In this essay, Luis E. Poza argues that educational dignity can help practices and reforms targeting students classified as English learners move beyond a narrow focus on programmatic and material factors related to English language development and instead toward more holistic consideration of these students and their schooling ecologies. In…

Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected…

I analyze two bills from the state legislatures of California (SB 1174) and Arizona (SB 1242) that propose to expand bilingual education where English-only education was previously the default. Using a critical discourse analysis lens to conduct a directed content analysis, I ask who bilingual education is for, why it is offered, and how the…

This chapter proposes a conceptual framework that merges intersectionality and policy analysis as an analytical tool to understand the nuanced, multilayered, compounded educational inequality encountered specifically by low-income, Latino Spanish-speaking students in Arizona K-12 public schools as a function of intersecting educational policies.…

Is the U.S. Supreme Court inviting litigants to take aim at unraveling injunctions in institutional reform litigation--especially consent decrees in the schools? In "Horne v. Flores" (2009), the court remanded a 17-year-old school reform case to a federal judge with orders to look beyond consent decrees on financing, reducing class…

Between national and state budget cuts in education and an ever increasing push toward the English Only movement, a rise in dropout rates for Hispanic students is imminent. National data show the percentage of Hispanic students who drop out of high school to be nearly 60% in some states including Michigan, South Dakota, West Virginia, Alabama,…

When the 93rd Congress enacted the Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974 (EEOA), it required states to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that inhibited equal education participation by their resident students. An examination of the EEOA legislative testimony suggests elected officials established the law to set forth…

This qualitative study explored Teach for America (TFA) alumni teachers' discourse on Arizona language policy, conducted with eight teachers in the Phoenix metropolitan area who received their professional teacher preparation from TFA, a national organization that uses alternative paths to certification to place teachers in low-income schools.…

This fact sheet provides demographic information for the young Dual Language Learner (DLL) population in Arizona, based on Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis of U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) data pooled over the 2011-15 period. DLLs, defined as children ages 8 and under with at least one parent who speaks a language…

The Arizona English Language Learners Assessment (AZELLA) is used by the Arizona Department of Education to determine which children should receive English support services. AZELLA results are used to determine if children are either proficient in English or have English language skills in one of four non-proficient categories (pre-emergent,…

In response to the passage of a state English-only policy and a newly mandated instructional model for English learners that focuses on English acquisition, Arizona introduced training requirements for all of the state's educators related to English learners. This policy coincided with changes in the training Arizona teachers opted to pursue,…

Approximately five million English Language Learners (ELLs) attend public schools in the United States. Because the majority of ELLs tend to live in immigrant families, schools become the means to provide ELLs with the English skills necessary to be competent in school and in life. Federal and state policies regarding instructional arrangements…

Assuring that English language learners (ELLs) receive the services to which they have a right requires accurately identifying those students. Virtually all states identify ELLs in a two-step process. First, parents fill out a home language survey. Second, students in whose homes a language other than English is spoken and who therefore might…

The objective of this paper is to provide some practical insight into the process of implementing large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCT) in educational settings and to provide general recommendations for researchers conducting education-based RCTs in the future. The authors draw their recommendations from their recent experiences…

This paper reviews the research on the impact of segregation on Latino and English Language Learner (ELL) students, including new empirical research conducted in Arizona. It also reviews court decisions regarding students' rights to be integrated with their mainstream peers, and provides data on the increasing segregation of Arizona's Latino and…