End Is Near in a Fight on Teaching of English

Next month, after 17 years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court will rule on the Flores case, deciding whether Arizona is complying with federal laws requiring public schools to teach children to speak English.

The case has been long and tangled, splitting state officials along party lines. In 2000, a district court ruled that the state’s financing for English language learners was not “reasonably calculated” to cover the extra costs of educating them, and ordered the district to come up with a better plan. Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the lower court, ruling that despite improvement, the state was still not in compliance.

“What hasn’t changed since the judgment is the state’s failure to adequately fund the program,” said Mrs. Flores’s lawyer, Timothy M. Hogan, of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest. “Nogales has been doing a better job with its English language learners recently, but they’re doing it by taking money away from other programs. They’re spending about $1,570 per E.L.L. student, but they’re only getting about $385 from the state. Without court pressure, who knows how long Nogales can continue to make those same budgeting decision?”

But Tom Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, said federal courts had no business directing how the state should spend education money.

“If you want to summarize our position, it’s that we’re now teaching kids English, we’re taking the ‘appropriate action’ the law requires, and how the district does it isn’t the court’s business,” Mr. Horne said.

With five million school-age children nationwide who do not speak proficient English — one in 10 of the nation’s students — the Supreme Court’s ruling could affect spending on English language learners in many states.

Oh, this worries me. Arizona passed a law banning so-called “bilingual education,” which is the education of students in foreign languages under the deceitful assertion that the kids learn English by never hearing it uttered. The federal government requirements to teach English require recipients of funds to use bilingual education. The article makes no mention of this context, leading to me to wonder whether Arizona is actually being sued for teaching kids in English.

Looking into this more:

Arizona is actually being sued because it teaches English. It passed “English for the Children” in defiance of Senor Bush, who was a stark raving mad promoter of the notion that children should be taught to speak English by sitting in classrooms where they hear nothing but Spanish-language instruction.

Back in the 1970s, “bilingual education” was an experimental pilot program, when San Francisco was sued because its way of teaching Chinese-speaking students was to simply stick them in normal classrooms, where they could not understand instruction. The solution was to stick non-English speakers in classrooms where the language of instruction was their home language, and thus bilingual education became sort of federal-government mandated. (You’d face discrimination charges if you didn’t use it.)

By the late 1990s, California and Arizona, witnessing that “bilingual education” students simply eventually flunked out without ever learning any English at all, passed “English for the Children” laws, mandating that kids spend some time in intensive English-language-learning programs. Where implemented, these laws were wildly successful, although many California cities ignored the laws by claiming inserting one or two native English speakers (”dual immersion”) into a Spanish-language class constituted teaching English.

The Clinton and Bush administrations were livid. The Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” Act (NCLB) provided massive amounts of federal monies for teaching kids English, providing that the kids were “taught English” by sticking them in Spanish-only or “dual-immersion” classrooms. Nonetheless, NCLB also introduced accountability, so there was no great resurgence of bilingual education, because it plainly resulted in drop outs and illiterate 21 year old high school students.

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