New Federal Guidance on Dual Language Learners

In a conference call this morning, the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice announced the publication of a series of new documents pertaining to dual language learners and English language learners’ educational opportunities. Specifically, they published guidance clarifying schools, districts, and states’ legal obligations “to ensure that [DLL] students can participate meaningfully and equally in educational programs and services.”

The document covers a host of topics related to public responsibilities for serving DLLs, including how schools should: identify and eventually exit students from formal DLL status, support DLLs’ linguistic and academic growth, engage with DLLs’ families, ensure that DLLs are integrated into classes with monolingual peers, and much more.

The guidance document was accompanied by the publication of the first section of a (soon-to-be) multi-part toolkit aimed at streamlining and clarifying the steps necessary for schools to be in compliance with federal regulations for identifying DLL students.

The guidance comes in response to increased problems caused by increases in the number of DLLs in American schools and stagnation in those schools’ efforts to serve these students well. As the Department of Justice’s Vanita Gupta put it on the call, “The need [for better education of DLLs] is mushrooming, but our schools have stayed the same.”

Both departments framed the guidance as a critical reminder for schools, districts, and states coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the 40th anniversary of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act (and the Lau v. Nichols case that prompted the EEOA’s passage).

All in all, the new documents should be a useful resource for educators and administrators at the local level. But DLL stakeholders probably shouldn’t expect big changes in response. Throughout the conference call, officials expressed reticence to prescribe specific language support programs in order to continue to “foster the innovation that occurs throughout the country.”

This is a laudable sentiment, no question. But DLL advocates have long complained that districts underinvest and underserve DLLs partly because of lax application of federal standards for language supports serving language learners. That is, case law and federal regulations usually require that states or districts support DLLs’ linguistic and academic development with (to use emblematic text from Title III of No Child Left Behind) “a language instruction curriculum that is tied to scientifically based research on teaching limited English proficient children and that has been demonstrated to be effective.”

That’s pretty loose language. What does it really require? For instance, recent studies corroborate earlier research showing that various forms of English-only instructional supports for DLLs are less effective than those that include native language support. Does this mean that districts who do not support DLLs in their home languages are out of compliance? Or could they argue (they often do) that various forms of English-only DLL supports are “tied to” other research? Or perhaps that their English-only services are still effective, even if they’re not as effective as programs that provide better home language supports?

Take another example. The toolkit released today reminds educators that DLLs must be screened “with a valid and reliable assessment to determine if they are in fact [DLLs].” That’s certainly a decent starting point for identifying students’ linguistic backgrounds and classifying them as DLLs. But it also allows for considerable variety in how these students are treated from state to state and district to district (there is similar variety around states’ DLL reclassification policies and assessments). Given that formal classification as a DLL can significantly influence a student’s academic path (for better or worse), this sort of variety poses a serious threat to educational equity. Is there any reason to expect that students who are classified as DLLs using one language screener in State A should not be classified in State B because the latter uses a different screening instrument?

In other words, one (federal) person’s “fostering innovation” is another (local) person’s “we don’t have to meaningfully change our practice for supporting DLLs.” And that sort of looseness is built into almost every level of federal oversight of state and district treatment of these students. The flexibility built into our educational governance structures makes it hard for the federal government to actively promote better supports for DLLs.

This problem, by the way, is something that DLL advocates should remember when they push for additional flexibility from federal rules. Flexibility for educators and administrators who are committed to investing in DLLs’ success is often helpful. But weakened federal oversight also makes it easier for those who would rather ignore these students’ needs to do so.

So it remains to be seen whether these new guidance documents represent a new approach to federal oversight or if they simply continue the general trend in DLL policy—federal priorities that are broadly encouraging…but are also too broad to meaningfully alter how schools, districts, and states serve DLLs.

(For the Washington Post‘s coverage of the announcement, read Emma Brown’s story here.)”