Do One-Size-Fits-All Literacy Programs Serve English Learners?
My teaching experience in a bilingual school versus a dual immersion school couldn’t be more different, although they shared one commonality: the balance between engaging and overburdening English learners (ELs) was hard to strike.
In the bilingual school, language barriers impeded my classroom daily. Although our lessons were taught bilingually, my co-teacher and I struggled to understand each other and often dealt with miscommunications. The administration mandated that state tested subjects be taught in English exclusively, implying that bilingual aims were on the backburner to test scores. Our EL students were constantly on call to translate for the non-Spanish speakers who didn’t understand the content, which distracted them from focusing on their coursework and put improper pressure on them to synthesize and interpret lessons.
But in the dual immersion (DLI) school, I struggled to get my EL students involved at all. I didn't even know which of my students were enrolled in the DLI program, but I wrongly assumed that because I taught almost all the ELs in my school that many of them would be enrolled to take advantage of its academic benefits. In the DLI program, students were eligible to receive a certification in bilingualism which could be leveraged for college and career advancement. I was shocked to find that despite the DLI program offering their native language, only a few of my 250 students were enrolled. The program marketed bilingualism as a career investment: but one aimed at English-dominant students acquiring a second language, not at students who were already bilingual and had the most to gain from formal recognition of that skill.
These experiences reflect a broader pattern in how state policy has approached English learners: investing in programs that promise inclusion while rarely centering the students those programs are meant to serve. The data reveals this gap, as 50% of ELs who are in the U.S. school system since kindergarten fail to reach proficiency within 6 years.
Dual Immersion Benefits Non-Native Learners
Many states have experienced rapid population growth of non-English speakers in the last few decades, and in response, have implemented practical school reforms to support students from non-English-speaking households. Utah’s dual immersion programming represents a widespread reform that was designed to support ELs but has instead largely served the white population.
In 2001, a Utah family member filed an OCR complaint about their nephew’s school, submitting that the school was grouping together ELs into isolated classrooms and providing inadequate curriculum/instruction. This complaint led to an investigation, which forced the state to implement an EL endorsement requirement and ELD instruction blocks for English learners. But in 2007, former Gov. Jon Huntsman began to advocate for a better way to integrate ELs into Utah schools: through dual immersion. Huntsman served as an ambassador to Russia and China and came back to his home state committed to making new economic and global goals of success for Utah students. Although the program offers that the two way programs—which teach both English and the program language—should have at least one-third native speakers, in 2013 only 8% of 3rd graders participating were English learners. By investing so heavily in DLI programs to ‘serve ELs’, the state managed to predominantly serve white populations instead. Utah’s case was not an anomaly: literacy policy has continued to treat ELs as the justification rather than the starting point.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Science of Reading
The politicization of science of reading legislation has created additional structural barriers for ELs. Tracing SOR back to NCLB and the Reading First Initiative, researchers note that the foundational 1998 Reading Panel report largely failed to study diverse learner populations, and assumed ELs should reach native language proficiency before starting to learn to read in English. A study on how SOR legislation affects deaf learners analyzed 24 recent SOR bills and found that state policies frame reading as a policy problem, and equally equate dyslexia, disabilities, and El interventions in one grouped mandate. This symmetrical language assumes that each of these states have the same demographics, and that reading interventions for students with disabilities and ELs will look the same.
Reading intervention provisions are not the only place researchers find problematic in SOR legislation: the gaps extend into how states prepare the teachers responsible for carrying out those interventions. While ELs benefit from the same foundational literacy pedagogy as all students, they additionally require oral language development and linguistic scaffolding that most teacher preparation programs do not include. State policies have largely failed to mandate oversight of whether teacher preparation programs incorporate EL-specific, science-based reading strategies. Teachers in bilingual programs must be trained to develop genuine bilingualism in their students, not simply translation skills.
Even when bilingual programming exists, the structural problems do not stop at teacher preparation. Research on dual language programs find that many plans are based in deficit frameworks for emerging bilingual students, particularly by using monolingual assessment practices. A policy brief reviewing Texas’ literacy legislation criticized the required assessments for ELs and found that when Spanish scores were combined with English, the students underperforming decreased from 84% to 40%. In short, when diagnostics and assessments are only completed in English, non-native English speakers may be mischaracterized. This leaves equity gaps in this type of intervention for English learners, as their bilingual growth is not reported accurately.
Bottom Line
The throughline across bilingual schools, dual immersion programs, and science of reading legislation is the same: English learners are rarely the starting point of policy design and are instead expected to adapt to systems built around other priorities. Utah's dual immersion expansion is an early example of this pattern. The economic and global competitiveness goals that drove that expansion were not EL goals, and the students who were meant to benefit were largely left out.
Science of reading legislation has followed a similar trajectory. When EL interventions are folded into the same legislative mandate as dyslexia and disability accommodations, and when the assessments used to track progress are monolingually normed, the policy infrastructure around English learners ends up measuring something other than what it intends to. What is consistent across these approaches is not a lack of investment, but a gap between the populations that policies are designed around and the populations they are meant to serve. Whether that gap closes depends on how seriously states take the distinction.