Several years ago, a new analysis of public data showed that in recent decades, Mexican-American students made strong academic progress in U.S. K–12 schools. What’s more, these students were integrating successfully into American social and economic life—so much so that some were ceasing to self-identify as Latino/Hispanic in Census data, inadvertently removing their academic gains from that student group’s publicly visible data.
While the findings were no surprise to most researchers studying the immigrant experience in the United States, they run counter to the current ugly public narratives about the academic potential of Latino/Hispanic students in particular and children of immigrants in general. Instead of being “overwhelmed” by these students, as then-VP candidate JD Vance put it last fall, U.S. public institutions—especially K–12 schools—are doing such a good job of integrating immigrants and their children into American society that the children’s academic growth wasn’t being noticed.
This success is, in part, a product of the legacy of decades of development and enforcement of rules protecting the civil rights of immigrant families and English-learning students (ELs). Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA), a steady march of case law and regulatory machinery has built up to ensure that linguistically diverse communities can access public services—particularly K–12 education—even as they are still developing their English skills. Indeed, research has reliably shown that multilingual programming in schools is the best way to ensure that linguistically diverse students succeed academically.
In the sixty years since the CRA, U.S. public services have become increasingly accessible to all members of the community on the grounds that no one should lose access to housing, nutrition, health, or education programs based on whether they were born in the United States or not—or whether or not they have mastered English. This system has made the United States a global leader in gaining the cultural, economic, and demographic benefits of attracting and integrating immigrants.
New guidance recently released by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice takes direct aim at this American strength. This—along with other recent administration attacks on immigrant communities—will make the government and public schools less effective in their work.
Undermining American Vitality
The Department of Justice guidance arrives as the next step in enacting the administration’s March 1, 2025 executive order designating English as the United States’ official language. In short, the new guidance proposes “a coordinated effort to minimize non-essential multilingual services, redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation, and ensure compliance with legal obligations through targeted measures where necessary.”
Specifically, in the name of government efficiency and pushing faster immigrant “assimilation” into the country, the Department of Justice announced that it will (1) rescind existing federal language-access guidance, (2) identify and “phase out unnecessary multilingual offerings,” and (3) prepare new guidance to “prioritize English.” It also asks all federal agencies to determine whether any of their current language access policies can be shifted towards English-only services, lean on technology for machine translation, and shift any cost-savings “toward research and programs that improve English proficiency and assimilation.”
Notably, the present guidance appears to primarily restrict how federal agencies operate—reducing federal programs’ obligations to translate materials or provide interpretation in other languages for members of the public. That is, it pushes the Department of Education (ED) away from translating new written materials or providing interpretation for public webinars—for instance—but isn’t grounds for a new mandate banning the use of federal dollars for supporting bilingual K–12 instruction. Insofar as this remains the case as the guidance is updated and implemented across the federal government, it would still be shortsighted and damaging to the country’s best interests.
It pushes the Department of Education (ED) away from translating new written materials or providing interpretation for public webinars—for instance—but isn’t grounds for a new mandate banning the use of federal dollars for supporting bilingual K–12 instruction.
However, there are hints that the administration’s push toward English-only public services will soon spill from the agencies themselves into conditions for state and local recipients of federal funding. For instance, the guidance suggests that, “Where allowed by law, agencies should determine which of their programs, grants, and policies might serve the public at large better if operated exclusively in English.” The mention of “grants” in this case indicates that the administration expects this English-only push to extend beyond the strict functioning of the federal agencies and into their grantees and subgrantees (usually states and school districts, in education policy).
This hint to where the administration may be going recalls an earlier moment where the White House released executive orders demanding that ED repurpose existing grant dollars for conservative priorities such as expanded school choice programs or leveraging local districts to abandon civics curricula that does not match conservative views of history. As one of us put it back in February,
The White House wants things, but it doesn’t have the power or the authority to actually get them in the ways or at the pace that it’d like. On the one hand, these…executive orders tell the Secretary of Education to steal funding from various current programs and use it for conservative priorities that are way outside those programs’ designated purposes. On the other, the orders explicitly promise not to do anything outside the law.
Now, as ED spent July—without legal justification—freezing a slew of already appropriated K–12 funds to “review” them for funding a “radical left-wing agenda,” it’s harder to expect that this new Department of Justice guidance will remain narrowly limited to the operations of federal agencies. Indeed, as the administration finally prepares to disburse those funds, it’s not difficult to imagine it adding state and local conditions to the English learner (Title III) funds, without consulting Congress or updating the statute governing these funds. The administration might well—again, illegally, in direct conflict with federal statute—insist that states and/or school districts commit to only using these dollars for English-only programming, or forfeit their access to the funds.
How We Got Here
Although the guidance is only for federal agencies, the guidance notably devotes considerable space to making a case that Title VI of the CRA, a law that imposes duties on recipients of federal assistance, doesn’t prescribe a duty against discriminating based on language. The law explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. The guidance acknowledges that for decades, both the executive branch and the U.S. Supreme Court have agreed that Title VI’s prohibition against national origin discrimination includes discrimination against people with limited English proficiency.
This is true. Before the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services were even their own agencies, the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare laid this out in regulations, in addition to the requirement that federal assistance recipients “rectify” the language gap so that students can participate in their instruction, as it was in the executive’s authority to do so. The new guidance also casually breezes by what is considered the landmark Supreme Court case for English learner (EL) students, Lau v. Nichols, from 1974. Lau was a swift and unanimous decision that held that students who lacked English proficiency had to be able to meaningfully access their education, which means, schools have to provide them their education in a language they can understand. The Court agreed with the executive branch’s reasonable interpretation of Title VI.
How did discrimination based on national origin come to also prohibit discrimination on the basis of limited English proficiency, even though the law does not spell this out precisely? The answer lies in the historical context in which the CRA was passed in 1964. State-sponsored discrimination during the Jim Crow era often crafted law and policy that had the effect of discriminating based on race even though the intent was not explicitly called out. Title VI has long recognized both discriminatory intent and discriminatory effect. CRA regulations allowed people who experienced discrimination outlined in the regulations to sue against state actions by showing the action had a discriminatory effect on a group of people even if there was no obvious “intention”—essentially, a plaintiff could ground proof of that intent via identification of a “disparate impact.” Almost three decades after Lau, however, a split conservative majority Court ruled that people do not have a “private right of action” to enforce the CRA’s regulations through disparate impact in Alexander v. Sandoval. While this ruling was a blow to enforcement, it did not erase the law’s connection between discrimination based on language proficiency and national origin. Importantly though, civil rights champions in Congress have been pushing for a legislative fix to Sandoval for at least a decade.
So, according to the Department of Justice, with this rescission of the Clinton administration’s August 2000 executive order, Sandoval, and the department’s refusal to enforce the CRA’s disparate impact regulations, all rationale for keeping people informed in languages they can understand is gone—poof.
Knowing that’s the basis for federal agencies to conduct their work, and that they have repudiated in another executive order the use of disparate impact in discrimination, it’s easy to see this slowly trickle to other actions toward immigrants via “English-only” in the name of a “unified” country.
What It’s Really About
Thankfully, when it comes to the foundational Title III grant program meant to ensure English learner students develop English proficiency and meet state academic standards, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (EEOA) should protect students’ access to fair, linguistically accessible educational opportunities. That’s because the EEOA is considered an extension to Title VI and passed in response to Lau, mere months afterward. Congress also agreed that “failure by an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs” amounts to discrimination based on the protected classes under Title VI. Despite the Department of Justice’s current assertion that Lau is no longer good legal precedent (and this on the heels of their celebration of Lau’s fiftieth anniversary a year ago), it is enshrined in black-letter law.
Critically, the facts in Lau helped establish that an English-only education for 1,800 Chinese-speaking students in San Francisco could not be sufficient for absorbing English enough to meaningfully learn it, especially while the district provided bilingual services to Chinese-speaking students in some of its schools. Justice Thurgood Marshall grilled San Francisco Unified School District about how the district could contend that zero bilingual services were appropriate for learning English. San Francisco Unified, multiple times, both on the record and in oral argument, did not deny that it was not the best method—and so, even in 1974, the consensus was that English-only instruction for learning the language doesn’t work.
Indeed—as Century Foundation researchers have repeatedly argued—here in the twenty-first century, the research consensus has been and is strong and exceedingly clear: English learners do best in educational settings that support their emerging bilingual development—particularly when attending linguistically integrated “two-way” dual language immersion (DLI) models. These latter programs enroll roughly even shares of native speakers of English and the non-English partner language. Researchers largely agree that English learners in bilingual settings—including DLI—are more likely to become proficient in English, succeed academically, and fully develop their bilingual abilities. This is why bilingual education activists often push for these programs as part of an “English Plus” agenda and why a U.S. Senator for Texas in 1967 introduced the Bilingual Education Act, which evolved into the Title III grants of today.
In other words, the data suggest that the administration’s current focus on English-only public services isn’t a realistic push for unifying the country under a single language. After all, bilingual educational programs are better at fostering English language acquisition, and multilingual public services make it easier for all families to get the public service support that they need. No, the administration’s monolingual myopia is about subtracting immigrant communities’ languages and cultures from the country.
The administration’s monolingual myopia is about subtracting immigrant communities’ languages and cultures from the country.
That’s why the guidance is best understood as the latest element of the administration’s comprehensive attack on public programs that help immigrant families succeed in the United States. Through the month of July, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon withheld a slew of congressionally appropriated funding from states—including nearly $900 million in Title III grants. The administration recently moved to restrict access to Head Start for some immigrant children. Meanwhile, during the administration’s first six months in office, the administration has removed protections for K–12 schools to allow federal immigration enforcement agents to conduct armed raids on campuses.
This is not a serious governing agenda aimed at improving public education. It is a campaign to make life in our country riskier and less dignified for immigrant families. To that end, it is making American communities less prosperous and safe. Worst of all, it is directly making the U.S. education system less effective for children of immigrants and English learners. This is bad for all members of the U.S. community right now—and ruinous for the country in the long run. Indeed, this guidance recalls a line from the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, only slightly updated here: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational [agenda], we might well have viewed it as an act of war” on our national interests.
Tags: dual language education, English learners, immigrant students, donald trump
Choosing English-Plus, Not English-Only: What’s Wrong with the Administration’s New Language Access Guidance
Several years ago, a new analysis of public data showed that in recent decades, Mexican-American students made strong academic progress in U.S. K–12 schools. What’s more, these students were integrating successfully into American social and economic life—so much so that some were ceasing to self-identify as Latino/Hispanic in Census data, inadvertently removing their academic gains from that student group’s publicly visible data.
While the findings were no surprise to most researchers studying the immigrant experience in the United States, they run counter to the current ugly public narratives about the academic potential of Latino/Hispanic students in particular and children of immigrants in general. Instead of being “overwhelmed” by these students, as then-VP candidate JD Vance put it last fall, U.S. public institutions—especially K–12 schools—are doing such a good job of integrating immigrants and their children into American society that the children’s academic growth wasn’t being noticed.
This success is, in part, a product of the legacy of decades of development and enforcement of rules protecting the civil rights of immigrant families and English-learning students (ELs). Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA), a steady march of case law and regulatory machinery has built up to ensure that linguistically diverse communities can access public services—particularly K–12 education—even as they are still developing their English skills. Indeed, research has reliably shown that multilingual programming in schools is the best way to ensure that linguistically diverse students succeed academically.
In the sixty years since the CRA, U.S. public services have become increasingly accessible to all members of the community on the grounds that no one should lose access to housing, nutrition, health, or education programs based on whether they were born in the United States or not—or whether or not they have mastered English. This system has made the United States a global leader in gaining the cultural, economic, and demographic benefits of attracting and integrating immigrants.
New guidance recently released by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice takes direct aim at this American strength. This—along with other recent administration attacks on immigrant communities—will make the government and public schools less effective in their work.
Undermining American Vitality
The Department of Justice guidance arrives as the next step in enacting the administration’s March 1, 2025 executive order designating English as the United States’ official language. In short, the new guidance proposes “a coordinated effort to minimize non-essential multilingual services, redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation, and ensure compliance with legal obligations through targeted measures where necessary.”
Specifically, in the name of government efficiency and pushing faster immigrant “assimilation” into the country, the Department of Justice announced that it will (1) rescind existing federal language-access guidance, (2) identify and “phase out unnecessary multilingual offerings,” and (3) prepare new guidance to “prioritize English.” It also asks all federal agencies to determine whether any of their current language access policies can be shifted towards English-only services, lean on technology for machine translation, and shift any cost-savings “toward research and programs that improve English proficiency and assimilation.”
Notably, the present guidance appears to primarily restrict how federal agencies operate—reducing federal programs’ obligations to translate materials or provide interpretation in other languages for members of the public. That is, it pushes the Department of Education (ED) away from translating new written materials or providing interpretation for public webinars—for instance—but isn’t grounds for a new mandate banning the use of federal dollars for supporting bilingual K–12 instruction. Insofar as this remains the case as the guidance is updated and implemented across the federal government, it would still be shortsighted and damaging to the country’s best interests.
However, there are hints that the administration’s push toward English-only public services will soon spill from the agencies themselves into conditions for state and local recipients of federal funding. For instance, the guidance suggests that, “Where allowed by law, agencies should determine which of their programs, grants, and policies might serve the public at large better if operated exclusively in English.” The mention of “grants” in this case indicates that the administration expects this English-only push to extend beyond the strict functioning of the federal agencies and into their grantees and subgrantees (usually states and school districts, in education policy).
This hint to where the administration may be going recalls an earlier moment where the White House released executive orders demanding that ED repurpose existing grant dollars for conservative priorities such as expanded school choice programs or leveraging local districts to abandon civics curricula that does not match conservative views of history. As one of us put it back in February,
The White House wants things, but it doesn’t have the power or the authority to actually get them in the ways or at the pace that it’d like. On the one hand, these…executive orders tell the Secretary of Education to steal funding from various current programs and use it for conservative priorities that are way outside those programs’ designated purposes. On the other, the orders explicitly promise not to do anything outside the law.
Now, as ED spent July—without legal justification—freezing a slew of already appropriated K–12 funds to “review” them for funding a “radical left-wing agenda,” it’s harder to expect that this new Department of Justice guidance will remain narrowly limited to the operations of federal agencies. Indeed, as the administration finally prepares to disburse those funds, it’s not difficult to imagine it adding state and local conditions to the English learner (Title III) funds, without consulting Congress or updating the statute governing these funds. The administration might well—again, illegally, in direct conflict with federal statute—insist that states and/or school districts commit to only using these dollars for English-only programming, or forfeit their access to the funds.
How We Got Here
Although the guidance is only for federal agencies, the guidance notably devotes considerable space to making a case that Title VI of the CRA, a law that imposes duties on recipients of federal assistance, doesn’t prescribe a duty against discriminating based on language. The law explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. The guidance acknowledges that for decades, both the executive branch and the U.S. Supreme Court have agreed that Title VI’s prohibition against national origin discrimination includes discrimination against people with limited English proficiency.
This is true. Before the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services were even their own agencies, the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare laid this out in regulations, in addition to the requirement that federal assistance recipients “rectify” the language gap so that students can participate in their instruction, as it was in the executive’s authority to do so. The new guidance also casually breezes by what is considered the landmark Supreme Court case for English learner (EL) students, Lau v. Nichols, from 1974. Lau was a swift and unanimous decision that held that students who lacked English proficiency had to be able to meaningfully access their education, which means, schools have to provide them their education in a language they can understand. The Court agreed with the executive branch’s reasonable interpretation of Title VI.
How did discrimination based on national origin come to also prohibit discrimination on the basis of limited English proficiency, even though the law does not spell this out precisely? The answer lies in the historical context in which the CRA was passed in 1964. State-sponsored discrimination during the Jim Crow era often crafted law and policy that had the effect of discriminating based on race even though the intent was not explicitly called out. Title VI has long recognized both discriminatory intent and discriminatory effect. CRA regulations allowed people who experienced discrimination outlined in the regulations to sue against state actions by showing the action had a discriminatory effect on a group of people even if there was no obvious “intention”—essentially, a plaintiff could ground proof of that intent via identification of a “disparate impact.” Almost three decades after Lau, however, a split conservative majority Court ruled that people do not have a “private right of action” to enforce the CRA’s regulations through disparate impact in Alexander v. Sandoval. While this ruling was a blow to enforcement, it did not erase the law’s connection between discrimination based on language proficiency and national origin. Importantly though, civil rights champions in Congress have been pushing for a legislative fix to Sandoval for at least a decade.
So, according to the Department of Justice, with this rescission of the Clinton administration’s August 2000 executive order, Sandoval, and the department’s refusal to enforce the CRA’s disparate impact regulations, all rationale for keeping people informed in languages they can understand is gone—poof.
Knowing that’s the basis for federal agencies to conduct their work, and that they have repudiated in another executive order the use of disparate impact in discrimination, it’s easy to see this slowly trickle to other actions toward immigrants via “English-only” in the name of a “unified” country.
What It’s Really About
Thankfully, when it comes to the foundational Title III grant program meant to ensure English learner students develop English proficiency and meet state academic standards, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (EEOA) should protect students’ access to fair, linguistically accessible educational opportunities. That’s because the EEOA is considered an extension to Title VI and passed in response to Lau, mere months afterward. Congress also agreed that “failure by an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs” amounts to discrimination based on the protected classes under Title VI. Despite the Department of Justice’s current assertion that Lau is no longer good legal precedent (and this on the heels of their celebration of Lau’s fiftieth anniversary a year ago), it is enshrined in black-letter law.
Critically, the facts in Lau helped establish that an English-only education for 1,800 Chinese-speaking students in San Francisco could not be sufficient for absorbing English enough to meaningfully learn it, especially while the district provided bilingual services to Chinese-speaking students in some of its schools. Justice Thurgood Marshall grilled San Francisco Unified School District about how the district could contend that zero bilingual services were appropriate for learning English. San Francisco Unified, multiple times, both on the record and in oral argument, did not deny that it was not the best method—and so, even in 1974, the consensus was that English-only instruction for learning the language doesn’t work.
Indeed—as Century Foundation researchers have repeatedly argued—here in the twenty-first century, the research consensus has been and is strong and exceedingly clear: English learners do best in educational settings that support their emerging bilingual development—particularly when attending linguistically integrated “two-way” dual language immersion (DLI) models. These latter programs enroll roughly even shares of native speakers of English and the non-English partner language. Researchers largely agree that English learners in bilingual settings—including DLI—are more likely to become proficient in English, succeed academically, and fully develop their bilingual abilities. This is why bilingual education activists often push for these programs as part of an “English Plus” agenda and why a U.S. Senator for Texas in 1967 introduced the Bilingual Education Act, which evolved into the Title III grants of today.
In other words, the data suggest that the administration’s current focus on English-only public services isn’t a realistic push for unifying the country under a single language. After all, bilingual educational programs are better at fostering English language acquisition, and multilingual public services make it easier for all families to get the public service support that they need. No, the administration’s monolingual myopia is about subtracting immigrant communities’ languages and cultures from the country.
That’s why the guidance is best understood as the latest element of the administration’s comprehensive attack on public programs that help immigrant families succeed in the United States. Through the month of July, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon withheld a slew of congressionally appropriated funding from states—including nearly $900 million in Title III grants. The administration recently moved to restrict access to Head Start for some immigrant children. Meanwhile, during the administration’s first six months in office, the administration has removed protections for K–12 schools to allow federal immigration enforcement agents to conduct armed raids on campuses.
This is not a serious governing agenda aimed at improving public education. It is a campaign to make life in our country riskier and less dignified for immigrant families. To that end, it is making American communities less prosperous and safe. Worst of all, it is directly making the U.S. education system less effective for children of immigrants and English learners. This is bad for all members of the U.S. community right now—and ruinous for the country in the long run. Indeed, this guidance recalls a line from the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, only slightly updated here: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational [agenda], we might well have viewed it as an act of war” on our national interests.
Tags: dual language education, English learners, immigrant students, donald trump