Standards - English as a Second Language (ESL) programs

Equity, not just equality. It is not enough to simply have availability, there needs to also be access. Learn about the laws and supreme court case that gave us ESL programs. 

This administration's bigoted and xenophobic attack on this country extends to the department of education, which they are actively attempting to dismantle.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, MJ, have you ever been thrown into a class where they're teaching in a language that you only vaguely understand?

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Yeah, I think that's the quintessential immigrant experience, unless you immigrated from a country where English is like a predominant language. And as a Asian American, I guess most immigrants, immigrant children, that is, uh, who don't have a good basis in English, the first day of school can be quite confusing. You're just sort of like straining to hear, like try to pick up nouns and verbs and ignore all the adjectives, try to get what the gist of the sentence is, what people are saying.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

I had to do sort of like a Spanish immersion thing for field work I was doing. I remember spending an awful lot of time watching their faces, trying to figure out what they were asking me based on like their expression.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Context clues, yeah. Yes. A lot of that. This is when you don't understand the language that well. You want to use all the clues you can get. So you're like looking at their faces, you're looking at the faces of people around you. Oh, yes. Trying to just grab words that you know and piece them together. Quintessential immigrant experience, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yeah. So it sounds like you have more experience with this than I do.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

So I'm assuming you have very strong opinions about English as a second language programs.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

I think strong in that I think they're good. That counts as strong. I'm not so well versed in the actual research about it, whether I can make a judgment of like how effective they are or not. I don't know enough about this field, but I think it's good. I think the fact that they exist is good.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

We're just gonna throw it down at the start of the episode. They work.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah, that's my experience. They certainly were very helpful. And I took ESL when I first immigrated. I was fourth grade, and they were very helpful. It was, I don't know what the standard is with ESL, but essentially every ESL student, regardless of their background, were sort of put in the same space. They didn't like segregate into like, oh, here's all the Chinese-speaking students, right? Here's all the Spanish. It's like if English is just a second language, you're in the same space. And it wasn't so much that they're trying to teach us English, it's more that it is just a safe space where everyone is sort of on a similar playing field. I actually don't have that much memory of what goes on in that classroom. Again, not well versed in what the standard is for ESL.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

So basically, it's like a supplement so that you can get the additional help that you need, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Yeah. My memory of this is very vague. It's been a while.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Maybe this will jog your memory, because today we are actually going to talk about the support and the funding that the Department of Education provides for English language learning students.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

I wonder what happened to that funding.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

I'll give you one guess.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Is it they're cutting it?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Shocker!

SPEAKER_01 2:41

How did you know? In this administration? Oh, dang.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

So we're going to talk about what essentially comes down to attempts to starve a program of funding so that they can then claim it doesn't work. But also how this administration is going to get around ending a congressionally mandated program without congressional approval.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

This is Standards, a Public Health for Everyone podcast, tracking the regulations that keep us safe and the efforts to dismantle them.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

And we're Elizabeth and MJ, two public health scientists trying to remind people that rules and limitations aren't always a bad thing. Regulations are written in blood, and the question is, whose blood are we using?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

I guess in this case, the blood is sort of wasted potentials because you're not providing the right environment for people to thrive. Today's episode is about ESL, but I can imagine how this is sort of related to the broader conversation about the Department of Education.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that everyone is aware that the current administration would like to shut down the Department of Education. In fact, they actually stated, the Secretary of Education stated that that was their goal, and that's what they were working on, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah. The Department of Education is historically has always been unfairly hated and scapegoated. Yes. This is not new in a sense that Republicans have always attacked it in recent memory. The only difference is that they are now finally doing it. Previously, all the attempts sort of petered out eventually, but now it's actually serious. They actually are taking concrete steps to dismantle the entire Department of Education, which I guess raised this very pertinent question. What does the Department of Education actually do?

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, and you know, it's funny. Well, no, it's not funny.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

But you don't actually have to go back that far in US history to see where it was not one of the political parties' goals trying to get rid of the Department of Education. There was a lot of attempt to reform it. And I mean that was huge through the early 2000s.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

That was one of Bush's main talking points.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Right. And it's really only been, I want to say, in the last 10, 15 years, where people have jumped on this bandwagon of get rid of the Department of Education. It is a woke department and they're just trying to brainwash our children.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

It's, I want to say, Obama's second term is when it got kind of serious about it. That sounds about right. Like many things, it's a backlash to electing a person of color as president. Now, I think it's important to sort of go over this because you might be thinking, Department of Education, like, what does it have to do with woke? And the main reason why they think that is because the Department of Education's their main purpose is not actually setting curriculums.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

That is the state level responsibility, sometimes smaller. Sometimes that's like a local school board responsibility.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Yeah, and actually, local school boards have a lot more power over what your children learn than the federal government.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Yes, a hundred percent. That's why those meetings are so important and you should try to attend them if you can.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

The state of Texas actually has a lot more influence in what kids are taught than the federal government because of textbooks. Uh, they set what a lot of the textbook manufacturers put in their textbooks.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah. And I think that's an important point because if the Department of Education is in the business of setting curriculums, they wouldn't want to dismantle it. They would want to infiltrate it. Right. But because that's not their purpose, they want to dismantle it. And let's get into what the Department of Education actually does.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

So the Department of Education basically it funds programs and it ensures equal access to education. It provides oversight, it provides funding. Yeah, actually, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

That is their main purpose is to prevent discrimination, to make sure that everyone has equal access, therefore, giving funds and grants to schools that may need assistance and ensuring that there's no gaps in our education system. Right. This is why they hate it, because it is fundamentally about equity. That's what the department's job is.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

So at this point, you might be saying, Oh, but they set guidelines about what people are supposed to learn at different levels. And yes, they do set guidelines, and those guidelines are to ensure that people are in fact getting access to education.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Yes, those are the guidelines.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Still not curriculum setting, it's all about access.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

All about access, all about addressing disparities. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Department of Education actually they don't have that much regulatory power.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

They really do not. It's I don't want to say it's mostly based on vibes, but it's kind of based on vibes.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Kind of based on vibes. It's up to the states to adhere to those recommendations, I think.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Right. It is. They used to at least provide comparisons. So data that you could look to see at, well, what is this state and how is this state doing compared to my state? But as in like going in and arresting teachers or firing teachers, that's not something they really have the power to do.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Nor in the business of doing.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yeah, and you know, it's funny, given as how it it was directly stated that this administration wants to get rid of the Department of Education, it's actually not in the news very much.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

I think this is just the effect of there are other more catastrophic things in the news. I feel like in any other times this would be more in the news, but there's only a certain uh limited bandwidth regarding what the public notice, I think.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yeah, well, maybe, except I would argue this is fairly catastrophic as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Definitely catastrophic. But is it World War III catastrophic? I guess is sort of a comparison we're dealing with.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Yeah, although I will say that from a public health standpoint, what's happening here has huge implications.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Absolutely. And let's get into it. So that's sort of what the Department of Education does. What how does that have to do with ESL, which is the main focus of our episode?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

So the Department of Ed oversees grants for funding ESL programs. And what you might not know or you may not have heard is that, well, over the summer, the Trump administration paused all payment to ESL programs. Although I think it was paused for about a month and then they were forced to release them. They also reduced the staffing in the office that oversees these programs. There's now just a single person responsible for all the programs in the entire country.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

We talked about this strategy before. If you can't make it disappear completely, you just make it so impossible to administer it that it practically disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah, and along those same lines, any online toolkits that were available for people who were working in these programs, they've all disappeared. They're just gone now. And the administration revoked guidelines on how to train teachers in ESL programs. So they played games with the funding, they took down the material for training, they gutted the staff who is responsible for the oversight, and now they've actually proposed cutting funds for the programs entirely.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Like classic deregulation, classic like dismantling of things that were put in place for a very specific reason.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Telling you, not great. I'm assuming most people who've listening to this are not surprised to hear that education level has actually a huge impact on public health.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

That's one of those classic correlations that is very hard to dismiss.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Yeah. People who have higher educational attainment spend longer in school, live longer.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

They make more money, they have better life outcomes in general. Overall, just a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Right. These programs are aimed at getting kids through school, successfully through school. So by denying the support, we are creating a public health crisis.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

It's just going to be a couple years down the road.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

We won't see the full impact of this until unfortunately maybe five, maybe ten years later. So let's talk about what the actual piece of regulation is that determines the ESL program's existence.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

I don't think anyone's gonna be shocked by the name of the act. It's actually the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It is the act that funds elementary and secondary education programs.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Would you look at that? Very good things.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Shocking. So the federal funds for these ESL programs are known as Title III funds. That's because the guidelines and the funding for these programs are set out in Title III Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Pretty logical, right? And the reason we have this is because every child in the United States has the right to a free public kindergarten through 12th grade education, regardless of their immigration status, race, or background. That's not just me saying that. I pulled that quote directly from the Department of Education's website.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

And that has been their mission for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Right. This is not a controversial idea or it hasn't been a controversial idea in the US. Free schools for kids were being provided as early as the late 1700s. And honestly, by 1930, every single state required children to attend and successfully graduate elementary school.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

We talked about this a little bit in one of our older series, Public Health and Retrograde, about the establishment of public schools in the United States. And it's not just like a liberal enlightenment impulse. It was very practical. The more educated your citizens are, the more productive they are in factories and in like farms, etc. Right? It is a very practical thing that it's not just like, oh, education liberal arts. It was not that at all. No. There's a reason why it wasn't controversial. Like they want better workers.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

And in a way, it's still not controversial because I think most people would say, yeah, kids should be learning. And the argument really comes down to what they're learning, but not necessarily the idea that they should be learning.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

They should be learning. I mean, we'll get into this in a little bit, but this aggression on ESL is specifically targeting kids that they think don't deserve to learn. Yes. And that's the whole thing. So that's the legislative basis for the ESL program. Why do we have this?

SPEAKER_00 12:57

So although all the states had agreed, more or less, that kids should be in elementary school, we didn't actually have any federal legislation about education until the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement really birthed this idea of federally funded educational programs because of the idea that people should have the right to an education no matter what race they are, no matter what background they are, no matter what is happening in their family. They should have this education. That is a civil rights issue.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

The first act dealing with English as a second language learners was passed in 1968. It's called the Bilingual Education Act. It relatively quickly was passed, actually. It was introduced in 1967 and underwent some revisions. And then it ended up being signed into law in January 1968. So less than a year. There was broad consensus that this was important.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

It makes practical sense too, right? The more people that can speak English, the easier it is for them to find work, the better workforce you have as a country, right? It's very practical. It's not just like, oh, you know, liberal civil rights. It's a very practical decision, too.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

It's funny you say that. It is a practical decision, but there was no real appetite to do this in the 1950s. And that's because they were still deep in the grip of anything foreign might be communist. Yes. So the idea that you would provide programs to help people who don't speak English fluently to better learn English, I guess, somehow meant that the communists were gonna take over.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

It didn't make sense then. It's not gonna make sense now, right? Like we shouldn't get into the psyche of these xenophobic, you know, anti-communist people. We can't understand them.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

That's fair. So in the uh 1960s, people really started thinking that we should do something about this. And actually, one representative who voted for this act, he pointed out that among Mexican-American students, there was a 50% dropout rate from high school because they were struggling to keep up with their English-speaking peers in school, and eventually they just gave up trying. There were states and individual school districts were running programs, but it wasn't universal and the coverage was pretty spotty. So depending on where someone lived, they may not get the support they needed. But I think the biggest thing about the bilingual education act is that it sort of marked this shift from this idea that students should be afforded equal educational opportunity, that educational policy should work to equalize academic outcomes. So it's not enough to give people equal access. If someone is struggling, you need to give them extra access or extra help so that they can reach the same outcomes as their non-struggling peers. Yeah, and this makes intuitive sense. Right, but it was revolutionary at the time.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

I'm sure it was in the 60s of American history, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Yeah, and so when it started, the Bilingual Education Act was just a grant-giving program. The feds would give monetary grants to local school districts to support innovated educational programs, and these programs were for students with limited English-speaking ability. At this point, most of the emphasis was on students who primarily spoke Spanish or whose Spanish was their first language.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Yeah, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

And one of the compromises that ended up being made is that this particular program was really limited in scope when it was first happened. Participation was voluntary, so school districts didn't have to participate. They could. Right. Which means that reach wasn't great. And in 1972, there was approximately five million school kids who were eligible for this program, but only about a hundred and thousand were enrolled nationally.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Yeah. I mean, this is what happens when the regulation doesn't have teeth. I mean, they incentivize it in the sense that they were willing to provide the grant for schools to do this, but that obviously wasn't enough. Like you need to have, I guess, what in public health calls regulatory floors to make sure that it's not just if they feel like it, they can do this thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

You're absolutely right. And for the Bilingual Education Act, that actually came as the result of a court case. If you know anything about educational court cases, you probably know Brown versus Board of Education. But if you know just a little bit more, then you've probably heard of this one.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

If you just know a little bit more. I actually haven't heard of this one.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

I'm interested to learn. Or if I did at one point, obviously didn't make that big of an impression, so I'm interested to learn.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

That's funny because it's it was in your neck of the woods.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

California? Yeah. I can see why it's in California. It's a state that really prospered due to immigration, especially from Asian countries. So, all right, tell me about this court case.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

All right. The year is 1974. The San Francisco School District had recently begun desegregating.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Mm-hmm. Good.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

This was in response to a court case in 1971, and they ran into an unexpected problem, which is that there were almost 3,000 Chinese and Latino students who were not fluent in English who were suddenly integrated into the school district. So there's almost 3,000 of them, a third of them were offered supplemental English language support. The others were essentially thrown in and told to make it work. And often a lot of them ended up in special ed classes, or they ended up having to repeat the same grade multiple times, not because they weren't smart enough, but because they did not speak the language.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

If someone needs help and you don't provide them help, it shouldn't surprise you that they struggle.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

And this was one of those things. The San Francisco School District was following the court order and they were integrating everyone, but they didn't think beyond that. And as a result, they had this big problem. Actually, it was a group of Chinese students, their parents, the students and the parents actually both had limited English proficiency, and they met up with a public interest lawyer to sue the head of the school district.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Rightfully so.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

And so the case is called Lao versus Nichols. Kenny Kinman Lao is one of the kids whose parents were part of the lawsuit, and Alan Nichols was the head of the school district.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

The parents alleged that the students were not receiving special help and they were entitled to special help under the 14th Amendment and also the Civil Rights Act. The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection, and the Civil Rights Act bans educational discrimination. And so their argument was these are being violated. Our kids deserve more.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Yeah, we're being thrown in special ed classes and forced to repeat the same grade and not providing the right tools for us to succeed, right? It should be a slam-dung case.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Well, it's funny you say that.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Well, there's a reason why it got to the Supreme Court, right? So it wasn't a slam-dung case.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

No, actually, the parents lost both the initial trial and the appeal in the Ninth Circuit.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Yikes.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Because the judges there focused on the equal protection part of the argument. So the 14th Amendment. And the argument was that every student was given the same access to instruction. So there was no discrimination. And discrimination due to English fluency wasn't intentional if it happened. And the school district's argument was that they were not required to make up for the different starting points of the students. They were providing education. It was not up to them to make sure that the students could access it.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Now, this is a incredibly dumb argument because I don't know. Maybe they should try learning Chinese. See how that works out for them, you know? Thrown into like, I don't know, some Taiwanese high school. It's like, yeah, we're gonna do trigonometry in Chinese.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Let's see. You don't know the alphabet, so good luck trying to.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

We don't have the alphabet. It's all character-based. Yeah. Memorize a thousand characters before you come back.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Numbers are all the same, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:48

This is such a weak argument. Like, I bet I want to say there's a good chance that they probably don't speak a second language like any of these people. Who knows? Maybe they do.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Well, I mean, the Supreme Court agreed with you. The Supreme Court actually, it was a unanimous opinion. No, that is rare. Yeah, and there was at least one concurrent opinion in addition to majority opinion. There may have been two concurrent opinions, which is it's a slam dunk. Yeah, and so the Supreme Court actually they didn't focus on the Fourteenth Amendment at all. They focused on the Civil Rights Act. Their reasoning is that the school district retrieved federal funding, so it's required to provide equal opportunities and access to all students. Even though the school district provided equal treatment for all students, the school did not provide equitable treatment. Because they didn't give this equitable treatment to the non-English speaking students, since they couldn't understand the class material effectively, they were being deprived of a meaningful education. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

We talked about the difference between equality and equity many times on this podcast. And I think this is just such a clear example of it that in order for people to be at the same level, those who need more help need more assistance, right? It's a very simple concept. You see this difference being abused a lot by conservatives. This is like the all lives matter sort of deal, where it's like, no, you know, all lives matter, not just black lives. It's like, well, you guys are specifically hurting a particular group of people more than others. And that's why Black Lives Matter is like kind of an important slogan.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Yeah, just because saying that Black Lives Matter does not mean that you're saying no one else's lives matter. And saying that students with limited English fluency need extra help does not mean that you are saying that other students don't deserve an education.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

To me, it's a very simple argument for why equity is more important than equality, especially in cases like this. And I'm glad for once the Supreme Court did the right thing, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

I should also mention the concurrent opinion, which Justice Blackman wrote, said that in his opinion, he thought the decision would be different if it were only a few students, but that it was 2,000 students, and the scale of that is suggesting the systematic bias, we'll say.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

That's a very clear display of that. If it's one single family, I feel like this case would definitely have a different outcome. Even though that one single family definitely deserved that level of help, regardless, but from public perception.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Right. That student deserves an education.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Everyone deserves an education.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

So Law vs. Nichols, it really brought up this idea that it's not just educational equality, it's educational equity. I'll briefly mention this. This actually, in addition to causing amendments in the Bilingual Education Act, it also led to the passage of something called the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, which is now currently part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Nixon had initially proposed this in 1972, and it hadn't really gone anywhere. But after this case, people became interested in this idea again and decided to pass it. And it basically prohibits discrimination against faculty, staff, and students, including racial segregation, and it requires school districts to take action to overcome barriers.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Yeah, very rational, very reasonable, in my opinion. And just think of the situation reverse. If the school was teaching in all Chinese and there are a bunch of people who don't speak Chinese, you can't be like, we gave them the opportunity to learn trigonometry. That argument doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

No, it really doesn't. Anyone who has been dropped in a place where you don't speak the language knows how hard it is.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Yeah, it's not easy.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Trying to figure out anything.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Let alone trigonometry, of all things. Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

So these two things, the uh Lalverse Nichols and the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, really kicked off revisions and amendments to the Bilingual Education Act. It was repeatedly expanded and refined and re-upped, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Updated, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Actually, until 2002, at which point it ended up being replaced by No Child Left Behind.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Yeah, I think we can't talk about that right now, but yeah, so what happened?

SPEAKER_00 24:57

We're gonna talk about it very briefly because of how it sets up what the situation we're now in. So No Child Left Behind.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Infamous.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Passed in 2002, and it was actually a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It was just a specialized naming for that reauthorization. And because of No Child Left Behind explicitly stated that the focus for English as a second language programs would be English acquisition.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Yeah, which is a very different tone.

SPEAKER_00 25:28

And for anyone who is not familiar with No Child Left Behind, the big consequence of it is that we started doing a lot of testing on our kids, and that schools were graded based on the percentage of their students that achieved satisfactory marks, and schools would be punished if they had too many students failing.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

This was a it's such an incredible case study of many things, including education policy, but also a little bit of psychology almost, in that testing kids is not the problem with no child left behind, is the tying the incentives to those test scores because as soon as that occurs, then it becomes a way to game the system. Yes. But also, No Child Left Behind was founded on erroneous presumption that education alone can fix everything. Yes. It's under the assumption that schools, if you're doing a good job, they should be all getting saturated marks without taking into consideration, again, second language or their personal family life, or what neighborhood they live in, whether they have access to food. It's not taking into any of that into consideration.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Fun fact children learn better if they are not hungry.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah. I wonder why school lunches are so important and school breakfasts are so important, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Not the focus of this episode, but yes.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Not the focus. We have to move on. Yes. No child left behind. Infamous.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

No child left behind resulted in the Bilingual Education Act actually being renamed the English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement Act. And it moved it to Title III, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Hence Title III funds.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

And the vibes are very different.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

The vibes are very different. The other two things to keep in mind with No Child Left Behind is it capped the funding for bilingual education programs at half as what it had been previously. So it shrank the amount of funding for these programs. And it also did not require that any bilingual education programs undergo evaluation. So cut the money, remove the oversight, but still test your students and pay no attention to whether your students can speak English.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

This is one of the many examples why No Child Left Behind was such a catastrophic failure. It fundamentally does not understand how education works.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Right. It was at best, it was very naive.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

At best. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

So No Child Left Behind was actually replaced in 2015.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

By the Obama administration.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

Yeah. When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was reauthorized in 2015. What do they call it now? Every Student Succeeds Act.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Yeah, something.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

No, that's actually what they call it. And so they actually, in the Every Student Succeeds Act, they did include updated requirements for the education of English learners, including standardized criteria for identifying these students and the inclusion of English proficiency as a measurement of school quality. So still not perfect, but now there's a systematic way to identify students who need help. And also they're measuring the number of students who need help, which is apparently something we hadn't done before, uh, which I'm trying really hard not to think too badly about.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

It's incredible how bad no child left behind is. Whoever came up with that policy was on something else, destroyed an entire generation of American kids.

SPEAKER_00 28:51

Yeah, I laughed so I don't cry.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Yeah, it's depressing here, folks. Anyway, so that was the history of ESL. That was a history of why we have it and sort of how it works.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

And that is where we are now. Well, that's where we were until this past summer when the Trump administration froze all Title III funds to schools. No warning, they just did it.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Yeah, illegally, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Yeah, they were forced to uh disperse them, I think it was a month later, and that was$890 million. Although they were forced to pay them out this year for the 2026 federal budget. The Trump administration eliminated Title III funds entirely. They don't want them. The House version of the budget also eliminates these funds, but the Senate budget holds funding at 890 million. And we don't really know what's gonna happen. They're still negotiating. I have no idea. The Trump administration says that this is budget saving, um, and it's also going to reduce federal overreach.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excuses, excuses.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

These are things that we don't need to pay for. The state should take care of this.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

That's their excuse, but we know why they really did it.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Right. Well, and I should point out that these funds are meant to pay for things like after-school tutoring, family outreach, teacher training, other programs that can provide extra support to students. This is not the primary funding for English's second language students. This is supplemental. It's always meant to be supplemental and it's always been supplemental. And it's not very much.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

It's not very much in a grand scheme of things. It also goes to show you how their cuts are as malicious as they are incompetent.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

They actually don't know how anything works. They just have this blind mission to destroy anything that would even resemble helping people that they deem as unworthy, and they're just gonna cut whatever they see fit without actually understanding what the thing they're cutting is.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Yeah, and 890 million, yes, it sounds big to an individual person, but when we break it down into how much money is going per student, it's actually very little. In 2021, the 2021 to 2022 school year, which is the last year that we have the census data for this, it ended up coming out to$169 per each student per year.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Per year. Per year. Yes, that's how ridiculous it is. They want to gut this, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:25

It's already been dropping in the 2007 to 2008 school year. The federal government was spending$264 per student per year. But the budget has not been increasing with the number of students who need who are learning English. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

It's already dropping, it's already underfunded.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

We went from 264, it's decreased.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Decrease per student per year. It's already underfunded, and they still want to cut this, which tells you that this has nothing to do with any of the proponent excuse that they use, which is savings or overreach. In what cases is overreach? It makes no sense.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

Yeah, the states and the local school districts are providing far more support than the federal government to each of these students. It's hard to estimate how much it costs for each student. There's a lot of variability depending on state for one. Sure, yeah. But we do have an estimate from Vermont in 2024, and that they were spending at least$1,700 per student per year on these programs.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

It's very much and has always been a state-level issue and a state level program. The Department of Education, again, is largely a guidance and additional funding and aid determination sort of setup.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

Again, what overreach?

SPEAKER_00 32:39

It's not overreach. This is exactly how a federal program is supposed to work. Yes. And okay, you might be saying, oh, but it's$890 million. We we can save that. But don't forget, can we? Can't we, though?

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Let's think about this, you know?

SPEAKER_00 32:55

It strikes me as the sort of thing that is pennywise and pound foolish.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Let's think about the terms of future earnings and future contribution to our economy. We know that kids who struggle as a result of poor English fluency are more likely to drop out, as in not finish high school. We saw that in the 1960s, and that was we see it today. We see it today. Nothing has changed in that behavior. And in 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that every high school dropout cost the economy$272,000 over their lifetime in terms of tax contributions and higher reliance on public safety programs like Medicare or Medicaid, I guess. So that's per person. Add that up when you are dealing with the number of people who are in this group. That's a hell of a lot of money.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

This is to me the equivalent of like, hey, we can save so much cost on gas and electricity if we just never cook our chicken and eat it raw. We could save so much money. Like, think of the gas bill. So much money we spent like heating up food. What if we just eat it raw?

SPEAKER_00 34:04

Everything should be raw, and then we don't have to pay for electricity.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

The argument of like this is saving money is wrong on every single level. This relates to another episode that we covered in a spin-off podcast, uh Death by Doctrine. They are so keen on saying, oh, too many people are relying on these safety programs. We can't have too many people rely on these safety programs. At the same time, refusing to invest in people so they don't need to rely on the safety programs. Like they're creating like a self-sustaining problem. Cut the support that people need, more people rely on safety programs, complain about people relying on safety programs, cut more support that they need. The problem never solves itself. It can't.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Yeah, and not providing an education to students who have limited English proficiency is expensive.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

So expensive.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

They don't just disappear.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

They're still there. They have to be. You know what's even funnier to me is the fact that by not providing ESL and support that these students who don't speak English, by not providing that support, that means you need more H1B visa immigrants to fill those high-skilled jobs. You hate immigrants, and yet you're fueling the problem of our labor markets needing immigrants to fill those jobs that we can't fill domestically. Your ideology is inherently self-conflicting and it generates problems that it doesn't need to.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Yeah, and you know, I think it's really important to think about who does this action benefit. It's not the students.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

No, definitely not.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Right. And I mean, we know, we know what the thought process is. People who need help who are not fluent in English must be illegal immigrants. That's what they're thinking.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

That's the white nationalist frame of mind, yes.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Right. At best, about 10% of the school kids in this country are considered, they have limited English fluency. At best, 12% of those are undocumented immigrants. In fact, I can't believe I have to point this out because it should not matter. But many, if not the majority, of English's second language or ESL students were born in the US. They are U.S. citizens.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

Because that's how immigration works. They're U.S. citizens.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

They are U.S. citizens. They were born here. Their family may not speak English that well. And so when by the time they get to school, they have not been exposed to English the same way that their classmates might have been.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

And they need that extra help. And by not helping them, you are denying them, as we see in the case Lau versus Nichols, the proper education that they deserve. And it is expensive when you deny them that education. And I would just like to point out another thing. It is so beneficial to society to have bilingual citizens. It's incredibly beneficial to the point where it's like if you can achieve bilingualism naturally without taking a bunch of courses in college, that's so good for you and society as a whole that we don't have to, I don't know, use a translator app or something. That's just like that's just one example. But it's so good for filling those high-skilled jobs to have bilingual applicants.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

It's really beneficial for national security jobs.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

That too. You want people to not just take that language in college, you want people to actually have some cultural attachment to that language so they can understand the subtleties of different languages that unfortunately a college course probably skips.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:25

Anyway.

SPEAKER_00 37:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

Yikes.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

I know. This all happened, started happening in the summer. There was just a little bit of coverage about it, and then it sort of faded from the media. And it was brought back up in my mind, at least, when uh I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

This is gonna make Resident Nazi Stephen Miller. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

Yeah, I was gonna say, you know exactly where I'm going with this.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Yeah, resident Nazi Stephen Miller made an incredibly ignorant comment to the point where it's actually kind of hilarious.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

That immigrant students bring our test scores down. And I forget what else he said about it.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Yeah. First generation students bring down test scores, and that's why we shouldn't be educating them, I think.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Yeah, something ridiculous like that.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

Yeah, and first gen students as a group tend to score lower because a lot of them are still learning English. You don't say it's really hard to be tested in a language that you are not fluent in.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

Like again, flip the switch. Like, that's administer all the tests in Chinese and see what happens. Yeah. I bet the situation is reversed. Right. The moral framework that they have to come up with a conclusion that because their test scores are lower, so that we should stop educating them is something else.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

Right. Their test scores are lower, therefore they must be dumber.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

In their mind, it can't possibly be anything else. Anyway, so that was a really silly and wrong comment. And also, as an Asian American, watching that comment made me laugh so hard because if you look at any standardized test, Asians blow every other race out of the water. It's not even close. Asian Americans, by definition, are either immigrants or children of immigrants by definition.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

Is so hilarious. Like, you know, yeah, take out the Asians. See what that does to your test score. Yeah. Oh, so funny.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Not gonna go well. Well, okay. I guess. Do you want to end on a little bit of a bright spot?

SPEAKER_01 39:10

Sure. Let's uh let's end happy.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Illinois and Massachusetts recently passed laws that guarantee students will get an education no matter what their immigration status is. Good. Including students who need help with English fluency. And Michigan recently bolstered their requirements and the oversight for how these English as a second language students are being taught.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Good. Okay, we're seeing some states take the initiative to say, nah, we're not gonna do any of that stuff and actually help out their population for once.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Yeah, and so they pass these laws. Other states have laws like this in place.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

I wonder which states.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Now I'm regretting that I didn't actually look for a comprehensive list. You know what? Be happy with what I gave you.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Yes, I'm happy with what you gave me. And I hope every state does this, but just me knowing how America works, I bet not every state. And another funny thing, it's like, oh, these immigrants are not assimilating. Well, you know what helps them assimilate? Speaking English. Like ESL would help them assimilate, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Yeah, particularly now that it's our national language, right? Didn't we have an executive order? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

It's a vanity thing, it's it has no actual meaning whatsoever. Anyway, so there's that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

But anyway, there you go. Little bit of happiness to uh send you off into the rest of the week.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

Just remember that education is important. And when someone say they want to get rid of the Department of Education, that should be a red flag for everyone. Like education is such a good thing for public health and every other thing. We should definitely be making sure that every child has access and also the right support that they need to achieve the same level education so that they can succeed and thrive in the society, which is what we want. Thank you for listening to Public Health Is for Everyone. This is Standards, a podcast series about how regulation is kind of good actually, and covering the efforts to deregulate all these things that keep us safe. Please follow us on Bluesky Mastodon. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at everything ispublichealth at gmail.com. All the information regarding this podcast and also our sibling podcast, Everything is Public Health, can be found on our website, everything is publichealth.com. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, public health is for everyone.