State education agency leaders whose work focuses on English learners have increasingly found themselves balancing the need to uphold these students’ federal civil rights while also navigating anti-DEI policies and politics.
That tension is reshaping how states design, describe, and defend programs serving the nation’s more than 5 million multilingual learners.
That’s one of the key findings from a new research study published in early June in the American Educational Research Journal. The qualitative study is based on interviews and observational data collected over the last five years within a national research-practice partnership focused on English learners, or multilingual learners. Its authors included the voices of 26 leaders across 21 states representing all regions of the country, and a range of political contexts.
Researchers analyzed the various ways state leaders have balanced their responsibility to serve students while not running afoul of anti-DEI efforts. Among other things, states reframed programs and had to remind fellow state leaders of the federal responsibilities that schools must meet for English learners.
“There might have been a general assumption that some of this anti-DEI [rhetoric] was separate from multilingual learner education … What we really wanted to show and highlight was these broader constriction policies are having spillover effects in areas that are not often talked about,” said Megan Hopkins, a professor and chair of the education studies department at the University of California, San Diego and co-lead of the study.
Such policies, according to the study, include President Donald Trump’s executive order from last year, which focused on eliminating “wasteful” and “immoral” DEI programs. It led to the U.S. Department of Education eliminating equity-focused commissions, webpages, and contracts and scouring grants for evidence of supposed DEI leanings.
“They are the first step in reorienting the agency toward prioritizing meaningful learning ahead of divisive ideology in our schools,” the Education Department said in a statement at the time. The agency did not provide additional comment by publication.
Legislation and rhetoric complicate state leaders’ jobs
The new study sheds light on how federal and state-level anti-DEI legislation and rhetoric affect state leaders’ work in addressing equity concerns related to English learners, a demographic of students that exists at the intersection of multiple policy landscapes, including immigration.
State education agencies play a major role in English-learner education. They must oversee accountability, capture English learner growth, and ensure schools are making progress with these students and provide required services.
Those responsibilities have become increasingly important following several shifts in federal policy, including the Trump administration rescinding guidance on how to uphold English learners’ civil rights, and the Education Department dismantling the only federal office dedicated to English-language acquisition by shifting programs, such as teacher-training research grants, to various other offices within the agency, Hopkins said.
Hopkins and Hayley Weddle, an assistant professor of educational foundations, organizations, and policy at the University of Pittsburgh, looked at a broad array of anti-DEI policies and practices ranging from book bans to executive orders filed over the past five years. The education leaders they interviewed detailed a variety of experiences with both restrictive formal legislation and rhetoric, including:
- A leader in a conservative state lost their job due to conflicting beliefs between high-level state education agency leadership and their commitment to multilingual-learner equity;
- A leader in a liberal state said they encountered deficit views of multilingual—often known as having less academic expectations of students due to their low English proficiency—at the highest levels of leadership, even as attention and funding for these students increased;
- And leaders across states said they had to support broad bills for dual-language education rather than legislation focused specifically on increasing English learners’ access to these programs, to make the legislation more palatable.
Stephanie Vogel, the multilingual programs manager at the Vermont education department and the president of the National Association of English Learner Program Administrators, told Education Week the study’s findings don’t surprise her since she’s heard similar sentiments from fellow state leaders.
Vogel said she’s grateful that her governor, a Republican, and state political leaders including the Democrat-led legislature support equity initiatives. Even so, schools in the state have been seeking guidance from the department on how to address growing absenteeism among immigrant students fearful of heightened immigration enforcement in Vermont and elsewhere.
Federal anti-immigrant rhetoric has also left schools across states needing guidance on how to address increased bullying of multilingual learners, Vogel said.
State leaders collaborate to serve ELs
When facing challenges to equity-driven work, state education agency leaders largely responded by reframing their work, citing research-backed best practices and federal civil rights law, Weddle said.
For instance, rather than using the terms equity, race, and culture, a leader in a politically purple state said they framed their multilingual-learner work as an effort to provide opportunity for students. And a leader in a red state described using research to push back against pressure to remove specific terms from state guidance, such as equity and culturally relevant.
“If it is backed by research, that is a line drawn,” the leader said in the study.
Leaders also cited federal civil rights and protections of English learners as supporting their work in the face of anti-DEI policies and politics, Weddle said.
Nevertheless, the loss of federal leadership, such as the staff of the former office for English language acquisition, can complicate state education leaders’ work in upholding these students’ federal rights.
