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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