Funding Disparities Squeeze ELL Efforts

States vary widely in how much of their own money—if any—they allot to English-language-learner programs to supplement federal funding.

By Michele McNeil

Under pressure from the federal No Child Left Behind Act to rapidly improve academic achievement for more than 5.1 million English-language learners, states have adopted vastly different approaches to funding the programs needed to meet that challenge.

Some states appear to dedicate no additional money to the task. Others set aside line items in their budgets for language programs and, in some cases, allocate twice as much money for English-language learners as they would regular students through a weighting mechanism. And many states are somewhere in between, according to a new analysis by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

The variety and complexity of such funding methods makes it difficult to assess states’ fiscal performance in this area,...