Multilingual Students with Disabilities Deserve Stronger Support

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed a rule that would weaken Head Start’s Program Performance Standards and further dismantle the federal program. Since 1965, Head Start has served more than 40 million children from families with low incomes, offering early care and learning, health care, and family support. Today, about one-third of the children it serves are dual language learners.* About 15 percent of children in Head Start have disabilities, and many more are at risk of developing disabilities.

The children at the intersection of those two groups, known as dual-identified learners, have needs that neither the language services system nor the special education system meets well on its own. Head Start has long been one of the few places that address both sets of needs from the start through its Program Performance Standards.

The proposed rule would strip away several protections at once for multilingual learners and children with disabilities: 

• Current Head Start standards require programs to treat home languages as an asset. The proposed rule would require English-only instruction despite evidence that supporting a child’s first language alongside English is an effective way to build proficiency in both languages.
• The rule would end Head Start’s requirement to conduct universal developmental screening, likely leading to a sharp decline in identifying children with delays and disabilities. 
• The rule would stop requiring programs to actively find and recruit children with disabilities, which could especially hamper enrollment of dual-identified learners from mixed-status or immigrant families. An April 2026 survey of Head Start providers across seven states reported chronic absenteeism and an average seven percent disenrollment associated with families’ fears of immigration enforcement. 

Together, these changes could especially harm dual-identified learners, who are underserved at every stage of school. Head Start is a bright spot that provides language and disability supports right before kindergarten through high school (K-12), when dual-identified learners often experience inequities. HHS’s proposed rule would weaken Head Start program standards, and with them, the foundation these students deserve.

Of the approximately 15 percent of U.S. students in K-12 receiving special education services in the 2020-2021 school year, about 12 percent were dual-identified learners. Between 2012 and 2020, this student group grew by 30 percent. 

In her book Promoting Equity for Multilingual Learners with Disabilities, Sara Kangas, associate professor of special education at Lehigh University, describes the predictable, repeated barriers dual-identified learners face throughout K-12.

“The compromises to multilingual learners with disabilities, the compromises to their learning opportunities and to their rights, really have the same root causes,” Kangas said in an interview with New America. “And those inequities pop up over and over again, across their education.” 

Language-or-disability filter. One of the most common patterns is what Kangas calls the language-or-disability filter. She gives the example of a multilingual learner’s reading score plateauing and educators tending to ask an either-or question: Is it because the child is learning a language, or because the child has a potential disability? What they may not consider is whether the student’s learning environment is causing the student’s struggle. It may be that they are receiving poor instruction or an intervention not designed for multilingual learners. “We think about language and disability as the source of a problem,” Kangas said, “without looking at what’s going on around the students in terms of their learning opportunities.”

Though Kangas’s book examines K-12, this pattern can also apply to preschool. The proposed Head Start rule would end universal developmental screening, which could worsen the language-or-disability filter from a child’s earliest years. Without screening, a speech and language delay is easy to dismiss as a language-learning issue, and alternatively, a language difference is easy to mistake for a developmental delay or disability. Head Start provides guidance specifically for developmental screening of multilingual learners, including requirements for who may conduct the screening. 

Siloing. English learner services and special education are run as separate worlds at every level in K-12, a patterned inequity that Kangas terms the specialization trap. This siloing reflects what Kangas calls unitary identity, wherein the education system treats a dual-identified student as either a multilingual learner or a student with a disability, but not both. State education agencies have separate offices for English learner services and special education, and districts often lack coordination between the two. Teacher preparation programs award separate certifications, and very few states offer licensure in multilingual special education. “The siloing is a complete top-to-bottom problem,” Kangas said, and it hinders educational progress.

The federal government has further siloed and weakened these services recently, both for K-12 students like those Kangas discussed, and preschool students receiving special education and related services. The Trump administration moved the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED’s) Office of Special Education Programs to HHS, housing the support for students with disabilities in an entirely different agency. ED shut down its Office of English Language Acquisition, eliminating the agency’s only office focused on supporting English learners and immigrant students.

Head Start is a rare educational environment in which program staff are trained to support both dual-language learners and children with developmental delays and disabilities, leading to a particularly supportive environment for dual identified learners. About one-third of Head Start staff are proficient in a language other than English. Research has shown that dual-identified learners strengthen their social and communication skills when educators speak to them in their home language.

Reclassification and identification challenges. State reclassification policies apply to the education of multilingual learners starting in elementary school, and many such policies ignore disability entirely and treat English learners as one uniform group, Kangas noted. “I would argue that that type of policy is an example of the language-or-disability filter; that when we make sense of these low reclassification rates, we say it’s probably the disability without looking at the policies or even the conditions in schools that maybe are a barrier to reclassification.” Multilingual learners without disabilities are much more likely to be reclassified out of English learner status than are those with disabilities. Many dual-identified learners become long-term English learners (LTELs), meaning that they have received language services for more than six years and not yet been reclassified as proficient in English. LTELs face diminished educational opportunities and have poor academic outcomes. However, reclassifying dual-identified learners as English language proficient too early can prevent them from receiving needed language support in tandem with special education services. 

Overall, multilingual learners are overrepresented in special education, though this varies widely by state and there are nuances across grade levels, Kangas said. (Click here for an interactive map of state reclassification policies). Multilingual learners are more likely to receive special education services as they get older. In early elementary school, educators are less likely to refer a multilingual learner to special education as students acclimate to the school environment, often attributing academic challenges to English language learning. By third grade, academic expectations are higher and reading challenges are more pronounced, leading to a surge of referrals for a specific learning disability. Throughout elementary school, educators often attribute speech and language difficulties to English learning, but when delays persist in secondary school, referrals increase for speech and language delay. In K-12 overall, multilingual learners are more likely to be identified with specific learning disability, speech or language impairment, intellectual disabilities, developmental delay, and hearing impairment.

Lack of guidance. State education agencies provide minimal resources to school districts on supporting dual-identified learners. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice and ED published unprecedented federal guidance on dual-identified learners, but ED rescinded it in 2025.

Bright Spots

There are promising practices in some states to support dual-identified learners.

• Colorado has a dedicated staff position focused on dual-identified learners, which bridges the state’s Office of Special Education and the Office of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education.
• The University of Maine offers a graduate certificate in multilingual special education for practicing teachers.

• Texas’s state education agency created a bilingual special education certification.

• New Mexico developed guidance for districts and schools on identifying and supporting dual-identified learners.

For many dual-identified learners and their families, Head Start is their first encounter with public education. It can be a place where their language is valued, their needs are spotted early, and families are welcomed in. The proposed rule would take that away and contribute to systemic barriers for these learners that last well beyond their early years.