Dive Brief:

• After the 2008 recession, Texas cut $5.4 billion from its public-schools budget and lawsuits allege the state's allocation of revenue hurts lower-income districts and those with substantial ELL student populations.
• Texas lacks the political momentum to fund, examine, and possibly expand the much-needed ELL programs, Alana Semuels writes in the Atlantic.
• In the El Paso Independent School District, around 50% of non-English speakers met academic proficiency standards last year; in Texas the execution and makeup of ELL programs vary from district to district and experts disagree on what works best.

Dive Insight:

Questions around how best to educate ELL learners aren't just an issue in Texas. Across the U.S., 4 million American students don't speak English at home. That number is on the rise.

A law from 1968, the Bilingual Education Act, is the guiding document behind current ELL instruction, and ELL teaching methodology continued to change and evolve. One recent study from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and San Francisco Unified School District show that bilingual instruction is best for English language learners.

The U.S. Department of Education previously adopted a "mixed approach" to accountability for ELL, but the new language related to ELL in the Every Student Succeeds Act has provoked concern, since it abandons those of federal accountability measures. Worse, some states may not have the capacity to carry out what ESSA now mandates for ELL.

Districts should note that multilingual students also sometimes need help learning their native languages on top of English language instruction. 

"Many of these students have no literacy in the language they speak," Olga Kagan, the director of UCLA's National Heritage Language Resource Center wrote in a L.A. Times op-ed last year. "… By not teaching the languages that many students often only half-know, we are missing an opportunity to expand the number of Americans completely comfortable with other languages and cultures — a tremendous asset in today's increasingly globalized world." 

Yet bilingual ed remains controversial; California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have English-only policies and have previously ceased bilingual studies. This can be a disservice to students in places like California, where 44% of state residents speak a language other than English at home.