Research Analyst

Fort Worth, Texas.

In 1974, Lau v. Nichols, set a new precedent in bilingual education when it required school districts to assist all students without regard to English language deficiencies.  All school programs conducted exclusively in English were deemed unconstitutional because they denied equal access to education to English learners.

Although the decision did not make bilingual education an absolute requirement, many schools were faced with additional challenges to meet the needs of non-English speaking students in some meaningful way.

Responsibility for serving LEP students continues to be relegated to the state, district and school level with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).  Schools across the nation are now involved in a high-stakes competitive atmosphere of ensuring adequate yearly progress for all students.  The process includes the use of state-level assessments and increasingly higher standards for student achievement.  As a result, by 2014 all English language learners are required to pass state accountability assessments.

Adequate-yearly-progress requirements extend to all subgroups of students and test results are commonly disaggregated in other ways such as ethnicity, income level and special education.  However, federal requirements have increasingly challenged states and districts with large populations of Limited English Proficient (LEP) students.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in 2005-06, Texas reported nearly twice the number of LEP students (15.7 percent), as compared to the national average (8.7 percent).  In the past 10 years alone, the growth of LEP student enrollment has risen 50 percent in Texas, approaching 700,000 students (U.S. Department of Education, 2006).

            While variability exists in any subgroup, a number of issues make bilingual education distinctive. For example, many LEP students experience interrupted formal education due to high rates of migratory patterns within the subgroup.  As students arrive and depart schools frequently, significant gaps in formal schooling result.   While some LEP students have histories of formal education in their native countries, others may have had limited, if any, formal education (Mercuri, Freeman, & Freeman, 2002).