In a released today, the foundation and its offshoot, , scored state education departments on whether and how they define immigrant students, collect and report data on their educational progress and fund programs that support them. 

They assigned grades to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., based upon their findings: None won a mark above a C+. Forty-two states ​scored between C- and D- and five — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana and West Virginia — earned an F.

The results come as the Trump administration continues to zero in on this vulnerable student population as part of its multibillion-dollar immigration crackdown: Young people have been arrested, detained — in the case of one Los Angeles teen this month, at gunpoint — and deported. 

The federal government also recently directing schools to accommodate English learners. Immigrant advocates are pleading with state lawmakers to push back by showing their support for these students and better preparing teachers to meet their needs.

“We are witnessing a sinister daily attack on our immigrant neighbors from a federal government bent on stripping immigrants’ access to work, health care, educational opportunities, and even their sense of safety,” said report co-author Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a foundation fellow who heads its National Newcomer Network. “All students show up with a twinkle in their eye, excited to learn — newcomers included — and states need to do more to support them.”

The Century Foundation, founded as the Co-operative League in 1919, recommends states develop specific and consistent definitions for this population, which includes refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors and migratory children. 

In an effort to better serve this diverse and largely growing student body — there are more than inside the nation’s K-12 public schools — agencies must also collect and publish data on key indicators about their educational experiences, including years in the United States, English proficiency, home language, prior schooling and academic outcomes. Such data points might include school engagement, participation in clubs and sports and any behavioral issues that could arise in school, the foundation concludes.

State education agencies should use the data to inform funding formulas, the report recommends, and to create a newcomer-specific funding structure that supplements federal money. This additional aid should provide support for students in their first few critical years in the public schools system, “with transparent reporting on its use and impact.”

The report highlights the scattershot nature of data collection across the country: 17 states collect no discernable data on immigrant students at all. Twenty-two compile such information to determine eligibility and maintain compliance with federal earmarked for English learners. 

Eight states collect data that might include newcomers, but it isn’t differentiated or used to determine how supports are allocated. Only four have clear definitions of the term “newcomer” and consistently collect robust data about these children. 

requires all districts to submit what it calls Recent Arrivers data and uses the information for federal reporting and to allocate Title III funds, according to the analysis. collects disaggregated immigrant student data annually and later divides it by subgroup, while state, according to the researchers, requires districts to track all eligible English learners in their student information systems and report key data points like birth country and U.S. school enrollment date. 

But outdoes them all, the study shows: It publicly reports disaggregated English learner data by year, including counts and percentages of immigrant, refugee and migrant students, among other groups, and breaks down this data by district, home language and ethnicity. The state, population , had less than residents in 2023. Nearly 84% were of working age. 

“This is exemplary,” the report notes of North Dakota’s approach, adding it allows for a clearer understanding of the diverse needs within this student population and supports targeted interventions for many children, including those with limited or interrupted formal education.

The report cites the unevenness of young immigrants’ educational experience, as they sometimes move between districts striving for stable housing. 

“When these programs differ across district lines within a state, this group of often highly mobile marginalized students may not qualify for comparable services when they move, and their new schools may not receive the resources they need to properly serve them,” the report reads. “State education agencies have the unique opportunity to address these inconsistencies to best support all students, including newcomers.”

English learners nationally had a , as of the 2019-20 school year, compared to the 86% national average.  

At a moment when anti-immigrant fervor was beginning to build in this country, The 74 last year tested the enrollment practices of more than 600 high schools, attempting to register a 19-year-old newcomer who spoke little English and whose education had been interrupted. More than 300 schools refused to register him — including 204 denials in the 35 states and the District of Columbia where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20.

Vázquez Baur said newcomer students are here to stay and their presence predates the laws guaranteeing them educational access, including the 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe. The quality of their education, she said, will determine not only their opportunity but the health and well-being of their communities.

“Newcomers students are in our classrooms regardless of what our president says,” she said. “They are valuable neighbors and students. They become valuable leaders in their communities. Especially at this moment, it is the states that are on the front line against the federal government.”

And yet, in most American cities — and a wide range of — a quiet consensus has formed around dual language immersion programs. These bilingual schools appear to appeal to everyone — for the past two decades, . They’re popular because they offer 1) all students the chance to become bilingual in diverse learning settings, and 2) English learners the best chance to retain their emerging bilingual skills and succeed academically. But in a joint Century Foundation and the Children’s Equity Project published this week, we show that these bonuses aren’t a certainty. 

First: What are they? The most effective are “two-way” dual language immersion programs. These offer bilingual instruction and a bilingual social world — by enrolling roughly equal shares of children who are native speakers of English and children who are native speakers of the program’s other, “partner,” language. This is a major improvement on traditional U.S. language courses, where one Spanish-speaking (or French-speaking, or Arabic-speaking, etc.) teacher tries to cajole a classful of native English-speakers into conjugating verbs. It is also an improvement on traditional U.S. bilingual education programs, which usually only offer bilingual instruction long enough to transition English-learning children to English-only instruction. 

But, as one of us noted in — and — the relative scarcity of dual language schools means that these goals are in tension. and these students gain unique benefits from dual language programs, particularly when they’re integrated. And yet, in some cases, high demand for dual language from privileged, English-dominant, and often white families displaces less-privileged ELs, who are disproportionately likely to be , and . 

It’s an elemental question of fairness: research suggests that policymakers should prioritize equitable dual language access for English-learning children, but also that diverse, linguistically integrated programs work best for ELs and English-dominant children alike. And, of course, the program’s popularity with the privileged can make it difficult to find a balance. 

To get a clearer view of the situation, our new report analyzes more than 1,600 dual language schools enrolling more than 1 million students across 13 states and the District of Columbia. It explores the different ways that cities and school districts are navigating that tension in their dual language programs. 

Given the tension between prioritizing English learners’ access and maintaining diverse dual-language campuses, it can be difficult to define and measure what counts as fair access. For instance, we found that a majority of dual-language schools in Dallas, New York City, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Oakland, San Francisco, Houston, and Portland enrolled a lower share of white students compared to their share of the district population in 2020. 

But we also found that access to these schools is changing over time. ELs’ share of dual-language enrollment shrank between 2015 and 2020 in a majority of these schools in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and San José. Meanwhile, white enrollment shares grew in a majority of dual-language schools in New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Portland, and Washington, D.C.

These patterns are particularly striking in the context of shifting American public school demographics, where the share of white students — and the share of English learners has been growing.

Up to a point, enrolling more English-dominant students (of any race or ethnicity) can make dual-language schools work better for all students — including ELs. Indeed, while 92 of Dallas’s 154 dual-language programs got whiter since 2015, just 33 were whiter than the district in 2020. This is mostly because Dallas enrolls relatively few white, English-dominant students. A majority of the district’s students are current or former English learners and most come from Spanish-dominant homes. As a result, most of Dallas’s programs are “one-way” dual-language models, serving classrooms of only Spanish-dominant children. The upshot: the district might benefit from finding ways to increase English-dominant enrollment in these schools. Notably, San Antonio is pursuing this strategy in some of its dual-language programs.

The challenge, however, is to ensure that privileged, English-dominant families don’t fully colonize these schools and push ELs out. Fortunately, there are relatively straightforward ways for policymakers to protect English learners’ access. For instance, in Washington, D.C., 13 out of 17 dual-language schools had student populations whiter than the district in 2020. But in San Francisco, another gentrification epicenter, just 3 out of 21 dual language schools were whiter than the district. 

Demand for dual language is high in both places. wind up on D.C. dual language schools’ waitlists each year. In , in one program, there were two applicants for each seat reserved for native Japanese-speakers and 15 applicants for each seat available to non-native Japanese speakers — and similar patterns in other dual language programs. 

Notably, district leaders in San Francisco are much more aggressive about reserving seats for native speakers of the non-English partner language (e.g. Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, etc.). The data suggest the reserved seats are perhaps the key difference — without them, demand from San Francisco’s English-dominant families would rapidly shift programs away from English learners who are native speakers of the program’s non-English languages. Our research suggests that more schools should consider similar policies to ensure that ELs have fair access to the dual-language classrooms that serve them best. 

Finally, as we note in the report, “nothing exacerbates educational unfairness like scarcity.” The tension between prioritizing English learners’ access and enrolling diverse dual language classrooms would dissolve if there were enough programs to meet family demand. Local, state and federal policymakers should increase public investments in growing these programs. Above all, this means committing resources to train and license more of the bilingual teachers necessary to expand dual language instruction. 

Without reforms like these, the country’s growing number of dual language programs could fall well short of their potential for ELs and English-dominant students alike. Dual language schools full of privileged, English-dominant children will be less effective at producing bilingual graduates. Dual language schools that segregate Spanish-dominant (or Arabic-dominant, Vietnamese-dominant, etc.) English learners away from their English-dominant peers risk reinforcing social separation between families of different backgrounds. Given the popularity and effectiveness of dual language programs with children from linguistically, racially, socioeconomically, ethnically and politically diverse communities, that would be a failure indeed. 

Century Foundation senior fellow and 74 contributor ; Children’s Equity Project executive director ; Century Foundation fellow and Century Foundation senior policy associate are the co-authors of “Ensuring Equitable Access to Dual-Language Immersion Programs.”

President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act Tuesday at the White House — a $740 billion package that took nearly a year to get through Congress. 

While it lowers health care costs, includes new tax measures and offers clean energy incentives, it left out many of the signature priorities in Biden’s original Build Back Better plan, such as universal pre-K, lowering child care costs and extending a pandemic-era child tax credit.

Early-childhood education advocates in recent weeks have harshly criticized Congress for leaving programs for young children out of the bill.

“It is a complete shame that the Senate’s Inflation Reduction Act does not include inflation-fighting funding for child care,” Michelle Kang, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, said in a statement last month.

A year ago, Miriam Calderón was leading the U.S. Department of Education’s work in early-childhood, a time when $400 billion in new federal funding for programs serving young children still seemed within reach.

Now she’s working on the outside, hoping Congress passes a bill with a small fraction of that amount.

While the Senate once again inches closer to voting on what was originally President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, the recent compromise won’t include the $390 billion for child care and preschool and $190 billion for a child tax credit that the last November. Biden campaigned on adding four more years to public education — two in preschool and two for free community college. So far, he’s had to back off both promises. 

“There’s no sugar-coating it — it feels like a gut punch,” said Calderón, now chief policy officer at Zero to Three, an advocacy organization. “We will not have anything more equitable for children, birth to 5, without greater federal investment.”

House Democrats passed the $2 trillion package last November with the expectation that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York would secure enough votes to get it to President Joe Biden’s desk. But fiscally conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose vote is necessary in the 50-50 divided Senate, has only agreed to a smaller to lower health care costs, address inflation and reduce carbon emissions. For now, Biden’s pledge to pay for two years of free preschool and shrink families’ child care costs is out of the conversation.

For many in the early-childhood field, the omission is a rejection by Democrats at a time when programs are still trying from staff shortages and sharp declines in enrollment wrought by the pandemic.

“When it comes to making commitments in the federal budget towards evidence-based early childhood policies, we have fallen short as a nation,” Rasheed Malik, senior director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said last month at a House budget committee hearing on early-childhood funding. 

Republican members at the hearing panned Biden’s original proposal, saying it doesn’t prioritize “nuclear families” and includes large tax increases. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri dismissed it as “build back broke.”

But even a from Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Tim Kaine of Virginia — with $18 billion for preschool and $72 billion for child care — would have been “the largest federal investment in pre-K ever,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. Total current state spending on pre-K is less than $10 billion, he added.

Julie Kashen, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, said there’s still a slim chance Manchin, who weeks ago had ruled out an agreement on climate policy, would have another change of heart. During the vote, senators will also be able to offer amendments.

“We started out at $400 billion and we are far from there,” she said. “But until the ink is dry, we keep seeing things change. They could change again.”

For now, states and advocates are moving ahead on their own without a huge federal windfall.

“We know what it looks like when [the funding] doesn’t come through. That is our history,” said Kashen, who has worked on federal child care and family support policy for more than two decades. 

In New Mexico, residents will vote this November on a that would guarantee children a right to an education — not just K-12 students, but those 5 and under as well. If the measure passes, the state would put $125 million a year toward early-childhood education, generated from fees on public lands.

In the meantime, officials are state and federal relief funds to make child care free for every family for the next year. 

New Jersey has also to upgrade preschool facilities, expand access to child care and pre-K, and support home-visiting programs, which often target low-income mothers with newborns and toddlers. Barnett said the state is wise to put relief funds primarily toward construction projects, “which will pay off for the next 30 years or more” instead of “giving one-time bonuses and other things that are transitory.” 

Some states are also using relief funds for early-childhood staff raises, to support teacher mental health and pay for training, according to a National Association of State Boards of Education issued Tuesday. 

Romney’s family plan

While Manchin has said he supports , he argued against raising taxes to pay for Biden’s proposals during a period of high inflation. And he vowed only to support the child tax credit, which provided up to $300 per month for families with young children, if it included a work requirement for parents. show the direct payments helped families afford rent, groceries and school supplies last year. 

Conservatives are now backing a similar proposal from Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, His would provide most families with $350 per month for children from birth to age 5 and $250 for school-age children. 

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said educators should support the bill, saying it “has the potential to help millions of kids — especially poor and working-class children — come to school ready to learn.”

Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who has pushed to make the Biden child tax credit permanent, tweeted that he Romney’s work on the issue. But Bennet’s staff said he splits with the Republican on details. Romney’s plan would require families to earn $10,000 in the previous year to qualify for the credit and cut for low-income families to pay for the credit.

Bennet, along with other Senate Democrats, such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey, hope they can squeeze into an end-of-the-year tax package.

Meanwhile,some Democrats are still pushing to include last-minute funding for young children in the final deal between Manchin and Schumer — now called the Inflation Reduction Act — before the Senate is expected to break for recess next week. 

“The simple reality is that if we don’t act now, the child care crisis will only get worse,” Murray said in a statement Thursday. “As we fight inflation, we must help parents find and afford the child care they need so they can get back to work, and help child care providers stay in business.”

In his , Biden promised to “keep fighting” for lower preschool and child care costs.

“This bill is far from perfect. It’s a compromise,” he said. “But it’s often how progress is made: by compromises.”

“They were both segregated middle schools,” said Akeshia Craven-Howell, who until recently was assistant superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, overseeing student school assignments. 

“Sedgefield Middle School serves students primarily from lower socioeconomic communities and Alexander Graham serves students from communities with primarily higher socioeconomic factors.”

But in 2019, the district, fueled by strong parent advocacy, tried something new. It mixed the two buildings’ student populations by creating a combined attendance area and rearranging which elementary schools sent students to which middle schools.

“We were able to create two middle schools that were much more socioeconomically diverse,” said Craven-Howell, who now works as an advisor for Bellwether Education Partners.

Across the country, thousands of schools closely resemble the segregated Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office reveals. 

Over 7,800 predominantly same-race schools, it finds, are located within just five miles of a different same-race school. Widening the radius to 10 miles swells the total to over 13,500. 

Those cases may represent “low-hanging fruit” for integration efforts, said Craven-Howell. 

“It doesn’t require a significant trade-off with home-to-school distance, which I think is often a barrier for some families when they think about school diversity.”

A strong majority of parents say they would like to see schools increase their racial and socioeconomic balance, but support wanes when the undertaking involves busing programs or further travel, according to from The Century Foundation. Opponents of integration schemes often cite lengthy bus rides in their resistance to the plans.

In many cases, however, such a sacrifice is not required, said Richard Kahlenberg, the organization’s director of K-12 equity.

“It’s so often true that people will say, ‘We would love integrated schools, but it’s just not logistically possible because of distances,’” he told The 74.

That’s often a false dichotomy.

“Distance, in many cases, is not an excuse for segregation,” he said.

‘Wrong side of the tracks’

Roughly a third of the 13,500 schools identified in the federal report belong to the same school system as their counterpart campus, meaning possible desegregation efforts would lie directly in the hands of district leaders. 

Some 9 in 10 have a pair across district lines, which can entrench racial imbalances between campuses, said report co-author Jacqueline Nowicki. (The percentages, 32% and 90%, add to more than 100% because some schools have pairs both within and outside of their district.)

“Where we choose to draw school district boundaries, … that matters a lot as to where kids are going to schools,” the GAO education director told The 74.

“School district lines are not God-given,” added Kahlenberg. Florida and several other states, for example, use large county-based school systems to help balance their classrooms racially and socioeconomically.

Using 2020-21 data, the most recent figures available from the U.S. Education Department’s Common Core of Data, Nowicki’s team found that over a third of U.S. students — roughly 18.5 million — attend predominantly same-race schools. They applied the “predominantly same-race” label to schools where students of a single race or ethnicity make up at least 75% of the enrollment. The percentage of highly segregated U.S. schools decreased slightly from 2016, the last time the GAO investigated the issue. But given increases in diversity over that time span, including more students who identify as Asian or Hispanic, the researcher doesn’t see the numbers as particularly encouraging. 

The share of students of color attending highly segregated schools, which tend disproportionately to also be high-poverty schools, ticked up, she pointed out. Those campuses, on average, have worse academic outcomes compared to their wealthier peers.

“What does it mean, in a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse, to have large portions of kids going to school only with other kids who look like themselves?” said Nowicki.

The reasons why the U.S. continues to have divided classrooms stretch far into the past, her agency’s report explains. In one major example, redlining, a federal 1930s practice of denying home loans to borrowers of color while supplying them to white candidates, systematically reduced Black homeownership and codified racial divisions between neighborhoods. The impacts of the discriminatory policy continue to haunt education outcomes to this day. 

“This is where phrases like ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ have come from,” said the GAO director.

‘The city that made desegregation work’

In the case of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the recent school integration push comes on the heels of a back-and-forth history after Brown v. Board of Education.

Charlotte was as “the city that made desegregation work.” After the landmark 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling upheld the district’s busing scheme, the city’s integration plan became a model for cities across the southern U.S. — which in the current day are than other regions of the country.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools,” the Charlotte Observer editorial board in 1984.

But after a 1999 decision struck down court-mandated desegregation requirements, campuses in the area quickly became — with between its 180 schools.

In 2014, the area received sobering news: a by Harvard University researchers ranked Charlotte dead last out of 50 American cities in upward mobility, or the likelihood of low-income youth rising out of poverty.

The report blamed two main factors for the abysmal assessment: racial segregation and school quality.

“One of the predictors of low levels of social mobility is school and neighborhood segregation,” explained Kahlenberg.

When the 140,000-student district resurrected decades-old conversations on how to integrate its schools, the memory of past efforts remained vivid for many residents. There was an appetite for the changes, but they still proved difficult, said Craven-Howell. In merging communities that had different socioeconomic makeups, the district had to be careful to make sure the voices and needs of wealthier parents did not drown out those of lower-income families.

But the effort has been a success thus far, said the former Charlotte-Mecklenburg administrator, and they have begun to move the needle on integration. However, they affect only a small share of campuses. She hopes the district will continue to build on its progress and “identify opportunities to replicate some of the great work that was done six years ago,” the last time it reviewed student school assignments.

Charlotte is not alone in the push. The district is a member of The Century Foundation’s , a network of 27 school systems, 17 charter school networks and 13 housing organizations across the country undertaking efforts to chip away at segregation in their schools and communities. Though they account for only a tiny fraction of the 13,500 segregated school pairs identified by the GAO report, Craven-Howell believes they demonstrate what’s possible. 

“There are districts all over the country who are thinking about [integration], who are trying things,” she said. “It’s not the case that a district has to embark on this work without there being any models or examples to look to.”

And as for Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, the Charlotte middle schools that combined their student bodies in 2019, the change has worked, said Craven-Howell.

“People don’t think about it as the two schools and the two communities that paired. They really have become a single community.”

But first his staff had to respond to the “pandemic’s aftershocks,” including student learning gaps and parents’ loss of work. Now with 106 students — 99% of them Black and Latino — the school has leaned on a $1 million grant from the federal Charter Schools Program for new technology, curriculum materials and furniture.

Schools like Long’s could have a much harder time getting off the ground if the Biden administration’s plans to revamp the $440 million grant program become final. The U.S. Department of Education’s would give preference to charters that districts view as potential partners and discourage new applications in communities with voluntary integration efforts. And if districts are losing enrollment — as they are in D.C. — new charter schools might not be well-received. 

“As a Black male who leads a single-site school in Washington D.C., this is extremely concerning,” Long said. 

The rule could significantly alter a program that has given a boost to almost 4,100 existing charter schools — roughly 53%, according to the department. like KIPP and Success Academy Charter Schools are among the grantees.

Nina Rees, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the funds help launch new charters, which typically don’t receive state and local funding until they begin admitting students. The program is especially important for “aspiring school leaders of color” who might not have financial backing from a foundation, she said. 

With nearly 65% of charters being single-site schools, Rees added, “these proposed regulations are a direct attack on new schools like this.”

Congress has taken note of the backlash. North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, ranking member of the House education committee, said in a statement that the “administration is manufacturing authority it doesn’t have to add unworkable requirements to these charter school grants.” On Monday, the department to comment on the rule from Wednesday to next Monday after six senators for more time. In a statement to The 74, the department said the “administration recognizes that there is a place for high-quality public charter schools and supports continuing important investments.”

The debate comes amid a period of change and growth for the charter sector. Last school year, charters saw their largest jump in enrollment in six years — a 7% increase. Initial reports from states such as Alabama and Massachusetts show growth is continuing.

At the same time, Democrats have soured on charters in recent years after a long period in which they enjoyed bipartisan support. 

“The Biden administration breaks that tradition,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center. “It is clear that they looked around and decided that hewing closely to the wishes of their political patrons in the teachers unions was the way to go. Since they cannot kill us directly, they must resort to attacks on start-up funding.”

Advocates say the department didn’t consult with them before writing the regulation. North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr’s letter noted that the department turned down his staff’s request to meet. 

“It doesn’t feel like charter school leaders are a valued part of the process,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, which promotes efforts to create charters that are more racially balanced. As written, the regulations would “make it very challenging for even a diverse charter to get approval if enrollment is declining in a district,” she said.

She pointed to Prospect Schools in Brooklyn, New York, which opened in September 2020, and Atlas Public Schools in St. Louis, which opened last fall. Both designed their schools to reflect the make-up of their communities, but because enrollment is declining in their , the schools “would have had extreme difficulty in being approved” today, she said.

The department stressed that U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona spoke last year at the National Charter Schools Conference and has gathered input from charter leaders throughout the pandemic. 

One organization the department heard from was The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank that in 2019 for ways the program could promote integration. Halley Potter, a senior fellow at Century and a co-author of the report, said she had a call with the education department before the draft of the rule was issued March 14.

Her report cited showing that charters are more likely than district schools to have student bodies that are more than half Black or Hispanic. In some pockets of the country, however, charter schools are more likely to draw higher-income, white families away from district schools, contributing to racial segregation. Studies have borne this out in and .

Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said in communities with long-standing integration efforts, charters often “operate as an exit strategy for white families who are resistant  — consciously or subconsciously — to more diverse environments.”

Potter called the department’s proposal an effort to make sure charter schools “fit in with the context of [their] local community.” 

“I really hope that we could see a broad base of charter supporters getting on board with this,” she said.

‘A lifeline’

The , begun in 1994 under the Clinton administration, is a competitive grant that provides funding for start-up expenses. Smaller networks have also used funds to add more schools. When Uplift Education, based in Texas, expanded from Dallas to Fort Worth, where it would serve another 2,000 to 3,000 students, the federal grant program supported planning, expanding staff and family engagement efforts, said Rich Harrison, formerly the network’s chief academic officer. 

Under the proposed rules, states applying for the funds would have to prove that there is “sufficient demand” for charters, including support from the local community and evidence that district schools have more students than they can serve. 

In districts with declining enrollment — a trend across most urban districts nationwide — new charters would face a tougher time getting approved, said Harrison, now CEO of Lighthouse Community Charter Schools in Oakland. 

“The anti-charter rhetoric in Oakland is at an all time high,” Harrison said, after the district voted in February to close seven schools. 

Community impact

Charter opponents argue that the grant program has been a vehicle for and financially benefiting for-profit entities. In a commentary for , Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, called the new requirements “sensible rules of the road” and downplayed the rule’s impact. 

In a comment to the department, she pointed, for example, to Torchlight Academy, a North Carolina school and grant recipient operated by for-profit Torchlight Academy Schools. The state voted in March to revoke the school’s charter, citing alleged that benefited the family operating the school. The charter is appealing the state’s decision, saying it has cut ties with the family.

The proposal would require schools receiving the grant funds to pledge that they won’t contract with a for-profit organization to assume most or all of the operation of the school. Grantees would also have to make those agreements public.

Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said he appreciates the focus on transparency. But he and other charter advocates have problems with a requirement that states applying for the funds conduct a “community impact analysis.” Such a process would have to take “into account the student demographics of the schools from which students are, or would be, drawn to attend the charter school.” 

Rausch said local authorizers, not state officials, should be responsible for determining whether there is adequate demand for a charter school. He added that the department is sending a mixed message.

“You can’t simultaneously say that it’s a good thing to listen to communities and families and then federally impose specific kinds of schools on communities,” he said.

The education department would give preference to charter applications in which current and former educators are deeply involved in leadership and development of the schools. Another priority for the department is that districts and charter operators work together on issues such as joint teacher training or transportation. At least one district school would have to provide a letter in support of working with the charter. 

Rausch said that provision gives the districts leverage, adding that charter demand has increased because they “meet the needs of families” who feel their children aren’t being well-served in traditional schools.

“We are all in favor of collaborative efforts, but it’s got to go both ways,” he said. “We don’t want us versus them. That is old politics.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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