The Department of Education has quietly shelved guidance that has governed education services for children with little or no English proficiency for over a decade.
The policy change was driven by President Trump's Executive Order on March 1, designating English as the official language of the United States.
In welcoming new Americans, a policy of encouraging the learning and adoption of our national language will make the United States a shared home and empower new citizens to achieve the American dream. Speaking English not only opens doors economically, but it helps newcomers engage in their communities, participate in national traditions, and give back to our society. This order recognizes and celebrates the long tradition of multilingual American citizens who have learned English and passed it to their children for generations to come.
To promote unity, cultivate a shared American culture for all citizens, ensure consistency in government operations, and create a pathway to civic engagement, it is in America’s best interest for the Federal Government to designate one — and only one — official language. Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication but also reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society.
Accordingly, this order designates English as the official language of the United States.
Attorney General Pam Bondi followed this with guidance on how the administration will interpret that executive order.
"As President Trump has made clear, English is the official language of the United States," said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. "The Department of Justice will lead the effort to codify the President’s Executive Order and eliminate wasteful virtue-signaling policies across government agencies to promote assimilation over division."
"President Trump’s Executive Order marks a pivotal step toward unifying our nation through a common language and enhancing efficiency in federal operations," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. "The Department of Justice ensures that while we respect linguistic diversity, our federal resources will prioritize English proficiency to empower new Americans and strengthen civic unity.”
This is an action that is centuries overdue. There is no reason why a nation that requires English proficiency for citizenship should print ballots in dozens of foreign languages. If you can't read English, maybe you shouldn't be voting.
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The rescinded guidance was one of those verbose, lengthy "Dear Colleague" letters by the Obama Department of Education, which typically served to deprive a non-trivial portion of the student population of human rights (Department of Education Determines That Male Students Have Civil Rights and Might Be Human – RedState). In this case, it sets up a Rube Goldberg system where school districts are required to provide instruction in the student's native language. This might work in places like Minnesota, where the dominant immigrant language is Somali, but in districts with a multiplicity of languages, it obviously causes problems. Not the least of those problems is that every dollar diverted to providing instruction in Sanskrit or whatever is a dollar diverted from the education of children who speak English. And it uses a 40-year-old decision out of the Fifth Circuit called Castañeda v. Pickard to set the standard:
(1) The educational theory underlying the language assistance program is recognized as sound by some experts in the field or is considered a legitimate experimental strategy;
(2) The program and practices used by the school system are reasonably calculated to implement effectively the educational theory adopted by the school; and
(3) The program succeeds, after a legitimate trial, in producing results indicating that students’ language barriers are actually being overcome within a reasonable period of time.
Why we're tying the entire U.S. educational system to a dated ruling by a single court is anyone's guess.
Federal Law and a Supreme Court decision require that students not be discriminated against based on language.
The requirement to serve English-language learners in school is based on two federal statutes. The first is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on national origin, among other traits. A landmark 1974 Supreme Court case, Lau v. Nichols, interpreted this law to include a mandate for English-language services in schools.
The second federal law at issue is the 1974 Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which requires public schools to provide for students who do not speak English. A 1981 case decided in federal appeals court, Castañeda v. Pickard, laid out a test to determine whether schools were properly providing services to English learners in school.
What the Obama administration did was deftly pivot from equal access to instruction to the Marxist ideal of equity. As there is no evidence that the method in the "Dear Colleague" letter worked, they were perfectly happy to achieve that equity by driving down the reading scores of English speakers. Mission Accomplished, to coin a phrase.
Our education system should be a boot camp for knowledgeable and engaged citizens. It's not. It has morphed, over time, from a credible education system to a social work system that happens to provide banal and anti-patriotic lessons to the students unlucky enough to end up there. The idea that a child from a household that doesn't speak English, perhaps in an ethnic community, will become language proficient by accommodating that language in school is just nonsense—immersion works, as was proven at the height of our Ellis Island experience. If parents want their kid to receive instruction in a foreign language, then School Choice provides the perfect tool for that accommodation.