Ariz. ELL Programs Found to Violate Civil-Rights Law

High school students in Nogales, Ariz. listen during an English-language-development class last year. In 1992, parents from the district filed a federal lawsuit contending programs for English-learners were deficient. A hearing in that long-running case opened this month in the U.S. District Court in Tuscon.

—James Gregg for Education Week-File

Meanwhile, a court battle opens in the state.

By Mary Ann Zehr

Tucson, Ariz.

On the first day of a hearing this month in a closely watched federal court case over Arizona’s programs for English-language learners, a single witness for the state department of education spent the day on the stand testifying on the success of the state’s approach to teaching students who need to learn English.

Meanwhile, news surfaced that same day that federal civil rights officials took a slightly dimmer view of aspects of the state’s ELL programs.

In letters sent to the state school superintendent last month, the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, or OCR, said it had determined that two of the practices the state uses to identify which students require services, or for how long, violate federal law. They are the home-language survey that schools give to parents in order to initially identify students to be tested for ELL services and the process the state uses to reclassify ELLs as fluent in English even if they don’t pass all sections of the state’s English-language-proficiency test. The letters said that the U.S. Department of Justice...