Study: 1-In-4 Students in U.S. Schools Expected to Be English Language Learners by 2025
The incoming Donald Trump administration’s promised shakeup of the nation’s education system, including the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, with the nomination of Linda McMahon as DOE Secretary, presents the opportunity to address decades of increasingly dismal outcomes. Among the areas of concern are astonishingly low scores registered by U.S. students in reading, writing, and mathematics proficiency. Just 19% of high school seniors graduating are functionally illiterate.
By 2021, education spending had increased 136% since the DOE’s establishment under the Jimmy Carter administration, and the number of students in the U.S. education system also increased, but only by about 9% with historical rises and falls in the intervening years. In 1977, there were roughly 46.5 million school aged children in the United States. Today there are 49.6 million.
As of 2023, about 26%, or more than a quarter of the children in U.S. households, came from immigrant households, double the share of children from immigrant households in 1990. By 2021, there were a stunning 5.3 million English learners in U.S. public schools, or about one in nine of the United States’ roughly 45 million enrolled that year, who were learning to speak English in school.
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1. I would like to see an article comparing these present numbers with the numbers of non-English speakers in school in 1910. I suspect the numbers would be similar, or even greater, but I am not sure the statistics from back then would be complete or reliable. It was a problem back then, so it was addressed as a problem, practically, with an eye toward solving it. It was not an opportunity to identify victims, spend money, expand bureaucracies and hire bilingual staff, etc., so the scorekeeping was different.
2. Which reminds me: a teacher in a NYCity 4th grade classroom in 1910 might be looking at kids who spoke Polish, Italian, Greek, German and some others. And no ESL staff or funding. How DID teachers in those days get the job done? Easier than you might think. The teacher identified the Italian-speaking kid with the best English, and that kid became an adjunct instructor/translator for the Italian kids. Same for Czech, Armenian, etc. And so the dynamic shifted from “poor me, it’s not fair” to “if I learn English, I can get to be teacher’s pet, too.” Two lessons for the price of one.
3. Did parents complain? Not hardly. My grandparents were immigrants in 1906, lived in a big city neighborhood where their native language was in common use in shops and socially, went to a church where even into the 1950’s some services/sermons were given in the mother tongue. But if you think they would have permitted their children in the 19-teens to learn anything but standard English in school, you’re wrong. As I argued when Ebonics bubbled up as a notion 40 years ago, if you want your kids to remain permanent members of an underclass, just keep them from learning the language of the ruling class. Stream “My Fair Lady,” it’s all explained there.
So, what’s the price tag on that?