How States Can Reinforce English Learners’ Civil Rights

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration have upended all aspects of the federal government, including calling on Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED). This executive order came on March 20, one week after Secretary McMahon instituted drastic staffing cuts and placed 1,315 ED employees (nearly 50 percent of the agency’s staff) on administrative leave. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was one of the hardest hit departments, with seven of twelve regional offices shuttered and 243 employees placed on leave. These cuts also effectively shut down the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA).

These actions put English learners (ELs), whose access to equal educational opportunities depends on federal civil rights frameworks, in a precarious position. Given the persistent attacks on federal institutions and continuing volatility of the Trump administration, states interested in maintaining the current standard of protection for EL-identified students should bolster their legal and regulatory frameworks for ELs by doing the following:

1. Codify Federal Civil Rights & Educational Guarantees

States should consider enumerating and codifying certain federal EL rights and protections (Box 1) in their state constitutions, starting with ensuring EL-identified students are protected from discrimination for speaking a language other than English. States’ obligations to English learners have been clarified and fortified over the years, most prominently through a “Dear Colleague” letter issued by ED and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2015. States can look to this document as a starting point for the legal obligations, assurances, and civil rights protections that could be mirrored in state policy.

Per this letter, ELs should be guaranteed access to language assistance programs that are educationally sound, and have access to the core curriculum, specialized or advanced courses and programs, as well as extracurricular activities. And ultimately states must ensure ELs are afforded educational opportunities that enable them to meet graduation requirements.

Also clarified in this guidance is the requirement that state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and schools “must enroll all students regardless of the students’ or their parents’ or guardians’ actual or perceived citizenship or immigration status.” Undocumented students represent roughly one percent of the total K–12 population and should not be conflated with the 5.3 million students identified as ELs, the majority of whom (71 percent) were born in the U.S. We are already seeing a handful of states attempting to roll back undocumented students’ access to a free public education, which means it is critically important for states to ensure their right to an education is enumerated in their constitutions.

This issue should also be of particular concern to state leaders that have invested in undocumented students’ access to higher education, by granting them the ability to pay in-state tuition or state-provided financial aid, for example. These policies would be moot if undocumented students don’t have access to the K–12 system beforehand.

In recent years, states have also passed English learner “Bill of Rights” explicitly declaring that ELs and their parents/guardians have the right to translation services provided by an interpreter, that ELs have the right to receive all core content instruction, and a parent or child’s immigration status cannot be used to barr a student from receiving a free public education in the school district where they live. During the 2023 legislative session, for example, the Connecticut General Assembly passed the Parent Bill of Rights for English Learners/Multilingual Learners. New York and Rhode Island also have their own versions of bill of rights for parents of English learner/multilingual learners. These policy vehicles may prove useful as states explore how they can step in and provide certain assurances.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015—the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—also includes guardrails for EL-identified students. These guardrails include the requirement that states adopt standardized, statewide entrance and exit procedures for ELs, and that new students are assessed within 30 days of school enrollment to determine if they are an EL and thus eligible for language development services, among others. ESSA also requires that schools be held accountable for whether ELs are making progress toward achieving English proficiency, as well as whether they are meeting state standards as measured by statewide standardized tests. Given the staff reductions at ED and on-going attempts to shutter the department altogether, it is unclear whether ED will be able to fulfill its statutory responsibilities, including oversight over accountability systems pursuant to ESSA. As such, states should ensure ESSA’s English learner-related protections are thoroughly incorporated into any parallel state accountability system that may already exist, or that may be created in response to the federal government’s weakening role.

2. Establish Appropriate Oversight & Enforcement

The intricate web of legislation and case law that protect ELs has historically been enforced by the OCR within ED and the Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. OCR is responsible for investigating Title VI violations and the DOJ is responsible for enforcing Title IV which includes discrimination complaints alleging the denial of equal protection to students based on race, color, national origin, sex, and religion by public schools and institutions of higher learning, as well as the EEOA of 1974. Over the years DOJ has investigated and settled countless EL-related cases.

Enforcement and oversight is likely to come to a halt as OCR has been decimated. We are already seeing regional civil rights offices close leaving their pending cases in limbo. As of February 2025, there were 124 open OCR cases pending under investigation for Title VI English learner violations at elementary-secondary and post-secondary schools. This shows that despite the fact that EL rights and protections are intricately embedded into the legal fabric of the U.S., these frameworks are only as strong as the enforcement and oversight mechanisms that are built alongside them.

Many attorney general offices already have programs and divisions dedicated to affirmative civil rights enforcement. In New York, for example, the AG’s office investigates claims of education-related discrimination on the basis of race and national origin, to name a couple, under state, federal, and local laws. In California, the Civil Rights Enforcement Section addresses many civil rights issues including education rights, immigrant rights, children’s rights, and general discrimination by businesses on the basis of citizenship, primary language, and/or immigration status. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have similar offices in place. State leaders including governors, state legislators and attorneys general should explore how to ensure these offices are prepared to fill the enforcement vacuum left at the federal level.

3. Maintain & Increase Funding Specifically Geared Towards English Learners

English learner education is funded through a combination of federal, state, and local revenue. Title III of the ESEA/ESSA provides supplemental federal funding to states and districts to help EL students and immigrant youth achieve English proficiency and meet academic standards. The last fiscal year (FY 2024) budget appropriated $890 million for Title III which was disbursed to the states using a per-EL formula. This represents roughly .7 percent of the total funding the federal government provides for elementary and secondary education. Additionally, ELs benefit from Title I funding–which provides supplemental funding to school districts for children from low-income families–because ELs are overrepresented in high poverty schools.

Experts are already ringing the alarm on Title I being under threat, and as of the writing of this blog, the future of Title III remains unknown. State leaders should begin strategizing on how to maintain the current level of services for EL students if one or both of these funding streams are reduced.

Currently, 49 states provide additional funding for ELs through their state funding system. States can use this moment as an opportunity to revisit their EL funding frameworks and make improvements. This could include differentiating EL funding to ensure students with more needs are provided higher funding levels. Tennessee, for example, uses three EL tiers to determine how much funding to allocate to EL students, and uses a scale of funding weights ranging from 20 to 70 percent depending on the tier. Additionally, 37 states provide dual funding for students who qualify as both English learners and from low-income families. Some states have already begun to increase funding to support growing EL student populations.

At its core, a state-by-state approach to civil rights seems to undermine the unity and protection that the constitution is supposed to provide all people residing in the United States. Now more than ever, states must reinforce and enhance protections for protected classes of students to ensure they receive the equal protection they are entitled to under the 14th amendment. English learners will continue to represent a significant portion of the K–12 student population and states must take decisive action to ensure their civil rights are upheld, regardless of who is occupying the White House.