Bills respond to state’s lowered English fluency test score
Grijalva filed the three measures Sept. 16, the same day Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica published their reporting on the test-score change. A spokesperson for Grijalva said the congresswoman had previously drafted the bills but noted that the reporting underscored why federal support is needed to improve English learning.
The three measures target different parts of Arizona’s English-learner system. The Reaching English Learners Act would create competitive grants of up to five years for colleges that partner with high-need school districts or early childhood programs to train teachers to lead classrooms of English learners. The bill would give preference to programs that recruit teacher candidates who were once English learners or come from underrepresented groups. Colleges would pay at least half the cost of the training. The legislation does not specify a total cost.
The Families Learning and Understanding English Together Act would authorize $75 million a year from 2027 through 2031 for family literacy programs. Head Start programs, school districts, adult education providers, and nonprofits could apply for grants of $150,000 to $1 million a year to teach English and literacy to young children and their caregivers together. To qualify, programs would have to serve areas where English learners are a majority or growing share of students at local schools.
The Supporting Young Language Learners’ Access to Bilingual Education Act would fund dual-language immersion programs for children from low-income families from preschool through fifth grade. Students in those programs would learn in English and a second language and would use the second language for at least half the school day. The bill would authorize $15 million for 2027 and unspecified amounts in the following four years.
In a statement to the news organizations, Grijalva tied the legislation to Horne’s management of the English-learner system. “Superintendent Horne’s mismanagement of the misguided ‘English-only’ model underscores the need for real federal support for English learners, educators, and their families, which is exactly what my legislation would provide,” Grijalva said. “Instead of repeating the mistakes of the past by simply making the English proficiency test easier to pass, we should give students the resources and support they need to actually succeed in the classroom, including through supporting bilingual education.”
Horne disputed Grijalva’s characterization, arguing that the English-only model is superior to bilingual education. “To put bilingual education in schools is to sacrifice the students to dogma and condemn them to not learn English properly, which negatively will affect their future academic endeavors and their hope for good jobs in the economy,” Horne told the news organizations.
The Arizona Department of Education has previously defended its decision to make the test easier to pass by saying it first administered the exam to 600 native English speakers to set a baseline for the changes. The department skipped that step in 2020, when it last made a major change to the test, officials noted.
Proposition 203, which Arizona voters approved in 2000, established the state’s English-only policies. Students learning English spend two to four hours a day in separate English instruction until they pass a test showing they are fluent enough to learn in a mainstream classroom. Past attempts by the state to reclassify large numbers of children learning English as fluent prompted federal investigations, with the government alleging that placing such students in classrooms where they struggled because they lacked knowledge of English violated their civil and educational rights. Arizona agreed to a settlement more than a decade ago to resolve the matter.
Democrats do not have a majority in either house of Congress, and the bills do not stand much of a chance of passage this year.