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with the largest immigrant populations, the debate over assimilation has played out in
battles between advocates of bilingual education and those who support “English
immersion” programs. A successful 1998 California ballot initiative, Proposition 227,
marked one of the first significant victories for the latter. The law requires all California
public schools to teach “limited English proficient” (LEP) students in special classes that
are conducted almost entirely in English, eliminating bilingual classes in most cases and
shortening the amount of time LEP students spend in special classes before moving into
regular classes.57
Public funding for immigrant education and English-language learning is complicated by
the fact that 75 percent of the country’s immigrant population is concentrated in a handful
of states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey.58 At the same time,
recent growth rates have been most dramatic in states with little prior experience in
educating immigrant children, such as Kansas, Georgia, Oregon, and North Carolina.59 The
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, an education reform initiative proposed by the Bush
administration and passed with broad bipartisan support in 2001, replaced the Bilingual
Education Act (BEA), or Title VII, with the English Language Acquisition Act. The change
amounted to a major overhaul of the priorities and kinds of language programs supported
by federal funds. Since 1968, the BEA had reserved a significant share of funding for
language programs that employed students’ native languages in instruction, fostering the
autonomous development of bilingual language programs in many districts; a 1974
Supreme Court ruling went even further, requiring schools to provide special instruction to
non-English-speaking students.60 The new NCLB-linked legislation focuses exclusively on
English-language skills and makes English-language proficiency a critical part of the state
learning standards on which NCLB as a whole is centered. The former federal Office of
Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA) is now the Office of English
Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-
English-Proficient Students. Rather than being administered by the federal government
through a competitive grant system, funding is now distributed through formulaic grants
by the states based on the number of English-language learners and immigrant students in
each district, giving state education agencies much greater control over funding
decisions.61
The Emergency Immigrant Education Program (EIEP) was established in 1984 to help state
educational agencies serve the influx of immigrant children in their schools. As of 1999,
the Department of Education identified the purpose of the program as the provision of
“high-quality instruction to immigrant children and youth…to help [them] make the
transition into American society and meet the same challenging State performance
standards expected of all.”62 NCLB changed the criterion for EIEP funding from the overall
number of immigrants to high growth in the immigrant population. As a result, the number
of immigrants who qualified in California fell from 206,000 to 133,000 the year after
NCLB was passed, while funding per student fell from $153 to $67.63
Public schools have not been the only battleground in the struggle over language in
America. An “English Only” movement has promoted legislation that would restrict or
prohibit the use of languages other than English by government agencies and, in some
cases, by private businesses. This movement gained momentum in the early 1980s, and
16 states now have such laws. Critics of English-only laws, such as the American Civil
Liberties Union, argue that they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment and could result in non-English speakers being deprived of critical

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