concerned when students are misidentified early on.

“Maybe they’re special ed, maybe they’re absent all the time, maybe they’re in foster care, maybe they’re homeless, maybe they have a certain home life, and because of that they’re lacking so many skills,” said Marcella Gutierrez, a Mountain View TK teacher. “We don’t want kids labeled English learners when they’re just behind academically.”

EdSource reporter Lasherica Thornton contributed to this article.

These are among key findings of a new into ways to address the continuing turnover and shortage of special education and ESL teachers that has existed for more than three decades. 

The analysis showed that mentorship, teacher and principal preparation standards, tests of reading instruction knowledge, pay and professional development are key to retaining and recruiting these educators.

Students with disabilities and English learners face some of the most persistent academic challenges, partly because of a lack of access to high-quality teachers, said NCTQ President Heather Peske.

“Despite their potential, many of these students are not meeting even really basic thresholds in reading and math, and this is not for any fault of the students themselves,” she said. “It’s really because they don’t have access to the kinds of qualified and effective teachers that they need.”

The report recommends improved state policies to address attrition in these areas:

Teacher mentorship

The analysis found that half of states don’t require prospective educators to complete their student teaching under the supervision of an educator who is certified in the same subject area they are training to work in. Most are in the western United States, including states like Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Nevada. 

Having a mentor certified in the same field allows the college students to see what teaching special ed will actually be like and increases their chances of staying in the subject area once they finish their degree, according to the report. The analysis highlighted a study of more than 250 people who completed special education teacher preparation in Massachusetts, which found that those with a supervisor licensed in special education were 12% less likely to leave the workforce.

Teacher preparation standards

Clear state standards for teacher preparation programs ensure that aspiring educators get the skills needed to serve students with disabilities, the report said. Ten states don’t have explicit special education standards for teacher colleges, while 16 lack defined English learner standards.

The analysis highlights Texas, which created for ESL and bilingual education in 2019. These include understanding the foundations of language acquisition and adapting instruction to meet student needs.

Principal preparation standards

Less than half of states require principal preparation programs to address special education in coursework, while only 13 do the same for English learners. Without an understanding of effective ways to serve students with disabilities or English learners, principals are less prepared to improve outcomes for them and retain the teachers who serve them, the report said. 

Research has that principals are a key factor in creating an inclusive environment for special education students. One said that many new school administrators “find themselves suddenly thrust into situations in which they must be the final arbiter on matters related to strange-sounding issues such as IEPs [individual education programs], 504 [disability discrimination] decisions, due-process hearings and IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance.”

In Iowa, teacher colleges are to provide evidence that candidates are equipped to address the needs of English learners or students with disabilities, the report said. 

Reading instruction

The analysis found that 17 states require special education teacher candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of literacy instruction using a test the NCTQ deems effective. In 2023, the nonprofit reported that 29 states and the District of Columbia use weak reading instruction tests that aspiring elementary educators must pass to obtain a license. NCTQ studied 25 tests that states use and identified 15 as weak — with only four considered acceptable and six considered strong.

Just five states — California, Idaho, New Mexico, Louisiana and Maryland — require English learner teacher candidates to pass acceptable tests, the report said.

“Wisconsin, for example, uses a strong or acceptable reading licensure test, but they don’t presently require special education teachers to take that test and pass it,” Peske said. “We would say that this is an example of low-hanging fruit when it comes to policymaking.”

The NCTQ reported that 70% of fourth graders with disabilities and 67% who are English learners scored below the basic level in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

English learners are also at an increased risk of being identified for special education because of literacy-related struggles, the report said.

“With so many states right now focused on reading and implementing relatively new reading laws, it was surprising to us to find that states are also not requiring their teachers, especially of students with disabilities, and their English learner teachers to take and pass an acceptable reading licensure test,” Peske said.

Teacher pay

The report said that paying teachers in critical shortage areas more than those in general education can improve retention and recruitment in hard-to-staff areas. But has found that the additional compensation must be at least 7.5% of a teacher’s base salary — about $5,000 — to make a difference.

Only 18 states offer higher salaries or bonuses for special education educators, while eight states do so for English learner teachers.

An annual state-funded $10,000 incentive in Hawaii improved special education teacher shortages. The bonuses, which , reduced by 35% the number of teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher.

“Interestingly, it did little to improve retention among current special educators,” the report said. “Instead, the reduction in vacancies was driven almost entirely by general-education teachers — who were presumably dual-certified — transitioning into special education roles.”

The nonprofit said the policy was also successful because of its simplicity. All Hawaii special education teachers were automatically eligible, and there was no application process. 

Professional development

High-quality professional learning can improve retention for special education and English learner teachers, the report said. Currently, 40 states provide professional development for both fields. Oregon, Hawaii, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia are the only states that don’t offer professional learning for either position.

The report highlights Rhode Island, which recently adopted guidelines that require professional learning specifically for teachers of multilingual learners.

Peske said each of the above policy areas is equally important for lawmakers to consider. “If a state really wants to build a strong teacher workforce for students with disabilities and English learners, we would advise them to use these fixed [policy] levers together,” she said.

Newcomer centers opened to ease immigrant students’ transition to school? Closed. 

Hiring new English language learner teachers? Suspended.

These are among the tangible effects of the Trump administration’s targeting services and supports that go toward educating more than 5 million English language learners in the nation’s K-12 public schools.

And there are other, more subtle changes: Many newcomer students, in light of the president’s aggressive deportation campaign, are now too afraid to answer simple questions, the type that not only shed light on their lives but give insight into their academic needs. 

“I’m hesitant to have all the conversations about country of origin — conversations that celebrate diversity and create a community culture of inclusion — because now if you ask a kid ‘Where are you from’ or ‘Where were you born’ you visually see their walls go up,” said Texas teacher Tammy Ingraham Baggett.

Through multiple directives, the Trump administration has gutted the Education Department, including its Office of English Language Acquisition, leaving it with just . The administration rescinded critical guidance on earlier this year while the president’s proposed 2026 budget to support multilingual learners in the classroom. 

Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and director of the , a coalition of over 150 educators, researchers, and advocates from 35 states, said such cuts would have a “substantial, devastating impact.”

Her organization joined forces with another group, Immigrant Connections, to ask educators this past summer to describe what would be sacrificed. Oklahoma, which would lose $6.4 million in funding, would no longer be able to meet multilingual learners’ needs, education leaders said. 

The state would lose valuable school programs, professional development and family engagement geared toward these students — including translation and interpretation services. Likewise, Virginia, Vázquez Baur said, could lose $17.5 million, which would bring about a cascade of cuts, including tutoring for English learners and critical support for students who have gaps in their education. 

“And we know when we lose funding for some groups of students, it hurts all students because resources are pushed to the very edge,” she said. 

Teachers whose multilingual learner programs have already been axed are giving away their textbooks online, hoping they could be of use in another location, and some schools have suspended hiring new English learner teachers, unsure of how many students will show up and attend these classes, immigrant student advocates tell The 74. 

Schools could be further hampered in serving these students by the federal government’s recent retreat from its monitoring and oversight role. Without that, Vázquez Baur said, it’s up to states to hold themselves accountable for meeting their legal obligations to educate these children.

She expressed hope that educators will continue to follow the old directives, even in states that support Trump.

“Politics have taken over many state legislatures — including some state agencies — but at the district level, no matter what state you’re in, people are committed to supporting these students,” she said. 

JoAnne Negrín has worked with multilingual learners in New Jersey for much of the past three decades. She’s retired from her full-time post and now serves as a consultant.

Negrín said she has worked hard to identify newcomer parents so that they could fill much-needed positions in the school system, their Ukrainian and Spanish language skills in great demand as the local immigrant population increased in recent years. 

“We were perennially short on classroom aides,” she said. “And parents needed jobs to get settled. So, I started helping them through the process and getting aides in every school that needed them. It was a win for all. We solved a staffing issue, the parents got a paycheck, we got school-level language assistance and the kids got to have a parent in the building while they acclimated.”

But Negrín worries this effort could be lost: She’s particularly concerned about a Venezuelan woman and her husband who were recently hired by the district as bilingual math and science teachers. 

“I spent hours over Zoom helping them sign up for assessments and then walking them through New Jersey certification,” she wrote in a Facebook message. “At that point, I told our HR director to make them his first, best offer because they would soon figure out how valuable they are. He brought them in for around $70,000 each. Now, two years later, they own a home, have pets, they’re part of the community, and they are happy and settled in.”

But it’s they will be permitted to stay. 

“I hate this not only for these teachers, but because I don’t know what the district will do if it loses them,” she said. 

Amy Halsall, a teacher in Indianapolis, said her school has not received funds for professional development so conferences are not being offered — or educators are required to pay for it themselves. 

“We normally have funds for supplies and materials and that is on hold,” she said. “Due to funding cuts and federal policies where parents have to reveal their status, our district is not offering adult ESL classes. We have to be very creative in how we help.”

And newcomer students to her school are scarce, she said: There were just two this year compared to 10 last year. 

Perhaps the greatest loss to Ingraham Baggett’s district, she said, was of the newcomer centers, which were, until recently, thriving inside nine of the district’s 12 high schools. 

Each campus served 20 to 50 such students, she said, with 250 total and four to six teachers per site. Ingraham Baggett, the longest-serving biology teacher in the program, piloted the science courses, wrote most of the curriculum materials and led districtwide training sessions throughout the year for her colleagues. 

“This year I got a phone call in August from my principal, two days before going back to school. The entire district had less than 30 high school New Arrival Center program students enrolled,” she said. “They were consolidating the program. All those program teachers had to be reassigned. Only three got to go to the new campus to continue.”

She said many students who qualify for the services refuse to participate, afraid of being identified as new immigrants. 

“They’re declining services to be less easily identified by ICE, which means they’re missing out on an amazing start to a successful education,” she said. 

Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor of education at Harvard, who spent years researching the educational outcomes of immigrant children for her , said every critical program cut, every staff member let go or reassigned represents another lost opportunity for immigrant children as they and their families feel the walls closing in around them. 

School leaders, she notes, are living through a difficult moment. Long established and trusted programs for newcomer students are suddenly politicized, morphing their existence into an unintended statement, an opposition to a president who has frequently — and educators. 

“It’s this slow burn that has been happening,” Oliveira said. “It comes in all of these different ways. You start to cut that lifeline. Not only are the programs not available, but the people who are able to tell parents about it, distribute the information, inform them … that has been the biggest worry.”

Amid this flurry of activity, one major potential shift in federal education policy has received little attention: the $0 budget line for adult education programs in Trump’s proposal for FY 2026.

Many people may be unfamiliar with adult education programs and the services they provide. These programs serve adult learners who aren’t part of the traditional K-12 or higher education sectors. There are two main constituencies: adult dropouts and others with skills below the high school leve,l and adults who lack English language skills.

The roots of federally supported adult education stretch back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered chaplains to teach basic literacy to troops at Valley Forge. The modern system took shape under President Lyndon Johnson, whose 1964 Economic Opportunity Act established adult education as a pillar of his Great Society agenda.

Today, more than 1.2 million adults enroll in programs offered by libraries, school districts, community colleges, and nonprofits across all 50 states, D.C., and U.S. territories — at an average cost of just $2,000 a student, a fraction of K-12 or college education.

The Trump administration has already sought to withhold current funding for adult education, only to release the money along with other grants. It defends eliminating federal funding for adult education by claiming that K-12 improvements will make adult programs unnecessary and that existing efforts show “dismal results.” Neither claim holds up.

The idea that stronger K-12 outcomes will erase the need for adult education ignores the millions of adults already outside that system. And while research is still developing, the best studies show clear benefits. In our of an adult ESL program in Massachusetts, participants saw earnings gains that led to increased tax revenues when compared to similar adults who applied to the program but did not win an enrollment lottery. The increased tax revenue more than covered the cost of the program, yielding an estimated 6% return to taxpayers.

Public adult education programs, as we know them, are highly dependent on federal funds. Federal funding represents a much larger share — about one third — of funding for adult education than for K-12 (about 10%), meaning cuts to federal revenue will hit this sector particularly hard. 

Federal funding also provides incentives for investments in adult education by states, which are required to provide matching funds of at least 25%, a requirement most states substantially exceed. Moreover, the constituencies affected by these cuts will be geographically and politically broad: the target populations for these education services, low-skilled adults and immigrants,  are concentrated or growing most rapidly in red states. 

Trump’s proposed budget is now in the hands of Congress. As economists and researchers in the field, we envision a future where continued investment — and rigorous study — helps us better understand how adult education delivers value for individuals and society. But we already know enough to act. The evidence to date points clearly in one direction: Adult education works, especially for English learners. Congress should reject these proposed cuts and reaffirm its commitment to educational opportunity at every stage of life. 

Schools are still required under federal and state law to help students who don’t speak English to both learn the language and understand the content of their classes.

That’s the message California education leaders and advocates are sending to schools after the Trump administration rescinded guidelines about how schools should teach English learners.

A third of students in California public schools begin school as English learners, meaning they do not yet speak, read or write English fluently.

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Some educators and advocates are worried that the rescission of the federal guidance could open the door for some school leaders and teachers to scale back instruction for English learners and stop providing translations to families.

“The danger is not in the law going away, but in districts thinking they can step back from their obligation,” said Martha Hernandez, executive director of the nonprofit Californians Together. “That would be devastating for English learners.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled more than 50 years ago, in the 1974 case Lau v. Nichols, that students who do not speak and understand English fluently have the right to understand classroom lessons, and that schools must help them learn English and understand academic content alongside their English-speaking peers. These requirements were also codified in federal law in the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice, under former President Barack Obama, sent out a 40-page “Dear Colleague” letter to schools across the country, laying out legal precedents and federal requirements for serving English learners. The document included examples of how to identify English learners, how to give them adequate instruction in the English language and make sure they understand academic content, including the role of bilingual education or support in a student’s home language. It also provided examples of how school districts could be found to be out of compliance, such as not offering English language acquisition programs to students with disabilities, or not giving English learners access to the same grade-level curriculum or extracurricular activities as other students.

This summer, a message in red appeared at the top of the guidance: “This document has been formally rescinded by the department and remains available on the web for historical purposes only.” The only explanation the federal Department of Education provided for rescinding this guidance is to say that it is “not in line with Administration policy.”

It is the latest in a long line of steps the Trump administration has taken to dismantle support for students who speak languages other than English. Previously, the Department of Education laid off almost all employees in its Office of English Language Acquisition and asked Congress to terminate federal funding for teaching English learners, immigrant students and the children of migrant farmworkers. President Donald Trump also issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States.

In the president’s budget request released May 2, he said, “the misnamed English Language Acquisition program … actually deemphasizes English primacy by funding NGOs and States to encourage bilingualism.”
California state law requires schools to provide instruction for students to learn English, known as designated English Language Development (ELD), and language support within every class, known as integrated ELD. The state also has its own guidance, such as the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and the English Learner Roadmap. In addition, the state provides funding for English learners, and every district is required by state law to specify in their annual spending plans how they intend to use the money.

“The U.S. Department of Education’s action does not change any state laws regarding English learner programs or services,” said Liz Sanders, director of communications at the California Department of Education. She said the department will continue to provide guidance for teaching English learners with resources on its website, like the English Language Development Standards, and a page about specialized programs for “multilingual learners.”

“California has been a leader,” said Hernandez. “In the absence of clarity at the federal level, California can and should model best practices for the rest of the country.”

Still, Hernandez said not all California districts have consistently provided the English Language Development instruction required by law. She is worried that without federal guidance, more districts will stop providing instruction or support for English learners and their families.

“That will lead to an increase in long-term English learners, it will lead to a stalling of reclassification, it will lead to higher dropout rates, and it will leave English learners behind,” said Hernandez.

Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo published a statement criticizing the rescission of the federal guidance, saying it “creates uncertainty, weakens accountability and risks widening opportunity gaps, especially when resources are already stretched thin” and declaring that the county will continue to ensure “that English learners have equitable access to education.”

School district leaders in California said they frequently used the federal guidance in the “Dear Colleague” letter to clarify the legal obligations schools have to English learners.

“We quote it all over our own documents to just make very clear what our obligations are. When there is any wavering or questioning around, ‘Do we have to provide ELD courses?’ or ‘Do we have to provide professional learning?’, we have leaned on that guidance quite a bit,” said Nicole Knight, executive director of the English Language Learner and Multilingual Achievement department in the Oakland Unified School District.

Norma Carvajal Camacho, assistant superintendent of educational services for the Azusa Unified School District in Los Angeles County, said that when the federal guidance came out, there was still a lot of misunderstanding about how to best teach English learners. So the district used the federal document to help train teachers and administrators.

“Many of our teachers still lived in the space of, ‘If I’m teaching in English, that’s sufficient,’” Carvajal Camacho said. “So it was used initially to lay the groundwork for providing support for teachers in English language development, understanding language acquisition and being able to support students intentionally who are learning English as an additional language.”

After the Department of Education rescinded the guidance, Azusa Unified sent a memo to all school administrators asserting that schools must still provide daily instruction on language development and language support in all classes and make sure English learners have access to all courses, including college preparation, honors and AP classes, among other requirements.

“Our obligations under Title VI and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act remain in effect,” the memo reads. “As a District, we remain steadfast in ensuring every English Learner has meaningful access to high-quality instruction that supports both language development and academic achievement.”

Some parents of English learners across the state are concerned that without federal guidance, some schools will stop giving children the help they need to learn the language.

“If our children who are English learners don’t get reading, writing, listening and speaking help, it will be fatal,” said Martha Rivera, parent and president of the District English Learner Advisory Committee in the Riverside Unified School District. “Because a child who does not have reading comprehension is a child who will not advance in school.”

Teodora Mendoza, a mother from San Jose, said her daughter did not speak English when the family came to the U.S. from Mexico more than 10 years ago, but the language support she received in school helped her become fluent, and she is now in college. She said the translation the school provided for parents also helped.

“It helped me communicate with the teacher and ask how my daughter was doing,” she said. “It reassured me about sending my daughter to school.”

She thinks that without federal guidance, some schools may stop offering translation for parents.

“It truly worries me,” she said.

This was originally published on .

Despite decades of research and advocacy around differentiated instruction for English learners, many curriculum publishers continue to design products around a “grade-level box” that assumes a uniform level of language proficiency and background knowledge. These one-size-fits-all materials often meet state standards but rarely meet the needs of English learners who exist at various points along the language acquisition continuum.

The core problem is this: Curriculum is often written with the assumption that all students in a classroom are functioning at the same academic and linguistic level. But a fifth-grade classroom may include learners with the reading comprehension of a kindergartner in English — despite having strong critical thinking skills in their home language. Conversely, another EL student might speak English confidently but struggle with writing structured essays or understanding figurative language.

Curriculum that doesn’t account for these variations forces teachers to do heavy lifting to retrofit materials, spending hours supplementing, modifying, and differentiating lessons that were built on narrow assumptions.

highlights this disconnect between mainstream curricula and EL needs, calling for instructional models that integrate language and content instruction explicitly. Unfortunately, many commercial curricula still , treating EL modifications as afterthoughts or add-ons, rather than essential design principles.

Another oversight is the belief that language proficiency progresses evenly across all domains: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In reality a student might excel at oral communication while struggling to read grade-level texts or write a coherent paragraph. Yet, curriculum materials rarely provide scaffolded support for this reality. Instead, they often label students generically with little nuance.

This oversimplification of curriculum design can lead to gaps in instruction, often because of a failure to understand the difference between acquiring a language and learning one, as well as limited clarity on where these processes overlap. Teachers may unintentionally misjudge a student’s language proficiency, assuming a higher level based on conversational fluency or underestimating a student’s capabilities simply because they are quiet or reserved.

This challenge is when instructional decisions rely more on perception than on a clear understanding of state-identified proficiency levels — especially when curriculum materials are not aligned with those levels and fail to include explicit recommendations and strategies for integrated language development and strategies.

Beyond language proficiency, curriculum content can also miss the opportunity to tap into students’ cultural and linguistic assets. Students come with a wealth of lived experiences, knowledge, and perspectives that could enrich the classroom environment, what researchers describe as “.”&�Բ�����;

Yet, many curriculum materials approach ELs as blank slates to be filled, rather than as contributors with valuable voices. Sadly, these supports often appear as surface-level add-ons — like generic sentence frames or generalized translated glossaries — rather than as integrated approaches to equitable, meaningful content access.

Incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogy and leveraging students’ lived experiences and languages as legitimate background knowledge is not just essential for curriculum design but crucial for for all students.

Prioritizing the following actions in curriculum design can lead to more effective materials —ones that yield positive results, reflect classroom realities and genuinely align with teacher student needs.

• ��Build in multiple entry points for varying language proficiencies

Curriculum should reflect students’ diverse linguistic and academic starting points, not just simplified versions of the same material. allows English learners to engage meaningfully with rigorous content, rather than being sidelined or underestimated. 

• ��Provide professional development for teachers working with English learners
  Training for EL instruction should be treated as essential, not optional, in curriculum rollout. Equipping teachers with a of how students develop across all four language domains — speaking, listening, reading, and writing�� — helps them recognize that proficiency varies by domain and provides the perspective and tools needed to scaffold effectively.��

• Treat home languages and cultures as priorities and integral instructional resources, not afterthoughts
  Thoughtfully embedding these elements into curriculum design and materials strengthens student identity, builds relevance, and deepens engagement—making learning for all students. For instance, teachers can encourage the use of home languages when possible for brainstorming or initial drafting before transitioning to English

• Embed actionable teacher guidance
  Recommendations and multi-step approaches�� should be woven directly into lesson content — not tacked on as end-of-book appendices or vague disclaimers. Providing empowers teachers to adapt instruction in real time based on students’ language proficiency—not just grade-level benchmarks. Curriculum companies should offer strategies tailored to the specific content demands teachers are navigating. That can include callout boxes and in-line prompts within each lesson.

Curriculum companies must recognize that English learners do not come in a standard size, and their learning cannot be boxed into tidy grade-level expectations or neatly matched from one proficiency level to another. As classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural, this reality must be reflected not only in the lessons teachers deliver but also in the materials and products they are given.

English learners should not be a footnote, but a foundational consideration in how we build and deliver educational content.

On Monday, the Trump administration will release $1.3 billion in federal funds for summer and afterschool programs that it’s been holding back since July 1, the Office for Management and Budget  education advocates on Friday. That leaves $5.5 billion for teaching positions and training, migrant programs, English learners and adult education still frozen.

The move comes after����joined Democrats in pressuring OMB Director Russ Vought to release the funds.��Lara Wade, spokeswoman for AASA, told The 74 that��having hundreds of superintendents on Capitol Hill last week meeting with members of Congress also “could have been a motivating force.”

But Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member of the appropriations committee, said releasing just a portion of the funds isn’t good enough. “Every penny of this funding must flow immediately,” she said in a statement.

On Thursday, she blocked the fast-track consideration of a Trump administration nominee over the issue. Mary Christina Riley, nominated to serve as assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs at the Education Department, will now have to get through the education committee before the Senate votes on her confirmation.

Democratic-led states the Trump administration Monday over its freeze of nearly $7 billion in education funds, saying the delay has already “irreparably harmed” critical academic and extracurricular programs. 

For two weeks, the White House Office of Management and Budget has been conducting what it calls a “programmatic review” of funds for English learners, migrant programs, teacher training and afterschool programs — money it claims has been “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda.”

“President Trump seems comfortable risking the academic success of a generation to further his own misguided political agenda,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in . “But as with so many of his other actions, this funding freeze is blatantly illegal, and we’re confident the court will agree.”

Blue state leaders aren’t the only ones feeling the pinch. In a summer camp for 300 students was cut short, while an Ohio nonprofit says it will have to cancel afterschool programs this fall if the funds aren’t released. 

Georgia state Superintendent called releasing the funds a matter of fiscal responsibility. “In Georgia, we’re getting ready to start the school year, so I call on federal funds to be released so we can ensure the success of our students,” Eric Mackey, the Alabama state superintendent, said he was caught off guard by what he called a Losing the money, he told a local reporter, would be “a real problem for us.”&�Բ�����;

Neither OMB nor the Education Department responded to requests for comment.

The lawsuit dropped the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the administration can proceed with firing roughly half of the Education Department’s staff, further adding to the chaos districts have felt since January. The delay has been one more jolt from an administration that’s been quick to withdraw funding that the Republican-led Congress already approved. These particular funds are part of the fiscal year 2025 budget that President Donald Trump signed in March. 

“We were looking really good, and then you get something like this,” said Gordon Klasna, executive director of secondary education for the Billings Public Schools, Montana’s largest district. He’s wondering how to pay for the nine teachers who keep elementary class sizes capped at 22 students. Without them, classes would grow to 28 students, which, Klansa said, “can be substantial when you have lots of kids who are behind.”

With a new resettlement office that opened last year, the city has seen an influx of refugees. The roughly $30,000 the district normally receives for English learners helps pay for curriculum and translation services — not just for immigrants, but also for Native American students and families, some of whom still speak an indigenous language at home. 

‘No idea it was coming’

shared similar stories on Capitol Hill last week during an to Washington, where many members of Congress said they were also blindsided by the freeze.

“The offices I visited with had no idea it was coming and were wondering what other people had heard,” said David Law, superintendent of the Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota and president of AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

Their stories prompted Democrats in both the and to put more pressure on OMB Director Russ Vought and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to free up the funds. In a letter, senators said they were “shocked by the continued lack of respect for states and local schools evidenced by this latest action.”

OMB pointed to a few examples of programs it alleged conflict with the administration’s priorities, including one in Washington state that it said “used funds to direct illegal immigrants toward scholarships intended for American students.”&�Բ�����;

Sammi Payne, a management analyst with the Washington state education department, said officials aren’t sure which program OMB is referring to, but it could be the . Established in 1972, the program, which under both Democratic and Republican administrations, provides counseling, tutoring and housing assistance to migrant students during their first year of college.

“Our management and implementation of this funding is consistent with the law,” Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in a statement. “American prosperity has always been a function of embracing immigrants and lifting up those who need additional support to access education and opportunity.”&�Բ�����;

‘Can’t write enough grants’

A few states have stepped in to provide short-term support during the pause. Just as an Alabama nonprofit was about to cancel an afterschool program for this fall, the state education department provided some funds left over from the previous year. 

“Our programs are the only option for our children and our working families,” said Andrea Bridges, executive director of the , which serves a rural, high-poverty community about 30 minutes outside Huntsville. Federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers funds support services at three schools. “I can’t write enough grants to come up with $700,000. I could do babysitting, but that’s not what these programs are.”&�Բ�����;

Students in the program receive academic support, work on a lot of STEM projects and learn to play musical instruments. But they also focus on college and workforce readiness. She’s watched the graduation rate climb from about 64%, when the nonprofit launched the program 25 years ago, to over 90%. 

“When I say these funds are essential, that’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “It changes the socioeconomic status of the whole community. Everybody wins when kids graduate from high school.”

Verlena Stewart, director of Community Building Institute in Middleton, Ohio, north of Cincinnati, also relies on federal funds to run afterschool and summer learning programs. She was about to shut the summer camp down two weeks early when the Middleton city manager called her and said, “Come pick up a check for $60,000,” she said.

That will get the camp for about 100 students through July 25 and means kids will still get to go on field trips to a movie and Jungle Jim’s, a massive international market and shopping destination. But if the funds aren’t reinstated, the nonprofit won’t be able to offer its afterschool program this fall. 

The center, she said, would keep its doors open for “less formal recreation,” but would have to recruit volunteers to help students with reading and math. 

‘Unfunded mandate’

The White House may no longer want to fund education for English learners and migrant students, but districts are still legally obligated to provide language support, whether they have the funds or not, said Tara Thomas, government affairs manager, for AASA. The requires states to report students’ progress toward mastering English as well as their performance in math, reading and science.

“By cutting off these funds, you’re just expanding the unfunded mandate on schools,” Thomas said. Districts, she said, factored the federal money into their budgets months ago.

In Wyoming, Chase Christensen, superintendent and principal of the one-school Sheridan County School District, was expecting more than $15,000 to give teachers a second year of training in a new math curriculum. Now, he may have to find another way to pay the consultants providing the training.

He doesn’t want to drop non-academic programs either. He was about to shut down a jiu jitsu program that costs about $20,000. But students love it, and he thinks it builds confidence and “sticktoitiveness” that helps them academically.

“It’s just amazing watching kindergarteners do their takedowns. It’s the only time in my career that I’ve had kids get black eyes at school, and I’m not getting calls from their parents about what happened,” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can to keep it going.”

, Rhode Island has deepened its commitment to ensuring all students, including multilingual learners, have access to rigorous, high-quality instructional materials and that teachers have the necessary training to implement them. While overall gaps still exist in the state, students who recently exited multilingual-learner status are now outperforming peers who are native English speakers on .

Multilingual learners — who now comprise more than — represent one of Rhode Island’s fastest-growing and most vibrant communities. In fact, Rhode Island saw the largest percentage growth of any state in the nation between 2010 and 2020. Over the last 10 years, enrollment of multilingual students in many school districts has risen between 100% and 400%. In , the state’s largest city, multilingual learners currently make up almost 40% of all students.

To ensure that these young people received high-quality, inclusive instruction — with materials that reflected their diverse cultural and linguistic experiences, supported English language development and connected with what all students in the state’s classrooms were learning — the Rhode Island Department of Education partnered with the nonprofit in 2021. The goal was to create a cohort to help district leadership teams follow through on the state’s by better addressing the needs of these students in core instruction, school design and programming.  

Districts now choose from several high-quality curricula, which cannot get that designation unless they are designed from the start with multilingual learners in mind. The department encourages district leaders to identify their instructional vision and consider the demographics and needs of their students before reviewing and selecting curricula. Districts must also plan initial and ongoing professional development to ensure teachers are prepared to properly implement the new materials.

High-quality curriculum by itself can drive student growth, but its impact can be greater with proper professional learning and skillful implementation. That’s why the department’s partnership with the forum didn’t stop at curricular materials; it also prioritized the people who will actually be using them.

When educators complete their professional development sessions, they come away with a clear understanding of what rigorous instruction looks like. Principals and other school leaders are challenged to ask: How do we know this curriculum works for our multilingual learners?”  Teachers learn to go beyond providing basic help and use methods that make challenging material understandable for every student. This includes providing regular opportunities for students to discuss topics and clear goals for language learning.

When teachers know how to provide the right support and understand how students develop language skills in different subjects, young people rise to the challenge and often exceed expectations.

Rhode Island’s commitment to strong instruction with high-quality materials, following the department’s and for multilingual student success, form the foundation of this work. Together, they create consistent instructional expectations and invest in ongoing professional development to support the academic success of all students. The state is also implementing new regulations for multilingual learners to better align with federal requirements, best practices,and the state’s commitment to providing a high-quality education.

The results are very encouraging. Nationwide, Rhode Island and between 2019 and 2024, according to Harvard’s Education Recovery Scorecard. also noted that Rhode Island leads all New England states in academic recovery.

This improvement is not just happening in urban hubs; there is a growing commitment to these students in rural and suburban communities that have historically had little exposure to non-English-speaking populations.

For other states to see similar progress, they must follow two simple but critical steps: adopt rigorous instructional materials that meet the needs of all students, and provide consistent, high-quality professional development for teachers, principals and other school leaders.

There is no perfect curriculum. But with the right approach, even great materials can be made better. The key is starting with a strong foundation, giving educators the tools to teach their new curriculum effectively and then continuing to offer professional development long after they’ve started using the new materials. that many teachers simply haven’t received the training they need to implement new materials effectively. That has to change. Professional learning must be continuous and available during the regular workday, encouraging teachers to keep improving their classroom skills. 

Rhode Island’s progress is a testament to what’s possible when state leadership, district teams and national partners work together with one shared goal: creating a system where multilingualism is seen as a strength, not a barrier, and where every classroom reflects the rich diversity of all students.

The funds, which states normally can access by July 1, pay for staff salaries, teacher training, curriculum materials and other essential expenses. That means states and districts will likely have to cut those functions or find other ways to pay for them. The delay, for example, threatens over $1.3 billion in funding for 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which goes to schools, libraries and nonprofits that provide tutoring and enrichment programs. 

“We will very quickly see more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, an advocacy organization. 

The possible cancellation of additional federal funds for schools adds to the upheaval created by the elimination of existing grants and contracts amid Trump’s ongoing efforts to shut down the department. His proposed fiscal 2026 budget would also shrink over $6.5 billion for 18 programs into a $2 billion block grant. Last week, Education Secretary Linda McMahon assured members of the that special education funding and Title I grants for high-poverty schools would be “level funded,” according to a recording of the meeting shared with The 74. But she never mentioned the fate of the other programs, and state leaders didn’t ask.

Trump officials based Monday’s move on “the change in administrations,” even though the president the budget on March 15. The department, the note said, has not yet made decisions about “awards for this upcoming academic year” and remains committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.”&�Բ�����;

If the administration follows through with clawing back the funds, the move is certain to spark another lawsuit. Federal courts have mitigated the effects of previous cuts. McMahon, for example, tried to rescind over $2 billion in remaining COVID relief funds until 15 states and the District of Columbia . 

Last week, in response, she told all states with remaining funds that to avoid “uniformity and fairness problems,” they could once again submit receipts for reimbursement.

A seldomly used law, the , allows the administration to withhold funds that Congress appropriates, but the president has to first seek lawmakers’ approval, which he didn’t do in this case. Last week, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told senators that officials were to hold on to funds intended for some agencies, but both Democrats and Republicans appeared skeptical. 

In a statement Tuesday, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee, said the freeze will impact students in every ZIP code.

“President Trump and Russ Vought need to stop sabotaging our students’ futures and get these resources out the door,” she said. “Local school districts can’t afford to wait out lengthy court proceedings to get the federal funding they’re owed — nor can they make up the shortfall, especially not at the drop of a pin.”

Some advocates called on the Senate to delay final confirmation of Trump’s education department nominees, including Penny Schwinn as deputy education secretary and Kimberly Richey to lead the Office for Civil Rights, until the funds are released. 

The organizations, including All4Ed, EdTrust, Educators for Excellence and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the department’s move as “a potential violation of federal law and a direct threat to the educational opportunities of our nation’s most vulnerable students.”

In addition to the funding for afterschool programs, states are waiting on over $2 billion to recruit and train teachers, especially for high-needs schools; almost $900 million to support English learners; and $376 million for migrant education programs.

Gustavo Balderas, president of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and superintendent of the Beaverton, Oregon, district, said districts nationwide would feel the pinch.

“Districts are already stretched financially and this will be another unanticipated reduction to America’s public school system,” he said. “With school starting in a few weeks, budgets will have to be restructured and some staff positions will have to be reduced.”&�Բ�����; 

Districts may also lose their chance to spend federal funds on such programs in the future, if they find another way to pick up costs this year. The “supplement, not supplant” rule in the Every Student Succeeds Act holds that if a district used state or local funds for a program, then they don’t need federal dollars to cover it, explained Matt Colwell, who previously oversaw federal programs for the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

“The law severely limits what they can do once they lock into paying for it with state funds,” he said. He also wondered whether staff reductions played a role in holding up the funds. “‘We are looking into it’ could be a way around saying, ‘We fired all the people that actually take care of this.’ ”

Firebaugh’s student body is 98% Hispanic, and about 30% of its 530 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are designated as English learners. Based on diagnostic testing, administrators know many of them have limited or nonexistent phonics skills. In some cases, the students did not attend elementary school and lack the basics of literacy even in their primary language.

If you think of reading as an equation with specific components, you might assume reading instruction is straightforward. But as with any equation, there are variables, and English learners have many of them, from Individualized Education Programs to a diversity of home languages that makes it difficult for teachers to find a starting point for reading instruction. Any supplemental instruction educators provide must be flexible enough to account for those individual differences.

This is hard enough at the elementary level, but in middle school, students do not merely need to know how to read; they need to know how to read well, so they can comprehend information, analyze it and synthesize it. But in most middle schools, educators likely do not have comprehensive training in supporting basic reading development. While they may have picked up some strategies, their job and focus is to teach a single subject‚ not literacy. I’m a perfect example. I was a history major, and I am credentialed in social science. I was trained to teach ancient civilizations, modern government and economics, and everything in between — but not reading.

Time is also a limiting factor. At Firebaugh, students rotate through a seven-period school day. Teachers cannot adapt their schedules the way elementary educators can, making it challenging to spend extra time catching up students who are not reading at grade level.

We had attempted many approaches to improving literacy at Firebaugh. We added English language development classes. Educators tried to emphasize reading strategies and target specific students who were two or more grade levels behind in literacy. However, none of these efforts proved effective. Along the way, we realized many students needed pieces of the reading equation that we did not know they needed, such as decoding words.

Then, we discovered an unusual that uses glyphs as a resource to foster reading fluency and boost comprehension for English learners. The system consists of 21 glyphs, or diacritical marks, that function as a pronunciation guide for each word. These marks (think accents or umlauts) are widely used in languages other than English to aid with pronunciation and comprehension. The system indicates which letters make their usual sound, which make a different-than-usual sound and which are silent. It also denotes syllable breaks.

We for English learners who had no experience sounding out words. In the first stage of implementation, students worked with teachers to learn the glyphs and complete core skill-building activities. In the second stage, the diacriticals — which are available for more than 100,000 words — were integrated into students’ daily reading practice to build fluency and comprehension. With the markups, words like “field” and “filed,” for example, were no longer a problem.

Initially, we wondered whether learning a whole system of markups would be worthwhile for the students. Over time, we saw that it really did expedite their progress. Now, the students understand the different types of sounds that the same letters make alone or in pairs. They pronounce words more accurately. Perhaps most importantly, they are more confident. They want to read.

An unexpected benefit was the assurance this approach gave our teachers. Those who had felt unsure about buttressing basic reading skills found a common support mechanism.

During the first full year of implementation, we saw payoffs across the board. When we looked at assessment data from fall to spring, we saw a 10 to 15 percentage point reduction in the number of students scoring two or more grade levels below standard, compared with no change under the previous program. Additionally, progress toward students’ individual goals was tremendous. For example, one student was working with a case manager on a list of 20 words. Without the glyphs, he was able to read two. With them, the student got 18 of 20 words correct.

Results like that have convinced our students to buy into this approach. They are willing to invest time in learning the glyphs and practicing daily. The program also serves as a cultural bridge, connecting with parents who don’t speak English at home because the symbols are similar to those used in their language.

We are confident we will continue to see a decrease in the number of students reading below grade level as we consistently implement these new reading strategies. As we enter the second year of implementation, we also expect to see a related trend upward to our English Language Arts scores.

Going forward, one of our goals is to establish a culture of reading within the school. Firebaugh’s students are at a stage when they are starting to become independent and make important life choices. This is a prime opportunity to position them for the future by providing them with an independent resource to support their reading progress.

Inside a classroom at the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park on a recent Monday morning, teacher Julian Colón was busy setting out notebooks, folders, pens and crayons on a table. Outside in the hallway, a sign taped to a wall reads “CLASES DE INGLÉS POR ESTE CAMINO” —��English classes this way.

It was the first day of the spring semester in this predominantly Latino corner of the Brooklyn neighborhood, where Colón was expecting about 30 students in class.

But not everyone who wanted a seat at the table was there. More than 400 students are now on the center’s waitlist, according to Maria Ferreira, its adult employment program director.

“I sit right by the reception, and every single day we get inquiries about ESOL,” Ferreira told THE CITY, using the acronym for English for Speakers of Other Languages. “Every day we’re adding people to the waiting list.”

Demand for English classes has increased with the influx of migrants that began in 2022, according to a , which represents 46 settlement houses that help serve immigrant populations, even as City Hall has slashed funding.

At Flatbush-based social services giant CAMBA, program manager Jude Pierre said more than 700 prospective students are now waiting to get into one of its 10 city-funded ESL classes, which collectively accommodate about 200 students.

“With the migrant crisis…we ended up getting a lot of individuals coming here to register for classes to the point where we basically had to stop taking registrations,” Pierre told THE CITY. “We got to the point where it didn’t make any more sense to have thousands of people on a waiting list, knowing we would never get to most of them. We started saying, ‘Sorry, we can’t do this, because it’s not fair to you,’ and trying to refer them to other places.”

Last year, the Department of Youth and Community Development reduced funding for literacy classes by nearly 30% to $11.9 million from $16.8 million, the report noted. Many long-time providers in areas where migrant shelters were clustered also lost out on DYCD dollars after the agency adjusted its funding eligibility formula,” as .

According to the report, many classes now depend entirely on discretionary dollars from the City Council, which increased its funding to $16.5 million in fiscal year 2025 from roughly $6.5 million in recent years to back organizations DYCD left behind.

Several providers, however, told THE CITY that compared to DYCD’s multi-year contracts, Council funding, which requires annual reconsideration, makes it difficult to plan ahead and maximize offerings.

And for some, like CAMBA, Council funding was not enough to cover the losses from DYCD with the group reducing the number of students it serves by 174 and closing its waitlist, Pierre said.

So far, providers say, demand among new arrivals has remained steady even as the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts have led many new arrivals or or even walking the streets.

“Ideally, these programs would be supported by a robust, baselined program managed by DYCD that offered students and providers stability with year-over-year funding,” the report says. “However, until DYCD revisits its unnecessarily restrictive stance…it is crucial that the City Council continue this support to make sure that adult learners continue to have access to quality classes.”

‘I Understand People Now’

While fewer than 3% of the 1.7 million immigrants in need of English classes are able to access it through city-funded programs, according to the report, students who were able to find their way into a class told THE CITY improved English has helped with their daily lives — and their job prospects.

Currently, two-thirds of New Yorkers with limited English proficiency earn less than $25,000 a year, according to American Community Survey data cited in the report.

Rosanie Andre, 42, came to New York City from Haiti in 2023, and said she started taking English classes at CAMBA last year after three months on a waitlist. Since then, she’s been able to get a job serving food at Speedway while also delivering packages for Amazon per diem.

“When I did my interviews, you have to speak in English with the manager. And it helped me a lot because I understand people now,” Andre, a native Haitian Creole and French speaker, said in English.

Learning English has also helped Andre communicate with her 6-year-old — who only started speaking after their move to New York City.

“And she started to speak English — English only. She knows nothing in Creole,” Andre said. “I try to listen to my daughter and speak to her English-only.”

With her English improving, Andre said she is better able to help her daughter with her homework.

“I try to explain her how to do it in English,” Andre said. “If no CAMBA, I have difficulty to understand. Cuz when I come here, I don’t understand nothing. When people speak, I smile because I understand nothing.”

Roodleir Victor, 29, saw English classes as an essential stepping stone in furthering his education. He had completed his college coursework for an economics degree in his native Haiti, he said, though he ultimately fell just short of obtaining a degree because it would have required him to stay in the country’s capital, which has been

He started taking English classes when he moved to the city in 2023, he said, in hopes of continuing his studies here. For four days a week, he attended English classes in Flatbush from 1 to 4 p.m. before heading to Long Island to work at a pasta factory on a 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. overnight shift.

Victor is now enrolled in a GED class, he said, and hopes to study computer programming after that.

“I would like to study at a university which I can learn technology. But it’s difficult for me, because I don’t have the support I need to go there,” Victor said in English. “But for me personally, I believe in my capacity to adapt.”

‘It’s Not Impossible’

Back in Sunset Park, a 55 year-old asylum seeker was patiently waiting to enter the room half an hour before class started at 9 a.m.

“I’m just eager to learn,” the native of Ecuador�� said in Spanish. “It’s important because I want to communicate with others for a job.”

The mother of five arrived in New York City three months ago, she said, after seeking asylum at the Mexico-California border then being detained there for three months. She’s cleaning homes to help make ends meet, but hopes to land a job with steadier income soon.

“Whatever I can get I pick up, but those jobs come and go,” she said. “I was in a workforce development program but the curriculum was in English so I started looking for classes.”

Oscar Lima rolled into English class with his e-scooter just after class started at 9:30 a.m. The 34-year-old is now in his second semester of classes, he said, which he makes time for in between catering gigs, food deliveries and a third job as a barback.

“My bosses told me, ‘You’re a good worker, but you need to learn English,’” Lima said. “And I decided that I didn’t want to learn English myself.”

Lima and other students now settled into their seats, turning their attention to Colón.

“Everybody, are we ready? Listos?” Colón asked.

“Yes,” the class responded timidly.

Colón then began presenting ground rules on a digital whiteboard: Try to arrive within the five-minute grace period after the class start time, and come prepared with books, papers and pencils.

“The most important rule,” Colón continued, before repeating himself in Spanish. “Please don’t be afraid to participate and make mistakes.”

At break time, Lima shared how he, his wife and his two sons had arrived in the city from Colombia about three years ago. While the family had started off at a shelter, Lima said, they’re now able to afford an apartment of their own. His two kids —��seven and ten years old — quiz him about names of objects around the house, he said, and often encourages him to learn English alongside with them.

“New York, it poses many challenges. It’s difficult at the beginning, but it’s not impossible,” Lima said in Spanish. “My American Dream is my sons…I want my children to perhaps have what I didn’t have, but at the same time I want to show them how to earn it, and how to work like good people.”

The was originally published on

Kubes is the superintendent of Delhi Unified, a small district of five schools nestled in California’s Central Valley. , around 40% have been classified as English learners and speak a non-English language at home. 

Demographics like Delhi’s are relatively common in the Central Valley, whose agriculture economy has long depended on immigrants. Indeed, they’re reflective of California’s historical success attracting immigrants from a diverse range of cultures. This history is visible in the state’s K–12 system: there are in the U.S., and . 

And yet, the state hasn’t always embraced this diversity — or the immigration driving it — as a strength. In 1998, as a capstone to , voters passed , a referendum banning bilingual education for nearly all English-learning children in California. 

As Kubes notes, for kids. For nearly two decades, California schools stripped hundreds of thousands of linguistically diverse children of their emerging bilingual abilities. Worse yet, this was predictable: that bilingual and dual language immersion programs are the best models for these students to learn English and succeed academically. 

This can seem counterintuitive: Wouldn’t students learn English fastest in programs that taught only in English? But a drumbeat of studies — and the experience of — indicates that forcing young English learners into these sorts of “sink-or-swim” English-only lessons makes it difficult for them to understand academic instruction in English. Bilingual and dual language settings allow these students to begin learning English while deepening their abilities in their primary language, giving them opportunities to learn from classroom materials in both languages. 

When voters lifted the bilingual education ban in 2016, California’s political leaders embraced the change. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson set ambitious new goals through their , pledging to have at least half of all California students enrolled in bilingual schools by 2030. And yet, in the ensuing nine years, the state has made only halting progress towards building a K–12 school system that aligns with that research-backed bilingual vision.

Ironically, when it comes to bilingual education, this deep blue coastal state could learn a lot from a conservative rival to the south. Texas , but serves them very differently. Indeed, , the state has required school districts with significant numbers of English learners to offer them bilingual education. In 2019, , overhauling its school funding formula to make it in school districts’ interest to shift their programming to align with the research on how English learners learn best. 

Like most states, Texas provides districts with a weighted funding boost to pay for language instruction for their English learner students. But for every English learner that districts enroll in the “gold standard” of bilingual education: dual language immersion programs. These bilingual schools teach in two languages, sometimes to integrated classrooms of English-learner and English-dominant students. 

Critically, the bill also provided funding bonuses for non-English learner students enrolled in dual language programs. This gives districts a fiscal incentive to commit to the model even after English learner students reach English proficiency and are reclassified as non-English learners. In addition, it sets out an incentive for Texas districts to create integrated dual language immersion programs that enroll equal shares of native English speakers and native speakers of the program’s other language — usually Spanish. 

Texas’ systemic bilingual investments have produced a very different English learner education landscape. Texas enrolls nearly 40% of its English learners in — twice the rate California does. 

Given the research consensus on the efficacy of bilingual and dual language programming for English learners, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this gap is producing . These students in Texas outperform their English learner counterparts in California on a number of metrics. For instance, in Texas they have consistently scored higher than California English learners in both and in every administration of the National Assessment for Educational Progress since 2011. Finally, achievement gaps between native English speakers and English learners are consistently smaller in the Lone Star State than in California.

States’ English learner policies are more important than ever now, as the Trump administration guts the federal Office of English Language Acquisition, which oversees hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding earmarked for supporting those 5 million English learners. With funding cuts looming, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s Title III grants to support English learners’ language acquisition, states are likely to determine on their own the depth and breadth of their investment in the success of these students.

In California, local efforts like Delhi’s continue to push the state out of its failed English-only past. Delhi relaunched dual language immersion programs about a decade ago. Back then, the district “inherited a system that was not designed for all students to flourish,” Kubes said. So when he became superintendent in 2022, he moved to deepen Delhi’s commitment to those growing programs. 

District leaders conducted public discussions in Spanish and English to learn what families wanted — and to help families of English learners learn about the of developing their children’s home languages.

“What we offer,” said Gena Buchanan, principal at Delhi’s El Capitan Elementary, “is based on the needs of the community. It’s tailored to them. We used to have dual language immersion at just one site, but parents at the other schools started advocating for it, too.”

The shift is driving major changes for Delhi families. Over 50% of the district’s nearly 900 English learners are now enrolled in dual language. And long-time residents say that it’s reaffirming the value of their Spanish abilities. 

“It’s personal for me because I went to school here,” said Rosa Gonzalez, principal at Delhi’s Harmony Elementary and a former Delhi student during the state’s English-only era. She said that she put her own daughters in the district’s bilingual programs because of her experience losing her native fluency in Spanish. 

“I was struggling, as an adult, to communicate in Spanish,” she said, “even though that’s the language I had learned first when I was a kid. It was heartbreaking for me now to have to try to figure out how to speak to my grandparents, and I didn’t want my kids to have to go through that.”

But while local reforms like Delhi’s prove that California schools absolutely can deliver the language education models that research suggests work best, these efforts are definitionally limited in scope. In the near decade since relaunching bilingual education, California significant statewide policy changes to require districts to provide their communities with greater access to bilingual or dual language classrooms, nor has it provided substantial new resources to make it easier for districts to do so. State leaders have offered to seed several dozen new dual language programs, but have largely stopped touting the bilingual goals outlined in Global California 2030. 

While dual language immersion programs are uniquely beneficial for English-learning students, they can help all children become bilingual. Delhi parent Rosa Nuno brought her children to the United States when they were in kindergarten and fifth grade. She was eager for them to learn English, she said, but was also determined to maintain their connections to their native language and culture. 

“The more languages they learn, the better,” she said in Spanish. “And I want them to feel proud of their roots.”&�Բ�����;

Meanwhile, Buchanan, the principal at El Capitan, is starting her own bilingual journey.

“I’m English-only,” she said, “but seeing the benefits of dual language, I’m telling my children to enroll my grandchildren in our program. I’m an incredible supporter of it now. All the parents at my school know that I’m trying to learn Spanish.”

President Donald Trump has declared English the official language of the United States.

But his administration has fired nearly every Education Department staffer who ensured states and schools properly spent the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked to help over 5 million students learning English.

It appears that just one staffer remains from the Office of English Language Acquisition, or OELA, after the Trump administration .

“Your organizational unit is being abolished along with all positions within the unit – including yours,” an official with the department’s human resources team told the laid-off OELA staffers in a March 12 email.

Two days later, an administration official told state officials that the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education would take over the OELA.

Advocates for English learners and outgoing Education Department staffers worry the deep cuts to OELA will have serious effects on students, families, and school staff. Without a dedicated office to keep an eye on spending, they fear federal dollars won’t reach the English learners they’re intended to serve, and that the quality of teacher training will suffer.

“There won’t be any more staff to provide guardrails on the federal funding,” said one laid-off OELA staffer who spoke with Chalkbeat on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration. “Ultimately, it will affect the quality of education that English learners get across the nation.”

Among those expressing concerns is an official who led the OELA — and helped maintain it as a standalone office — during Trump’s first term.

Adding to the uncertainty is . The president said Thursday before he signed the order that the federal government will preserve high-profile programs at the department, but did not mention its office for English learners.

OELA staff have played a key role in monitoring how states and schools spend $890 million in federal Title III funds, which are allocated based on the number of newly arrived immigrant children and students learning English. When states and schools have questions about whether they can use their money on a certain after-school program or a new family liaison role, OELA staff track down the answers.

The office supports dozens of universities, nonprofits, and others who train bilingual education teachers. It oversees a grant program that helps Native American and Alaska Native children learn English alongside indigenous languages.

And the staff maintain the , a hub for data, research, and best practices that many schools rely on. Some resources, like a recently released , take over a year to produce.

OELA had 15 staffers in January, . The team already had more work than it could handle before the mass layoffs, said Montserrat Garibay, who led OELA during the Biden administration and left her role as the assistant deputy secretary shortly before Trump took office.

“They were overworked,” Garibay said. “It was almost impossible to keep up.”

Hayley Sanon, the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, that her office would manage Title III funds for English learners, as it did prior to December 2023.

She also said formula funding under the nation’s main federal education law, which includes money for English learners, “will continue to flow normally, and program functions will not be disrupted.”

“The Department is committed to fulfilling its statutory obligation to prepare English learners attain (sic) English proficiency and develop high levels of academic achievement in English,” wrote Sanon, who is also the principal deputy assistant secretary at the department.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat, Madi Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, reiterated that Title III and OELA would now fall under the elementary and secondary education office. But Biedermann did not respond to questions about why or how many OELA staff are left.

Students learning English have often been denied help

In addition to decimating the English language acquisition office, the Trump administration has eliminated nearly 200 civil rights attorneys who would make sure school districts meet their legal obligations to support English learners.

Some see the elimination of staff who oversee Title III as a precursor to bundling up that money in block grants that states could spend with fewer restrictions. Republican have , but advocates for immigrant children worry that could divert resources away from kids learning English.

“There’s plenty of districts and states who would do the right thing,” said David Holbrook, the executive director of the National Association of English Learner Program Administrators, which represents state and district staff. “But the reason we have laws, and the reason we see all the regulations, and the reason we have watchdog agencies” is because some would not.

In 1974, that the San Francisco Unified district violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act by failing to provide supplemental English language classes to students of Chinese heritage who did not speak English. The ruling led to significant changes in federal law and regulations, and spurred nationwide efforts to help English learners.

Several school districts, including , , and , entered into court-ordered settlements, known as consent decrees, to better serve English learners. , and many English learners are still denied the services they should receive.

Three decades after those court orders, or materials in native languages for English learners. In Denver, after two years in the district, test results showed.

Concerns about such issues aren’t confined to students’ English language skills and academic proficiency. Some advocates for English learners worry that could lead schools to put less effort into translating documents and conversations for immigrant families.

Then there’s the backdrop of how the president is enforcing immigration policy and who gets to remain in the country legally.

Trump is , and he . He’s taken away the temporary status that protected hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians from deportation. And Trump has pledged to strip birthright citizenship from children born to undocumented parents on U.S. soil.

Office helped train teachers and supported immigrant families

A dozen OELA staffers got notices that they would be placed on administrative leave as of Friday and terminated in June, according to the union that represents Education Department staffers who are not supervisors.

Two staffers listed in the January directory whose names did not appear on the union layoffs list had phone numbers that no longer worked. Another staffer had an email autoreply saying she was on extended leave.

“I looked at that list and I looked at all of the names on it and I realized: Oh that’s our entire office,” the laid-off OELA staffer said.

That seems to leave only the deputy assistant secretary, Beatriz Ceja, who was still responding to emails from organizations that work with English learners as of last week. Ceja did not respond to an email message or a voicemail from Chalkbeat seeking comment.

The Education Department layoffs are being challenged or questioned on multiple fronts. on March 13 challenging the staff cuts, and . Sheria Smith, a civil rights attorney who was among the laid-off Education Department staffers and president of the union that represents a dozen fired OELA staffers, said she did not think the layoffs complied with the law.

, but the plan ultimately did not come to fruition.

José Viana, who led OELA during the first Trump administration, told Chalkbeat in a written message that he is concerned about the cuts to OELA and “engaged in diplomacy efforts” with the new Trump administration.

“My focus right now is on providing guidance regarding the decisions that have been made, outlining the legal requirements, and working toward solutions that best support multilingual learners,” he wrote.

during the Biden administration. The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education oversaw Title III funds for 15 years before that.

Garibay led that transition and added four staffers to the team that handled Title III. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona saw the previous staffing level of two as “unacceptable,” Garibay said.

“We put systems in place so we could have better communication,” Garibay said. “Every time I would go to a state, they were just so grateful to have technical assistance.”

There can be benefits to the elementary and secondary education office overseeing Title III, because it can make federal program monitoring more consistent and cut down on some duplicative tasks, Holbrook said. But he also highlighted fears that existing staff won’t have the capacity to take on OELA’s workload.

One of the key roles OELA plays is in supporting universities, nonprofits, and others who train teachers who work with English learners.

Belinda Gimbert, an associate professor in education administration at The Ohio State University, has experienced that firsthand.

Gimbert is the , a program that helps pre-service teachers and paraprofessionals get their bilingual education teaching license and that trains existing teachers to work with English learners in small groups.

It also provides support for immigrant families, such as family-school connectors who translate over video chat — a key strategy for engaging Somali parents in central Ohio who speak Maay Maay, which is primarily an oral language. The program received a $3 million, five-year grant from OELA.

When Gimbert had a technical or financial question, she could shoot an email to OELA and they were quick to respond. If she didn’t understand a legal requirement, OELA staff would translate it into plain English and explain what it meant for her program.

Several times, OELA helped Gimbert quickly add a partner so she could serve more Texas schools without going over her original budget. That helped meet the sudden demand for adults to provide English language acquisition services when a wave of immigrant children moved to an area or military families relocated near a base.

“We’ve always had a person to lean on to be able to administer this grant,” Gimbert said. “Everybody is really concerned about making sure that we are in compliance.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home.��

These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners after hearing their families planned to leave rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.

“One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation,” said teacher Joanna Schwartz. “It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school’s logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it.”

She said she taught the fifth grader for three years. 

“It’s nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” she said. 

Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning. They simply stop showing up and ignore the calls and emails that follow. 

Other times, they give their teachers just a few hour’s notice, often a single afternoon, to process and accept the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years. A tight hug, a kind word and then … gone.  

Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration and , striking terror in the hearts of the undocumented and their advocates. 

Faced with the fallout, teachers who’ve spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students — fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure they have a robust education — are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress. 

Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments. 

She said she often gives these children “transitional objects,” something tangible, like the signed school T-shirt, to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States as they move back to their homelands.

Schwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she “reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed,” she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address. 

“I wish I could do more,” she said. 

Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state: The boy’s family was growing wary of and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they’d be safer. 

“He was my first student who left for this reason,” she said of the fifth grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. “It was so gutting. It just broke my heart.”&�Բ�����;

The family didn’t know the Sooner State would impose some of the harshest in the nation. Those included state schools chief Ryan Walters saying he would comply with Trump’s order allowing immigration enforcement in schools and a failed edict that Oklahoma parents be required to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school. That proposal was rejected by the governor this week, who said children should not be used

Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all his classmates.

Video: A fifth-grade student leaving Areli Rodriguez’s Texas classroom leads his classmates in a chant in Spanish about self-worth. The 74 obscured the students’ faces to protect their identity and provided the English-translation captions. (Areli Rodriguez)

The boy, who was chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F. Pierson just moments before he was gone from the district for good.  

I am somebody.

I was somebody when I came.

I’ll be a better somebody when I leave.

I am powerful, and I am strong.

… I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go.

And, his teacher noted, she wasn’t the only gift-giver that day: The boy left her one of his favorite toys, a Rubik’s Cube. 

In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: “To say goodbye to all of you, Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I’m sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much.”

Rodriguez didn’t need the note to remember him.

“I think about him all the time,” she said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. “For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard. We had academic competitions. I coached him. He did creative writing in Spanish and he placed. His parents were so supportive — they looked at education as something they wanted to seize.”

His classmates felt the loss, too, Rodriguez said. 

“There would be times when I would sit there at recess and watch them play without him and you could tell there was an element missing,” she said. 

The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to This isn’t the first time they’ve felt such pressure: Former President in a single term, double that of Trump’s first four years in office. But many of those he turned away were newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from . 

The current president is targeting this population in other ways, too. Trump signed an executive order Feb. 19 aimed at . It’s unclear how this might impact education: Schools receive federal money, particularly to help support low-income children, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 Supreme Court decision . 

That landmark ruling, however, , most recently in Tennessee where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it’s their intention to challenge Plyler.

‘We hugged long and hard’

In addition to the T-shirts, cards and other mementos, educators are preparing something else for withdrawing students, a far more practical gift meant to help them resume their education elsewhere — and quickly. 

Genoveva Winkler, regional migrant education program coordinator housed in Idaho’s Nampa School District, said she’s given more than 100 families copies of their students’ transcripts in English and Spanish. 

“This school year, we are preparing ‘packets’ for the families with all that information,” Winkler wrote in a Facebook message, adding her district also gave them textbooks supplied by the Mexican Consulate that parents can use to prepare their children academically and bolster their Spanish. “The students are not 100% bilingual. Parents are taking all steps necessary to make the transition easier for their children.”

Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in age from 7 to 12, left her school system right after Inauguration Day, headed back to Mexico. 

“They didn’t specifically say that it was immigration related but I would guess it was,” Halsall said. “This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave.”

The youngest and the eldest told Halsall they want to be ESL teachers when they grow up, she said. The two middle children hope to be mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.

“I told the kids that they had learned a lot and always did their best,” she said. “I told them that they worked hard and were on their way to being bilingual. We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit.

I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes.”

The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that “La Migra” — ICE agents — would take his mother away while he was out. 

“I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me,” she said. 

Another teacher, in Virginia, said she had two such students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.

The boy from Guatemala, a solid student who wanted to accelerate his path toward graduation, would often say how perplexing it was that some of his peers didn’t show the same dedication to their studies that he did. 

Both teens expressed concern to fellow students about possible immigration raids shortly before leaving school for good. Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling “completely empty.”

“I’ve loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway if they choose,” she said. “Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating.”

In 1953, Bárbara Flores entered kindergarten at Washington Elementary School in Madera, California, a small city in the Central Valley surrounded by farm fields. Her mother and grandmother had talked it up: You’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to like it. She believed them. A little girl who would one day become a teacher, Flores was excited.

But only until she got there.

“I walked out,” Flores recalled recently. She got to her grandmother’s house a few blocks away, furious. “Son mentirosas,” she said. “No entiendo nada. Y jamas voy a regresar.”&�Բ�����;You’re liars. I don’t understand anything. And I’m never going back.

Flores only spoke Spanish. As the grandchild of Mexican immigrants, she didn’t find her language or culture welcome in the school. But little Bárbara didn’t get her way. And, after depositing her daughter back in the classroom, Flores’ mother asked the teacher a question: Aren’t you paying attention? My daughter walked out. The answer felt like a slap and became a part of family lore. All these little Mexican girls look alike. I didn’t notice.

Flores returned to her old school this fall; the building she walked out of still stands, but almost everything else has changed. Now students speak Spanish because their teachers require them to. Little Mexican girls see their culture celebrated on the walls of every classroom.

Washington students will graduate knowing how to speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, joining a growing number of “dual-language immersion” schools in California. Flores’ eyes open wide as she describes the about-face her alma mater has taken.

“We were punished for speaking Spanish,” she said. “We were hit with rulers, pinched, our braids were pulled. Now the whole school is dual-language.”

The path has not been linear. When Flores was a child, California still had an English-only law on the books from the 1800s. As governor, Ronald Reagan signed a bill eliminating it. Then the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new era of bilingual education, and the California Legislature went further, requiring the model for students still learning English from 1976 until the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1990s. Voters banned it again in 1998, only reversing the latest prohibition in 2016.

Researchers have found bilingual education helps students learn English faster and can boost their standardized test scores, increase graduation rates, better prepare them for college and much more. California has removed the official barriers to offering this type of instruction since 2016, and the state now champions bilingualism and biliteracy, encouraging all students to strive for both. But eight years after repeal, California schools have yet to recover. A decades-long enrollment slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline. And underinvestment by the Legislature, paired with a hamstrung state Education Department, has limited the pace of bilingual education’s comeback. 

The result? A rare case in which Californians can say Texas is inspiring. Both states enroll more than 1 million students still learning English — but last year, the Lone Star State put 40% of them in bilingual classrooms. California managed that for just 10%.

In 1987, Flores didn’t think state policy would go this way. At the time, both states required bilingual education. She was a professor, helping build a bilingual-education teacher prep program at Cal State San Bernardino. Her home state could have kept pace with Texas.

But it didn’t.

The English-only years: 1998 to 2016

By 1998, the bilingual-teacher prep program was flourishing. Flores helped aspiring teachers understand how students learn to read and write in two languages, sending them off into classrooms with binders full of instructional tips. Her daughter, then 10, was learning both English and Spanish through bilingual classes in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Flores was on a parent committee organizing broader support for such programs in the face of a statewide campaign to get rid of them, bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz.

Proposition 227, which passed with 61% of the vote, required schools to teach only in English with students who were still learning the language, something that may sound like a good idea but often ends up unnecessarily putting students’ grade-level learning of other subjects on pause while they master English. Flores saw the impact immediately. Faculty on campus called for the elimination of her program, an effort that ultimately failed but showed, she said, “the intensity of the discrimination and language racism that was prevalent.” Enrollment in bilingual-teacher prep programs across the state plummeted.

Flores also watched local school districts respond. “I was shocked at superintendents in the area,” she said. “They just made everybody throw away their Spanish books. It was horrendous.” As she recalls, every single school district in the Inland Empire got rid of its bilingual programs except San Bernardino City Unified, where parent activism helped ensure the district took advantage of an exception to the new law.

Dual-language students outperform their peers in San Bernardino City Unified

At the time, student achievement data from San Bernardino City Unified had shown that bilingual programs were helping kids succeed. And over the next two decades, researchers studying programs across the United States released a steady stream of evidence about the benefits of bilingual education, especially a version called “dual language.” Traditional bilingual education essentially lets students use their first language while they learn English. Once students become fluent, their schools shift entirely to English instruction, which was the goal all along. Dual-language programs, by contrast, set bilingualism as the goal. Students continue to take courses in Spanish or another language for about half of the school day until they leave the program.

While dual-language programs often stop after elementary school, the “” stretches through students’ K-12 years and into their working lives. Dual-language students have been found to score higher than their peers on both  and exams by middle school. They also get higher scores  in high school, setting them up to be more competitive in college admissions. And importantly, a team at Stanford found that native Spanish speakers were more likely to test out of English-learner services , a coveted goal because of how well “former English learners” do. University of Chicago researchers just released data showing that Chicago high schoolers in this group had  GPAs and SAT scores, high school graduation rates, and community college enrollment and persistence rates.

Patricia Gándara co-directs the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which has published similar findings, and has spent decades of her career cataloging the bilingual advantage. She laments the narrow value placed on bilingual education in the U.S., where it has historically been pursued as a way to help kids who don’t speak English learn the language more quickly and then succeed in English-only classes.

“That’s a very shortsighted view,” Gándara said, “particularly from the research that we’ve done that shows kids who get a strong bilingual education are more likely to go to college, they’re more likely to complete college, they’re more likely to have better jobs and better opportunities.”

Yet while policymakers didn’t catch on right away, well-off and well-educated white parents did, seeing the economic benefits of bilingualism for their children very clearly.

Glendale Unified School District launched its first Spanish-English dual-language program in 2003, going on to add programs in six other languages while official state policy was to ban them. Last year, 85% of the students enrolled were fluent English speakers, according to program director Nancy Hong.

Immigrant families, weighed down by the pressure to speak English and make sure their children do too, have been hard to recruit. Hong said immigrant parents have long been concerned that letting their children spend half the school day or more hearing their home language will get in the way of learning English, even though research has shown it can make the whole process go faster. “The goal is to dismantle those myths and misperceptions,” she said. But even though about 20% of students districtwide are English learners, only about 10% of them are in dual-language programs.

Many immigrant families, however, have become strong advocates for the programs. José Sanjas, a Mexican-born father in Madera Unified School District, takes his 6-year-old daughter past her neighborhood school every day en route to one of the district’s dual-language programs. He and his wife want to preserve their native language as their daughter grows up here, but the draw isn’t only personal; Sanjas also sees how bilingualism will benefit his daughter in the workplace.

“She can help more people in the future,” Sanjas said. “Professionally, she’ll be able to serve everyone.”

Spurred on by support like his, a diverse coalition of school leaders in Madera Unified had, by 2016, come to see dual-language education as key to turning around the district’s chronically low performance, especially among the children of immigrants. Flores had helped make the case, inviting school board members to the annual conference of the California Association for Bilingual Education. And in Flores’ hometown, U.S.-born, white families were among those speaking up in support of the programs, knowing even if the immigrant students’ test scores had the most room to grow, their children could benefit too.

Statewide, public opinion had swung in the other direction; that November, about 74% of California voters said yes to Proposition 58, officially allowing bilingual education back in California classrooms.

“It was a relief we [could] finally move forward for our children,” Flores said. “We lost a whole generation of kids — quite a few generations, really — because of English-only.”&�Բ�����;

The next generation, however, is still waiting.

A limping recovery: 2016 to 2024

Flores spent 40 years training future teachers before retiring in 2019. Across three institutions and 32 years at Cal State San Bernardino, she likely taught 10,000 students, many of whom remain sprinkled throughout the state’s bilingual-education system. But if anything defines the legacy of Prop. 227, it is the shattered teacher pipeline it left in its wake.

Gándara, of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, said the current state of affairs is “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ … I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.”&�Բ�����;

California colleges are not producing nearly enough teachers to meet the state’s bilingual-education goals. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — . Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the  in California schools that year. And it actually gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.

The Legislature has not ignored this problem entirely. In 2017, it funded six grants, totaling $20 million, to help districts coach up bilingual staffers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms. But Edgar Lampkin, CEO of the California Association for Bilingual Education, said seeding such “grow your own” programs falls far short of addressing the statewide need. “That’s not systemic,” he said.

In 2022, the National Resource Center for Asian Languages, based at Cal State Fullerton, got state money to train 200 teachers over five years. They’re on track, and the center’s director, Natalie Tran, is proud that their programs are not only increasing the number of teachers certified to teach in Asian languages, but also diversifying the languages they speak. She expects to certify teachers who speak Tagalog, Hmong and Khmer this school year. Still, she said, the state needs to do more to train additional teachers of Asian languages, including the less common ones. “We’re going to need help from policymakers to make this happen,” Tran said.

She isn’t the only one calling on lawmakers to be part of the solution. Anya Hurwitz is executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit that got its start as an initiative of the Sobrato Family Foundation to address achievement gaps between immigrant and native-born children in Silicon Valley. She says the state underfunds education, which gets in the way of doing what’s best for kids who don’t speak English.

In 2022, the last year for which  is available, New York spent almost $30,000 per student. California spent about $17,000. And besides its support for teacher training, the Legislature has only given districts  extra to start or expand dual-language programs. In Massachusetts, home to about one-tenth the number of kids still learning English, the Legislature disbursed $11.8 million for the same work, kicking off its own recovery from an English-only law.

“Funding is not the solution to everything in and of itself,” Hurwitz said, “but at the same time, we can’t build capacity without funding and resources.”

Back in Flores’ hometown, Madera administrators have been able to use state and federal money earmarked for their sizable number of immigrant families and those living in poverty to achieve their dual-language goals. But startup costs for dual-language programs are expensive. Teacher preparation programs, Superintendent Todd Lile said, are not producing graduates who are ready to do this work, leaving districts like his with steep professional development costs.

A residency program with Cal State Fresno has given Madera a solid pipeline of teachers, but the recent grads have to clear all the usual hurdles of being new to the profession while also adapting to using Spanish in the classroom. While these new hires at Washington Elementary School grew up bilingual, they went to school through the Prop. 227 years, meaning most of them didn’t develop an academic vocabulary in Spanish.

Viviana Valerio, a kindergarten teacher, said that history made bilingual education an intimidating proposition. “I commonly speak Spanish at home, but then when I was thinking about teaching, I was thinking, ‘OK, academic terms, I don’t know how to translate that,’ or ‘Parents ask me a question and I can’t think of it, I’m going to want to transition into English,’” she said. “For me, that was the scary part.”

Texas, too, lacks bilingual-education teachers, echoing a shortage present in much of the country, but the state is far ahead of California; many districts are able to recruit their own alumni because their programs have been around so long. Texas also continues to invest in bilingual education, helping districts comply with state mandates to offer it. Like California, Texas gives districts more per-pupil funding for every student still learning English; unlike California, Texas offers an additional premium for each of them enrolled in a dual-language program.

As an extra incentive to start and maintain these programs, Texas has started bumping up funding for the native English speakers enrolled too. Research shows the programs work better when classes are evenly split between native English speakers and speakers of the program’s second language. Then, not only are students learning their second language from the teacher but from their peers as well. Conveniently, this also makes for more integrated classrooms, something Gándara said California needs.

“We haven’t been able to take advantage of that, in large part because people don’t pay attention to that as a major issue and also because we don’t have the teachers to pull it off,” Gándara said.

Indeed, districts across the state cite staffing as a major barrier to starting or expanding their programs. Some have gone abroad to recruit. Others have been forced to scrap their plans entirely. Newark Unified School District, in the Bay Area, got rid of its dual-language program this year because it couldn’t find teachers to staff it. “We tried everything,” said Karen Allard, assistant superintendent of education services.

For more than a decade now, the state’s Education Department has tried to champion bilingual programs. Students who can prove their fluency in two languages before graduation get a special seal on their diplomas. The department also implores schools to help the children of immigrants maintain their home language while learning English, building that recommendation into its 2017 . By 2030, it wants half of California students on a path to .

Yet all of this largely amounts to cheerleading. The department is , a result of the state’s commitment to sending almost all K-12 funding directly to school districts, and its support for bilingual education has not come with any firm demands.

Conor Williams, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently found himself — a self-described “professional lefty” — in the surprising position of . Besides following Texas’ lead on funding, he said, California should rethink teacher licensing. The state requires college graduates to pass a suite of tests to become teachers, but Williams points out the tests don’t lead to better instruction and can keep good teachers from classrooms. Getting rid of the requirement could bring more bilingual adults into the profession and expand the teacher pipeline.

Hard to overcome, however, is California’s shift toward more local control over schooling. Williams doesn’t always agree with what the Texas education department does with its power, but the state’s centralized approach means it has “enough power and muscle and will to set rules and hold districts to them,” he said. California’s  is widely popular and has ensured districts get more state money to serve students still learning English as well as those in foster care and low-income households. But, Williams points out, local control has its limits.

“You don’t win civil rights battles by leaving it up to local school boards,” he said.

Still, districts like Madera are moving ahead on their own. In 2020, Flores’ alma mater, Washington Elementary, became Madera Unified’s second dual-language school, welcoming its first class of kindergartners who are expected to leave proficient in both English and Spanish.

Mateo Diaz Zanjas was one of them. He’s now a fourth-grader and speaks in easy Spanish about the school and his long-term dream of going to Harvard. Upon hearing that he and his peers speak very good Spanish, he eagerly replies: “We also speak good English.” And he proves it, going on to answer questions in English about his favorite subjects and the languages he speaks with certain friends.

Administrators, however, are still waiting for the data to show that their bet on bilingual education will pay off in student achievement gains. The pandemic interrupted their early years and set them back, and the oldest students aren’t doing as well as district leaders would have hoped. Commitment to the programs, however, has not waivered. Students’ overall test scores remain low, but their growth scores — or how much they learn over the course of the year — are high.

The district is helping students learn English more quickly, too, meaning they are becoming “former English learners” faster with the newer supports and joining the district’s highest-performing student group.

In the meantime, Madera teachers are using bilingual education to give Spanish speakers grade-level material, knowing that once they sharpen their English skills, all that information will transfer.

“Kids can learn math in Spanish; it’s still math,” Lile said. “They can learn social studies in Spanish; it’s still history and geography. These subject matters don’t exist only in English.”&�Բ�����;

During Flores’ recent visit to Madera Unified, she heard Lile describe his long-term goals for the district, including higher graduation rates and better college readiness for the children of immigrants. She looked on proudly, sure her hometown district was finally getting it right.

An uncertain future: 2024 and beyond

A few years ago, Flores introduced Lile to Margarita Machado-Casas, a professor at San Diego State’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education, which has long been a top producer of the state’s bilingual teachers. Machado-Casas is helping the district figure out what concrete steps teachers and administrators should take to follow the high-level recommendations of the state’s English Learner Roadmap. They started out with “Principle 1,” which asks school and district staffers to see immigrant students’ language and culture as assets rather than seeing their lack of English proficiency as a deficit. Pointing to Madera’s long and painful history of discriminating against immigrant students, including Flores, Machado-Casas said this principle unexpectedly took the entire first year, requiring “courageous conversations” — including asking staffers to think deeply about whether they believed in the work enough to stay in the district.

Machado-Casas is helping educators in Madera understand both how to help immigrant students tackle grade-level material and convince them that the students can handle it.

Flores hopes the work ends up being a playbook for the entire state — which could soon need one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed  this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the road map’s guidelines and report on their progress.

This planning process guarantees California will be over a decade into its recovery from the English-only years before the state even considers holding schools accountable for changing their practices. When New York passed a blueprint for how to serve English learners in 2014, it followed it up with new state regulations that same year, creating stricter policies for serving students who were still learning English, including a broader mandate for bilingual education, which had already been required for decades.

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez leads the California Education Department’s multilingual support division. She said state budget limitations have gotten in the way of implementing the English Learner Roadmap and said any call to require bilingual education like Texas or New York would have to come from the Legislature, not the department. “That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.

Advocates caution such a mandate would have to come with enough funding to help districts create high-quality programs, but many agree it would be a win for California students. Children from immigrant families speak , according to the Education Department, but 93% of them speak one of 10. To require bilingual programs, the Legislature would likely tweak the current law, which says if the parents of 30 or more students in a single school request a language acquisition program, the school has to offer it “to the extent possible.” Texas, Illinois and New York have similar laws, but instead of requiring bilingual programs in response to parent advocacy, they do so based solely on enrollment.

Flores thinks the state is at least moving in the right direction. And Madera Unified gives her hope. During her recent visit, she was flooded with memories: She saw the tree she and her friends used to circle while playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” She visited the classroom she walked out of as a 5-year-old, where the walls are now decorated with vocabulary in Spanish as well as English. She suffered in that room 70 years ago. Now, little Mexican girls do not.

“We don’t stop,” she said. “We keep plugging away. That’s our tenacity. That’s our grit. And our motivation, of course, is for our children.”

This was originally published on .

California’s public school students are continuing to rebound from the pandemic, with more showing up for class, more graduating and fewer misbehaving at school, according to new data released today.

The California School Dashboard, a color-coded snapshot of how students and schools are faring, showed improvements in many categories during the 2023-24 school year — a relief for schools trying to help students recover academically and social-emotionally after the 2020 campus closures.

The most notable improvement was in attendance. The percentage of students who were chronically absent, missing more than 10% of school days in a year, dropped to about 20%, a significant decline from when it peaked at 30% three years ago. Prior to the pandemic about 12% of students were chronically absent.

“This is good news,” said Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that advocates for school attendance. “I’m pleasantly surprised. … To benefit from all the services that schools are offering, kids have to show up.”

Since the pandemic, schools across the state have been doubling down on efforts to lure students back to school. Many used their federal and state COVID-19 relief money to hire outreach workers, add bus routes, host pizza parties and otherwise make it easier and more enticing to come to school. Some districts had  to solve transportation and other obstacles.

Chronic absenteeism continues to improve after pandemic peak

Those efforts paid off, Chang said. While the pizza parties helped, she pointed to many schools’ focus on improving campus climate overall. That includes counseling, social-emotional learning, stronger relationships between school staff and families, and health and wellness services.

Pandemic relief , so some districts will be scrambling to maintain these programs going forward. But the state’s recent investments in community schools, arts education, transitional kindergarten and other services will help, Chang said.

Recognition for long-term English learners 

Another noteworthy item in the Dashboard is the inclusion of a new student group: long-term English learners, or students who were not fluent in English after seven years. The reasons for these students’ delays vary, but in general they’re not receiving adequate help learning English and as a result, lag far behind their peers academically.

About 10% of students who were ever classified as English learners were considered long-term English learners last year, according to state data. Those students had some of the lowest math and English language arts scores of any of California’s 13 other student groups.

“We’re celebrating this significant milestone, that long-term English learners get the spotlight they deserve and they are no longer invisible,” said Martha Hernandez, director of Californians Together, which advocates for students who are English learners. “But now the work begins to ensure their needs are met.”

Schools and other education agencies need to work together to help families who are recent immigrants by finding translators, provide counseling to students, boost bilingual education and bring in tutors to help with English and academic skills, said Lindsay Tornatore, director of systems improvement and student success at California County Superintendents, which represents county office of education superintendents.

‘Not good enough’

Elsewhere on the dashboard, the graduation rate was 86.4%, up a bit from the previous year and higher than the pre-pandemic rate of 84.2%. But a related item on the dashboard raised alarm bells with researchers. The number of students meeting the requirements for admission to California’s public universities was up only slightly — an increase of just 3,700 students among a graduating class of 438,000.  Close to half of high school graduates are ineligible for the University of California or California State University.

“That’s just not good enough,” said Alix Gallagher, interim managing director at the nonpartisan think tank Policy Analysis for California Education. “It means the recovery has been anemic, and that’s a problem. We need a different approach, starting at the state level.”

Most California high schoolers graduate in four years

But only about half of graduates meet University of California or California State University admission criteria, also known as A-G requirements.

She pointed to some districts’ policies of placing students on math tracks that don’t allow them to meet the college admission requirements by their senior year. While not all students should be expected to enroll in four-year colleges, they should at least have the option available, she said.

The Department of Education hailed a drop in the suspension rate, among all student groups. Student misbehavior had increased after schools re-opened, and schools struggled to maintain a positive atmosphere for staff and other students. The rate dropped from 3.6% to 3.3% last year.

No major changes to format

The dashboard itself has been . The data is too hard for parents to navigate, and the color coding can be misleading, according to a report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. 

For example, a school might earn an orange color, the second-from-lowest designation, for showing slight improvements, but its scores might actually be lower than schools that earned a red, the lowest ranking. The state said it would consider making some changes but hadn’t made any major alterations on this year’s version.

The dashboard was released a few weeks earlier than it was last year. By 2026 the dashboard’s release will coincide with the Smarter Balanced test score announcement in mid-October.   

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“I’m teaching in a neighborhood that I grew up in,” said Lee. “I’m really a part of this community, like, I have more of an obligation as an educator to really serve the individuals that I’m working with. I think that’s what connected me with families more so it helped me be more involved with other curriculums around the school.”&�Բ�����;

This matches the campus mission. Camino Nuevo — “New Way” in English — is a school tailored to its diverse, polyglot community’s needs, but it’s probably better understood with the operational arrow inverted: This is a school that exemplifies and expresses that community and its aspirations.

Its Burlington campus, in Central Los Angeles, is just west of downtown in a vibrant, plural area bursting with linguistic and cultural assets. Lee, a child of , grew up nearby speaking Spanish, English, and (some) Cantonese. The large majority of Camino Nuevo students identify as Latino and come from families where Spanish and/other non-English languages are spoken. 

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Burlington — the flagship campus of Camino Nuevo’s LA charter schools network — would host a pioneering response to California’s persistent shortage of bilingual teachers. After all, Camino Nuevo-Burlington served as a  during California’s 18 years of mandating English-only instruction. Only a small number of schools were able to secure waivers from the policy and keep bilingual education’s fire burning in the state. 

When that mandate was lifted in 2016, schools across the state began the arduous task of returning non-English languages to their campuses. Or, put better, they started working on bringing those languages to the front of classrooms — the linguistic diversity of California’s students had persisted through its decades as an English-only state. In 2023,  spoke a non-English language at home, and the number is much higher . 

At Burlington,  are currently classified as English learners — and that number does not include former English learners who have reached proficiency in English but also speak other, non-English languages. 

Despite this abundant multilingualism, California schools and districts have struggled to regrow their bilingual programs in the past eight years. Asked why they’re struggling to overhaul their English-only classrooms, school leaders here almost universally raise the same challenge : they can’t find enough bilingual teachers. 

Compared to California’s students, . Just 27 percent of California teachers speak a non-English language at home. Over 60 percent of California teachers are white, compared to just 22 percent of California students. 

“Post-pandemic, we realized that we had to do something about this because we had teachers leaving and there were no new teachers coming in,” says Camino Nuevo leader Adriana Abich. 

How can this be? , of all places, to build a bilingual teaching force that reflects the burgeoning linguistic diversity of its student population? 

Above all, it’s because teacher training pipelines and state credentials — in  and in most states — are inflexible, expensive, and largely designed for monolingual teacher candidates. 

“In California, there’s so many layers to becoming a teacher, [particularly] a lot of testing” says Camino Nuevo principal Juliana Santos. “We’ve lost some wonderful, high-quality teachers because they couldn’t pass those tests.”

To get , young adults first need to complete a bachelor’s degree, in a state where  at four-year public colleges and universities, and room and board charges add thousands more. Most candidates then need to enroll in  to get their preliminary teaching license — which often adds tens of thousands of dollars more in cost. 

Teacher candidates must also complete  of student teaching and pass a battery of tests (in English) covering everything from knowledge of the U.S. Constitution to subject matter expertise and pedagogical methods. Further, to be eligible to teach in bilingual classrooms, candidates also need a , which requires extra coursework and successful passage of additional language exams. 

These various requirements often serve as diversity filters, blocking bilingual teacher candidates who cannot easily pay for years of coursework, multiple testing fees, and many months of unpaid student teaching. Even those bilingual candidates who are able to clear these financial obstacles may be filtered out by the necessity of passing multiple teacher credentialing assessments in English — even though there is overwhelming demand for their abilities to work and teach in Spanish or another non-English language. 

Perhaps worst of all, there is little research suggesting that these credential requirements reliably produce higher quality instruction — in English-only or bilingual classrooms — let alone better academic outcomes for students.

Since it couldn’t find the teachers it wanted post-pandemic, Camino Nuevo decided to train its own. Last fall, it partnered with a handful of local schools and Loyola Marymount University’s (LMU) School of Education to launch , with three dedicated residency pathways: bilingual, English-only, and special education.  

“Basically, it’s a program to disrupt the typical approach [to teacher preparation], where you don’t get paid for work. You sit side by side with a master teacher and you learn as a student teacher,” Abich says. “My main thought was, ‘How do we make it work for people of color? How do we make it so that, number one, people are getting a living wage when they come and do a residency with us?’” 

To that end, AVANCE residents’ daily work counts towards their required student teaching hours. Unlike most student teachers, they receive a salary — along with tuition stipends and payments to cover testing fees  — for a   of nearly $50,000. In return, residents work with students alongside  at one of the participating schools’ campuses (their mentors also receive a stipend for their participation). 

While , the University provides scholarships that reduce costs by roughly half — and AVANCE provides an additional scholarship that brings the total cost down to $8,000 (or $10,000, if they are seeking a special education credential). State-sponsored scholarship programs for teachers can further reduce costs, provided that residents go on to spend at least four years in the classroom once they earn their teaching credential. 

During their residency year, AVANCE participants take coursework both online and in person as a cohort, studying trauma-informed pedagogy and weekly coaching sessions to give them practical guidance for their specific roles — in bilingual education and/or special education. “These are our way of saying, ‘this is the reality of the theory you’re hearing about in your classes,” Abich says. “This is the real stuff.”&�Բ�����;

To ensure that candidates can get over the state’s testing hurdles for teacher credentials, AVANCE residents also receive free test preparation materials through a partnership with . 

As it launches its second year, it appears that the program’s blend of support and flexibility is meeting its goals. Across the first two cohorts, 97 percent of AVANCE residents identified as BIPOC. Nearly 70 percent of the first cohort are already leveraging their language abilities to launch careers as lead teachers in Camino Nuevo’s bilingual classrooms, and another 24 percent are on track to take on lead roles once they complete their final credential requirements.

In a state starving for bilingual teachers, high-support, low-cost residencies like AVANCE could be a policy camino worth exploring. The key, Abich thinks, is to design these programs with teacher candidates’ specific strengths and challenges in mind. 

In Camino Nuevo’s case, she says, “We were focused on our community. We wanted people from the community to be in those teacher roles.”

Teaching students who speak different languages can be an exciting endeavor that more and more teachers are experiencing. Diversity is an asset, something to be embraced and encouraged. It helps broaden students’ perspectives. Listening to and learning alongside peers from various cultures allows students to feel more connected and capable of navigating the world. When educators feel prepared to teach in such classrooms, they can celebrate this diversity properly while also developing students’ English literacy skills.

Here’s some advice for how teachers can amplify diversity in ways that acknowledge students’ heritage and foster a productive learning environment for everyone.

Check your own biases

Bias is a powerful thing, and it can exist in ways we don’t even realize. The first step in effectively teaching in a language-diverse classroom is understanding and overcoming your own assumptions as an educator.

Do you believe that all children can learn, regardless of their language background, what they look like, and their socioeconomic status? Cognitive research tells us they can—and that canlearn how to read, write, and speak in two or more languages at the same time. But sometimes, teachers find excuses not to believe that: This child’s parents don’t speak English, therefore it will be difficult for them to learn English at school. Their parents aren’t caring/giving/interested in education because they work all the time. Parents don’t read to their child therefore it will be difficult for the child to learn to read. 

Being honest with yourself and checking your biases at the door is critical to ensuring every child’s success.

Honor students’ cultural diversity

Acknowledging and celebrating students’ cultural heritage creates an environment where all students feel welcome—and therefore ready to learn. That means learning how to pronounce each child’s name correctly, building a classroom library that includes books reflecting characters with similar backgrounds and interests, and knowing about their interests and individual lived experiences.

Knowing what’s important to your students and their parents can help foster deep connections. We know from learning science that serotonin and dopamine are important aspects to learning, and those chemicals are more likely to flow in a safe, secure, and welcoming learning environment.

Learn about their heritage languages

Sometimes, teachers think they have to know all of the languages their students speak to be successful. That’s not true. However, learning at least a little bit about each language can help teachers make invaluable connections for their students. And with AI, it’s now easier than ever for teachers to gain this knowledge. You can start by asking an AI engine which letters and letter sounds are the same and which are different when comparing English to a student’s heritage language.

For example, if you know that in Spanish, “ll” makes a “y” sound and “qu” is pronounced as a hard “c,” you can help native Spanish speakers overcome some common hurdles in learning to read and speak in English.

Leverage students’ skills in their heritage language

Children who have grown up learning how to speak another language have already acquired initial literacy skills that can help them learn English—and you can leverage these skills to make the process easier for them. For instance, if you know which letters and letter combinations sound the same in a student’s native language and English, this gives you a natural entry point for helping that child learn English.

Use curriculum tools that follow the science of reading

Regardless of their first language, all children learn to read and write in any language most effectively by following an evidence-based, structured literacy curriculum grounded in the science of reading.

To meet this requirement, the curriculum should begin with phonological awareness activities, followed by systematic, explicit phonics instruction that leads to decoding simple text supporting this instruction. What this means is, if you’re introducing the short “a” sound to students, you should have them practice reading decodable texts that emphasize the short “a” sound. The lessons and activities should build on students’ phonics skills in a logical progression, leading to fluency with increasingly complex texts.

At the same time, students should be developing their vocabulary and learning about syntax and semantics to extract meaning from the text. These five elements—phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension—should be taught together in a structured approach to literacy.

If the curriculum you’re using doesn’t meet these criteria, then you likely need some evidence-based materials to use in your classroom, along with professional learning on implementing the science of reading into instruction. A good place to start is the and the Online Language and Literacy Academy.

Teaching in a language-diverse classroom is an exciting prospect! By following these five strategies, educators can celebrate this diversity and create an environment where all students can learn and thrive.

But researchers with The University of Chicago say such data points represent a mere snapshot of student achievement for those still learning a new language, telling just a fraction of a greater story. 

They’ve been turning their attention instead to a different group of children: Former English learners who, by the time they reached ninth grade, had graduated from language support programs.

Their of 78,507 Chicago Public School students who started high school in the fall of 2014, 2015 and 2016 shows this group is thriving: They had better cumulative grade point averages and SAT scores and were more likely to graduate high school than the district average.

Their two-year college enrollment rate was also higher. 

“There is this perception that English learners are particularly struggling, that they don’t do well … that they are perpetually behind,” said Marisa de la Torre, a managing director and senior research associate at the . 

Incoming Vice President JD Vance furthered the notion that these students are a burden, when he pointed to the tens of thousands of school-age children in whose parents are undocumented.

“Now think about that,” he said in October. “Think about what it does to a poor school teacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English. Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Xenophobia and race-baiting were central to Donald Trump’s re-election efforts. The incoming president has said he will to drive millions of undocumented people from the country, a plan and  

de la Torre said the belief that all children associated with English learner programs are forever adrift is misleading and unfair to students and their teachers: It’s a far smaller subset of active English learners — those who struggle to make it out of English learner support programs — who tend to have lower grades, she said.

Jorge Macias, now a senior consultant to the Latino Policy Forum, led Chicago Public School’s multilingual program for years. He said the narrative must be changed to reflect reality. 

“State-level data and national data doesn’t capture this group properly,” Macias said, noting that 78% of English learner students in the Chicago school system transitioned out of the program by 8th grade, according to an earlier study. “And once the students exit, they actually show just as much success — if not more — in the factors that matter most for postsecondary success. “

UChicago researchers divided active English learners into categories, including long-term English learners. These students were in the program for at least six years: Many had learning disabilities and Individualized Education Programs outlining their mandated special education services.

The final category consisted of late-arriving students, those who came to the district after the third grade and remained active in the English learner program in their freshman year of high school. 

Former English learners represented 23% of the school system’s ninth graders in the years the study covered. Long-term English learners without IEPs made up 4%. Their performance was substantially lower than the district average. 

These students were more likely to enroll in a two-year-college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college — and when they did enroll in a four-year college, they had lower persistence rates., they had lower persistence rates.��

Long-term English learners with IEPs made up 3% of ninth graders in the study. Their high school performance and college enrollment and persistence rates were similar to non-English learners with IEPs.��

Late-arriving English learners, who also made up 3% of the study’s ninth graders, graduated high school at similar rates to their peers: 81% compared to the district average of 84%. But their college entrance exam scores were lower. 

Despite this, their two-year college persistence rate was markedly higher than most other students who enrolled in college.

Researchers found that while late-arriving English learners struggled with standardized tests, their grades were strong. And they were more successful than their native English-speaking peers — and former English learners — in college, suggesting their poor test performance was not predictive of later success. 

This new report builds upon earlier research in this area. Another de la Torre of Chicago Public Schools found that English learners who demonstrated English proficiency by eighth grade had higher attendance levels through elementary and middle school, better math test scores and core course grades compared to students never classified as ELs.

It found, too, that English learners who did not achieve English proficiency by eighth grade struggled with declining attendance by the middle grades and also had considerably lower grade point averages.

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro, the Latino Policy Forum’s vice president of education policy and research, said quality bilingual programs and other supports can help active English learners succeed. 

The achievements of former English learners, she said, are “a powerful reminder that bilingualism is not a barrier, but a bridge, to greater opportunities.”

The measure, which does not eliminate the administration of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam, but rather its role as a graduation requirement, passed with of voters in support and 41% opposed, with 96% of votes reported as of Wednesday afternoon. The “yes” vote was particularly strong in western Massachusetts, while towns and cities in the greater Boston area were more likely to vote against it, according to reporting from . In Weston, one of the state’s wealthiest communities, 2 in 3 voters cast ballots in opposition, according to the Globe. 

Students still must meet the state’s course requirements of gym and American history and civics, along with locally determined measures, set by the some 300 school districts. 

When asked about next steps at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Maura Healey, who was a of the measure, said “The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will be out with guidance shortly on that … But the voters spoke on that question. And I don’t know what will come as of just yet.”

In response to a question about her willingness to entertain bills that would overturn the measure, Healey said, “I’ll review anything that comes to my desk, but I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals.”&�Բ�����;

Those who wanted to keep the requirement and see the ballot measure defeated — including Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler and the National Parents Union — argued that the MCAS is a high-quality assessment that is necessary to hold schools accountable, communicate progress with students and their parents, and establish consistent academic expectations statewide.

Those in favor of the ballot measure — backed by the statewide — argued that the testing requirement narrowed curriculum, forcing teachers to “teach to the test.” Each year, more than 700 students — including many English language learners and students with disabilities — are unable to graduate because they didn’t pass the MCAS or because they didn’t meet local district requirements.

Historically, approximately 70,000 10th graders sat for at least one of the three MCAS exams each year. Based on state policies, students had to earn a passing score on all three exams to earn a diploma. Those who didn’t could try again at least four times and some students were able to participate in an appeal process or an alternative pathway. Ultimately, the vast majority of students — about 99% — met the requirements.

“With this election victory, voters have welcomed a new era in our public schools,” said Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy in a following the announcement that voters approved Question 2. “This is the beginning of more holistic and thorough assessments of student work.”&�Բ�����;

Leading the charge on the ballot measure, the union poured $7.7 million into its campaign as of Oct. 1 and opponents spent $1.2 million, according to reporting from the .

John Schneider, the chair of , a coalition opposed to the ballot measure, said in a statement that, “Eliminating the graduation requirement without a replacement is reckless. The passage of Question 2 opens the door to greater inequity; our coalition intends to ensure that door does not stay open.”

This point was echoed by the president of the , Keri Rodrigues, in an interview with The 74 Wednesday afternoon.

“I think it’s a strong signal about what we’ve been warning about: that we’re going to watch the inequities in Massachusetts kind of just go wider and wider and wider” as more affluent districts largely maintain high standards and others lower theirs.

Rodrigues said she and other advocates will immediately begin calling for legislation that implements new statewide graduation requirements based on , a state-recommended program of study, which includes the successful completion of four credits of English, math and a lab-based science, along with a number of other requirements.

James Peyser, former state education secretary, is similarly concerned about the new lack of regulation. “We had [a graduation standard],” he told The 74. “I think it was working well, and I’m disappointed that the ballot question passed because it replaces something — something that’s working — with nothing. But we need to fill that void as quickly as possible.”