Risking a country’s commitment to equal education access

Linnea Saxton, Tribune News Service

While volunteering this spring at a middle school in Washington, DC, I watched a science teacher chat with her newest student, who had recently arrived from Paris. The teacher began explaining the guidelines of an upcoming assignment, employing hand gestures and a few well-intentioned Spanish words. The student, appreciative though a bit bewildered, listened intently as her teacher endeavoured to communicate across their language barrier. The right to equal education access, regardless of native language or any factor of identity, has been a core tenet of American values since the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, though study after study shows that true education equality has yet to be realised.

President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14224, “Designating English as the Official Language of the United States,” stands in direct contradiction to these values. Besides declaring English the nation’s official language, Trump’s order revokes President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 13166, “Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency (LEP).” Clinton’s order, deriving its authority from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, defined linguistic partiality as discrimination on the basis of national origin and directed federal agencies to “implement a system by which LEP persons can meaningfully access” necessary services.

Since signing the order on March 1, the Trump administration has begun withholding federal funds supporting emergent bilingual students. Ileana Najarro, writing for Education Week, explains that revoking Clinton’s order removes the requirement for federally funded schools to support emergent bilingual students in accessing school resources. That means schools may terminate their interpretation and translation services. By eliminating these protections, the Trump administration has jeopardised the country’s commitment to equal education access. Efforts to remove protections for bilingual speakers are as old as the country itself. Officials at residential schools punished Indigenous children for speaking their native languages. In a 1919 letter, President Roosevelt wrote, “We have room for but one language here,” criticizing the country’s evolution into what he called “a polyglot boarding-house.” In 2023, more than a century later, then-senator JD Vance introduced a bill to designate a federal official language and require English proficiency for naturalisation.

English-language fluency is vital for students to succeed in US schools and workplaces. Fighting to provide equal opportunities for emergent bilingual students should therefore remain a national imperative. As Pooja Reddy Nakamura, a senior researcher for the American Institute of Research, concluded, “Throwing children off the linguistic deep end and trying to immerse them in English before they learn their own language invites literacy failure in both English and their own languages.” Native language literacy is not merely a stepping stone to English literacy; a student’s resulting bilingualism offers them crucial advantages. The Center for Applied Linguistics describes multilinguals as possessing “both a personal and societal asset” that “strengthen(s) our position” in diplomatic relations and the global economy.

Moreover, supporting multilingualism brings communities together. Every time a family’s efforts to support their children are snubbed because they lack English fluency, or an emergent bilingual student is deemed unintelligent, a wedge drives deeper into the communities around our public schools. Native language valuation is not only academically and economically beneficial; it is an act of community building and an affirmation of our nation’s egalitarian ideals.

For these reasons, state departments of education and school districts must protect students’ and families’ rights to translation services and language-learning support. To be sure, policymakers fighting for equal education access have finite political capital, and schools have limited funds to allocate to these endeavors. Supporting emergent bilingual students is one goal of innumerable necessary fights, but it must be considered just as urgent as other contemporary civil rights issues. On that spring day at the middle school, I later approached the student and struck up a conversation in French, my words laced with a thick American accent but welcoming all the same. Her face lit up, and though we only exchanged a few sentences, I think our interaction left us both feeling a little more tethered to the school’s community, bound together by language.