Making California Public Schools Better for English Learners: Lessons from Texas

Executive Summary

While California and Texas have a similar-sized population of English learners (ELs) in their K–12 school systems, the two states take different approaches in bilingual education, translating to substantive differences in how ELs in each state do linguistically and academically. The data show that Texas’ bilingual education approach produces much better outcomes for its ELs, suggesting that California could do better by imitating Texas’s system.

To meaningfully improve the quality of learning opportunities it provides to its ELs, California needs to expand access to bilingual and/or dual-language immersion programs across its education system. Progress on this will require the state to:

1. collect and publish data on bilingual offerings at the district and state level;
2. provide systemic resources to encourage new bilingual or dual-language immersion programs—beyond piecemeal competitive grants programs;
3. provide significantly greater funding for both alternative and traditional bilingual teacher training pathways; and
4. reform teacher training and licensure rules to support bilingual teacher candidates.

Introduction

When it comes to the education of English learners (ELs), California and Texas ought to have everything in common. In 2022–23, California enrolled 1,112,435 ELs—nearly 19 percent of its total K–12 enrollment. That same year, Texas enrolled 1,179,130 ELs—just over 21 percent of its total K–12 enrollment. Taken together, the two states enroll more than 40 percent of the country’s 5.3 million ELs.¹

Indeed, in recent years, it’s become clear that leaders in California and Texas have come to a shared conclusion: that bilingual and dual-language instruction is good for their EL students. This makes sense, given that research continues to show that ELs do best in schools that affirm and support their bilingual development.²

However, the two states take different approaches to supporting ELs’ access to bilingual learning in their public education systems. Texas has taken a systemic and broadly funded approach to bilingual education expansion, while California has used a mostly optional and narrow, patchwork funding approach. This divergence has been particularly clear in the past decade, and it’s captured neatly in how each state refers to its linguistically diverse kids: following federal terminology, California refers to these students as “English learners,” while Texas refers to them as “emergent bilinguals.” (Note: this paper uses English learners/ELs to refer to these students because that is the term encoded in federal K–12 policy.)

This symbolic distinction translates to substantive differences in how ELs in each state do linguistically and academically—Texas has invested dramatically more resources to support its students’ bilingualism across its entire K–12 system, enrolling a larger percentage of its EL students—more than twice as many as California does—in bilingual and dual-language programs (see Table 1). By contrast, California has offered sporadic grant programs and non-binding frameworks.

Table 1

Why California Lags Texas on Bilingual Education

California’s bilingual education underperformance stems from a number of policy choices.

California Recently Removed Obstacles to Bilingual Education, but Hasn’t Backed It with Significant Resources

In 2016, California voters reversed the state’s multi-decade ban on bilingual education. Since then, however, its pursuit of bilingual education has been incremental at best. California has largely encoded its EL priorities in nonbinding guidance that decentralizes authority to local education officials—the state occasionally provides small competitive grants to tempt districts into choosing to implement these policies. This pattern is clearly visible in its EL Roadmap, the Local Control Funding Formula (and attached local accountability plans), Global California 2030, California’s reclassification policies, and beyond. Limited grant investments through initiatives like the Bilingual Teacher Professional Development Program and the Dual Language Immersion Grants program have produced correspondingly limited results.³

California’s biggest bilingual education success in recent years has been its Seal of Biliteracy program, which allows students who can demonstrate proficiency in multiple languages to receive recognition on their diplomas. The program has since been replicated in every other state and the District of Columbia.⁴ However, like the EL Roadmap, the Seal is a voluntary, opt-in program. Further, like Global California 2030, the Seal valorizes multilingualism in general, rather than equitably prioritizing the unique benefits ELs gain from sustaining their emerging bilingual abilities. In 2024, California enrolled 206,578 ELs and former ELs (which the state terms Reclassified Fluent English Proficient, or RFEP students) in twelfth grade. Just 28,731 ELs or RFEPs received California’s Seal of Biliteracy that year. Put another way, just 40 percent of the state’s 71,814 Seal recipients in 2024 were current ELs or RFEPs.⁵

Texas Has Deepened—and Funded—Its Systemic Commitment to Bilingualism

Texas has taken a different tack, backing systemic accountability for expanding bilingual education with systemic resources for that growth. The state has had a mandate requiring linguistically diverse districts to provide their ELs with bilingual education for more than half a century.⁶ Critically, it has deepened its investment in bilingualism in recent years. In 2019, Texas passed legislation to systemically boost funding for districts that convert their English as a second language (ESL) and transitional bilingual classrooms into dual-language immersion programs that make students’ full bilingualism and biliteracy a core goal.⁷ Unlike California’s periodic competitive grant programs, this funding is available to all Texas schools, providing increased support for campuses that commit to growing dual-language immersion for their ELs.

Texas ELs Do Better than California ELs

These different strategies are producing different results. As seen in Table 1, Texas enrolls far more of its ELs (about 38 percent) in bilingual or dual-language classrooms than California (about 18 percent). Texas’ bilingual commitments are even greater in the early years. In 2022–23, the state enrolled nearly 70 percent of its kindergarten and first grade ELs in some form of bilingual education, and that share only dips under 50 percent in fifth grade (about 47 percent).⁸

Research indicates that, over time, ELs in multilingual education settings are more likely to reach English proficiency.⁹ Public data suggest that Texas’ experience with its bilingual approach is tracking those findings. The share of Texas ELs reaching English proficiency has been higher than California’s in recent years. 

Table 2

Research also shows that EL students in multilingual education settings have better academic outcomes than ELs in English-only settings.¹⁰ Again, Texas’ experience with a systemic commitment to bilingualism is tracking those findings. A comparison of more than a decade of NAEP scores shows that Texas’ ELs consistently outperformed California’s ELs in both math and reading and at fourth and eighth grade (see Table 3 and Table 4). Further, while achievement gap analysis comparing ELs to non-ELs should be analyzed with caution, these gaps are substantially larger in California than they are in Texas (see Table 5).¹¹

Table 3

Table 4

As TCF researchers and colleagues have noted in recent reports, California policymakers have made valuable, productive reforms in the wake of the state’s nearly two decades mandating English-only instruction.¹² Once voters made bilingual education broadly permissible again, California leaders articulated a compelling multilingual vision for the state’s schools. Unfortunately, the state has not yet backed this vision by (1) committing sufficient resources to allow local school districts to deliver more bilingual instruction and (2) granting sufficient resources and authority to allow the California Department of Education to push for more bilingual instruction. While Texas differs from California in many ways—its historical commitment to bilingual education, its predominant political environment, and so on—it serves as a powerful example for how the Golden State could improve its current bilingual education landscape.

Table 5

Recommendations

​​If California wants to provide its ELs with the same support and opportunities as Texas provides its ELs, it should consider these straightforward policy reforms:

1. Collect and publish data on local bilingual offerings. California should track data on the number and type of bilingual and dual-language settings as part of its Cradle-to-Career database. It should publish these data at the state level and also disaggregate them to the district level. 
2. Provide systemic resources to encourage new bilingual or dual-language immersion programs. Texas provides additional dollars to any school district that enrolls its ELs in dual-language immersion programs. California should do the same. It can implement this by providing additional Local Control Funding Formula allocations to districts for each EL they enroll in bilingual or dual-language settings. It could also pair this additional resource support with accountability by requiring districts with persistently weak EL language and academic outcomes to launch bilingual or dual-language programs. 
3. Provide significantly greater funding for alternative and traditional bilingual teacher training pathways. California cannot grow its bilingual education system without more bilingual teachers. While recent investments in the Bilingual Teacher Professional Development Program and other statewide grants are a good start, they are insufficient to the need. California should provide much larger grants for growing bilingual teacher training pathways in its institutions of higher education as much more funding towards scholarships that are exclusively available to bilingual teacher candidates. This should include stipends for bilingual student teachers. 
4. Reform teacher training and licensure rules to support bilingual teacher candidates. Many U.S. teacher training and licensure systems are designed for monolingual teacher candidates. California’s are no exception to this rule. To efficiently grow its bilingual teacher workforce (including in transitional kindergarten settings), the state should overhaul its requirements to ensure that bilingual teacher candidates are not unnecessarily blocked from reaching classrooms of their own by English-only licensure expectations.¹³Reforms in this direction can take many forms, but should be guided by three principles: 
   1. flexibility that gives bilingual teacher candidates options, e.g. to take licensure exams in their native languages; 
   2. efficiency that reduces time and resource hurdles that might keep bilingual teacher candidates from the classroom; and 
   3. equivalency that recognizes the unique value of bilingual teacher candidates’ language proficiencies as equal to the value of some teacher licensure requirements.¹⁴

Acknowledgments: This report was published with generous support from the Silver Giving Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and Sobrato Philanthropies. The author would like to thank Jonathan Zabala and Yasmin Naji for research assistance. The Century Foundation’s English Learners Team receives additional funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

1. “Enrollment in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, by Region, State, and Jurisdiction: Selected Years, Fall 1990 through Fall 2031,” U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_203.20.asp; EdDataExpress, Data Group 678, 2022–23, https://eddataexpress.ed.gov/download/data-builder/data-download-tool?f%5B0%5D=all_students%3AAll%20Students%20in%20SEA&f%5B1%5D=data_group_id%3A678&f%5B2%5D=population%3AEnglish%20Learners&f%5B3%5D=school_year%3A2022-2023&f%5B4%5D=state_name%3ACALIFORNIA&f%5B5%5D=state_name%3ATEXAS&f%5B6%5D=type_of_data%3AParticipation.
2. Conor P. Williams, Dr. Xigrid Soto-Boykin, Jonathan Zabala, and Dr. Shantel Meek, “Why We Need to Cultivate America’s Multilingual, Multicultural Assets,” The Century Foundation, June 14, 2023, https://tcf.org/content/report/why-we-need-to-cultivate-americas-multilingual-multicultural-assets/.
3. “English Learner Roadmap,”California Department of Education, June 18, 2024, https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ml/roadmap.asp; “Global California 2030: Speak. Learn. Lead,” California Department of Education, 2018, https://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/documents/globalca2030report.pdf; “Bilingual Teacher Professional Development Program,” California Department of Education, June 13, 2024, https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fo/profile.asp?id=6237; “Dual Language Immersion Grant (DLIG),” California Department of Education, June 18, 2024, https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ml/dliginfo.asp.
4. “State Laws Regarding the Seal of Biliteracy,” Accessed December 11, 2024, https://sealofbiliteracy.org/.
5. “2023–24 Participating Current and Former English Learners,” California Department of Education, 2024, retrieved from https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ml/sealofbiliteracy.asp; “2023–24 ‘Ever-ELs’ by Years as EL and Reclassification (RFEP) Status and Grade: Statewide Report,” California Department of Education, Data Reporting Office, https://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/longtermel/ElYears.aspx?cds=00&agglevel=State&year=2023-24.
6. Rodolfo Rodríguez, “Bilingual Education,” Texas State Historical Association, February 15, 2020, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bilingual-education.
7. Jonathan Zabala, “How Texas Is Funding the Expansion of Dual Language Programs,” The Century Foundation, April 12, 2022, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/how-texas-is-funding-the-expansion-of-dual-language-programs/.
8. “Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Category By Grade Report, School Year 2022–2023,” Texas Education Agency, https://rptsvr1.tea.texas.gov/adhocrpt/va/geo/elcategory_23.html.
9. Conor P. Williams, “What’s the Best Way for Arizona Schools to Help English Learners Succeed?” The Century Foundation, September 19, 2023, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/whats-the-best-way-for-arizona-schools-to-help-english-learners-succeed/.
10. Conor P. Williams, Dr. Xigrid Soto-Boykin, Jonathan Zabala, and Dr. Shantel Meek, “Why We Need to Cultivate America’s Multilingual, Multicultural Assets,” The Century Foundation, June 14, 2023, https://tcf.org/content/report/why-we-need-to-cultivate-americas-multilingual-multicultural-assets/.
11. Conor P. Williams, “New Studies Hint at Clearer Ways to Measure English Learners’ Performance,” The Century Foundation, February 20, 2020, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/new-studies-hint-clearer-ways-measure-english-learners-performance.
12. Conor P. Williams and Jonathan Zabala, “Moving from Vision to Reality: Establishing California as a National Bilingual Education and Dual-Language Immersion Leader,” The Century Foundation, October 25, 2023, https://tcf.org/content/report/moving-from-vision-to-reality-establishing-caifornia-as-a-national-bilingual-education-and-dual-language-immersion-leader/; Conor Williams, Ilana Umansky, Lorna Porter, Manuel Vazquez Cano, and Jonathan Zabala, “Meeting Its Potential: A Call and Guide for Universal Access to Bilingual Education in California,” The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, UCLA, 2024, https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/language-minority-students/meeting-its-potential-a-call-and-guide-for-universal-access-to-bilingual-education-in-california/CA-bilingual-expansion_CRP_120224-No-Foreword.pdf.
13. Jonathan Zabala and Conor P. Williams, “How to Ensure Linguistic Equity in California’s Transitional Kindergarten Workforce,” The Century Foundation, October 31, 2024, https://tcf.org/content/report/how-to-ensure-linguistic-equity-in-californias-transitional-kindergarten-workforce/.
14. Conor P. Williams and Jonathan Zabala, “How to Grow Bilingual Teacher Pathways: Making the Most of U.S. Linguistic and Cultural Diversity,” The Century Foundation, August 28, 2023, https://tcf.org/content/report/how-to-grow-bilingual-teacher-pathways-making-the-most-of-u-s-linguistic-and-cultural-diversity/.

Tags: English Language Learners, bilingual education, california, early education