Carlos Guerras at the San Antonio Express-News writes this column on a recent Supreme Court decision that could affect Texas schools.
No, not the case where Arizona school officials ordered a 13 year-old female student strip-searched.
I am referring to Horne vs. Flores, a case filed by parents of Nogales students who charged that Arizona’s paltry spending to teach “English language learners” — or ELLs — denied them an equal education because they weren’t learning English well.
Ensuring equity meant increasing spending on English Language learning programs. Filed in 1992, a decision on the case forced the Arizona legislature to comply with law, as well as increase its spending on these programs. After several more decisions that increased spending, the case ended up at the SCOTUS.
The U.S. Court of Appeals returned the case to the lower court and voided the fines, but the lower court ruled, again, that the state was still not compliant.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling Thursday gave Arizona a partial victory. It says that spending levels, alone — and in only one county — don’t prove that Arizona is violating the Equal Education Opportunity Act’s requirement that “appropriate action to overcome language barriers” be taken.
But the justices also returned the case to the lower court with orders to consider four changes that have occurred since 1992: that Arizona now uses English immersion instead of bilingual education to teach English, that the No Child Left Behind Act is now law, that overall funding for ELLs has risen, and that Nogales’ school programs have changed. They also ordered that all schools be studied.
Then, the Supreme Court justice who recently sided against Civil Rights in the Ricci case, blurted this out in the opinion.
Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, however, indicates that issues other than funding may have been on the majority’s minds, as is evident in a footnote that wonders if other reasons “such as drug use and the prevalence of gangs” might not account for the ELLs’ low academic performance.
That’s before he espoused some Republican talking points on “immersion.”
Guerra then points to Justice Breyer’s minority opinion.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who, in the minority opinion, responded brilliantly, writing that Arizona’s English-immersion program is still a work in progress and that the state also uses new metrics to measure success that are, as yet, unproven, and that there is ample research that found bilingual education is superior.
In a nutshell, he implied that the majority seemed to cherry pick the research to support a foregone conclusion.
Bilingual Education has come a long way since its inception, and it has withstood the test of time. What began as a program targeting Mexican American students who did not do so well in English (at least in South Texas) has become a program to enrich the skills-set of new Americans. The main problem for K-12 education is funding and the mechanisms through which it is funded. Without changing this, then equity based on the amount of money that the mechanisms allow will still lead to a lack of equity and fairness for the vast majority of public schools.
