In the history of American education, after Brown v. Board of Education the most significant federal decision affecting English Learners (ELs) across the nation was the 1968 Bilingual Education Act. Centuries after negating Spanish as an American language, opposing bilingualism in German common schools, and denigrating cosmopolitan language training in the Pacific Rim, Congress finally recognized the significance of natal languages other than English by funding federal legislation to establish the US Department of Education’s Office of Bilingual Education, known until recently as the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). As a prelude to an executive order earlier this year to abolish the Department of Education, the White House designated “English as the Official Language of the United States” on March 1. Twelve days later, the new administration officially “abolished” OELA—firing fourteen of fifteen staff members and transferring its duties, including oversight of “$890 million in federal Title III funds,” to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.Footnote ¹ At stake, alongside the educational outcomes of EL students, is research into and the implementation of the EL infrastructure, as the majority of OELA-designated funding is distributed as grants to school districts and institutions of higher education for creating and evaluating EL programs to improve student performance. These 2025 executive orders have set the stage for eradicating access to EL programs for over five million children across the US and its territories, and for returning EL classrooms to their 1960s pre-civil rights status.

Before bilingual education existed as a congressional mandate protected by federal law, US children who spoke languages other than English found themselves at the mercy of federal and state education administrators, school districts, and teachers who often emphasized “sink or swim” pedagogies rooted in segregated, pre-primary immersion programs.Footnote ² With the rise of common schools in the nineteenth century and the continuing xenophobia toward Indigenous peoples and immigrants, English became the primary language of public school instruction and was erroneously hailed as the national language.Footnote ³ Overarching scientific trends elevated “raciolinguistic ideologies” born out of the long histories of European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Spanish and US colonialism, for example, generated conceptualizations of race, color, language, and borders that stereotyped Latin America as “brown and Spanish-speaking” and the US as “white and English-speaking.”Footnote ⁴ These ideologies forged the reactionary extremism of English-only movements that appealed to the masses, including ambivalent Latinxs who embraced assimilationist politics and sought acceptance as “white Americans.”Footnote ⁵ These ideologies also produced counterposing demands across generations for bilingual and multilingual curricula that preserved Indigenous and immigrant languages and cultures.

The 2025 executive orders to dismantle language-acquisition programs also stands in defiance of the 1974 US Supreme Court ruling in Lau v. Nichols that mandates public school support for English learners and individual access to an equal education. In Lau, Chinese-descent families sued the San Francisco Unified School District for failing to provide EL programs to nearly two thousand Chinese-speaking children. The court assessed this failure as “discrimination in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations.”Footnote ⁶ Over the last fifty years, the Lau precedent has preserved the federal language rights of children from various backgrounds, including speakers of Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian, Haitian Creole, Hmong, Urdu, Korean, French, Swahili, Somali, Tagalog, and Indigenous languages from across Latin America such as the Mayan languages of Mam, K’iche’ and Q’anjob’al.Footnote ⁷

Despite parental and community challenges in the decades before Lau and the passage of the Equal Education Opportunities Act of 1974, English learners were generally characterized as “unfit” for democracy and “good citizenship.”Footnote ⁸ Some educational experts argued that non-English-speaking children had to be taught to recognize their subordinate place as laborers in the social hierarchy of American capitalism.Footnote ⁹ In cities across the nation, Puerto Rican and Mexican American parents and leaders confronted this thinking and demanded new forms of EL programs as remedies to the racial and language segregation of their children in “special” classrooms for children who were thought to have learning disabilities or disorders simply because they could not speak English.Footnote ¹⁰ Few English learners were lucky enough to encounter bilingual educators, which was sometimes possible in communities of color. These concerned teachers, including Rebecca F. Muñoz Gutiérrez, who taught Spanish-speaking children in Arizona and California (see Figure 1 below), deserve recognition for shifting the status quo about language acquisition and establishing new pedagogical standards that embraced students’ bilingualism as an asset or “superpower.”Footnote ¹¹ Supported by the National Education Association (NEA), a group of Tucson educators led by María L. Urquides (considered the “mother of bilingual education”) investigated how Southwestern school districts in twenty-one cities in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas independently implemented EL and bilingual education courses for Spanish-speaking students. Published in 1966 and later read into the Congressional Record, their report is the first assessment of dual-language programs conducted solely by bilingual, bicultural Spanish-speaking teachers.Footnote ¹² Their findings inspired the NEA to convene a conference on bilingual education in October 1966 at the University of Arizona (also known for its binational teacher exchange program with Sonora) that encouraged two members of Congress, Representative Edward R. Roybal (D-California) and Senator Ralph W. Yarborough (D-Texas), to propose legislation that resulted in establishing the Bilingual Education Act as Title VII of the ESEA.

Figure 1.

Los Angeles— A photo published in a news article covering a legislator’s visit to a bilingual education program. Rebecca F. Muñoz Gutiérrez taught Spanish-speaking children from 1939 to 1972. She was a leader of “Los Conquistadores,” the first Mexican American student organization at Arizona State University, and later of the California-based Mexican American Movement with her activist-husband Félix J. Gutiérrez.

Source: El Sereno Star (Los Angeles), Jan. 21, 1971, 1. Courtesy of Occidental College Special Collections & College Archives and the California Digital Newspaper Collection California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside, http://cdnc.ucr.edu.

Following guidance from the US Congress, the federal courts, educators, and parents, the US Department of Education (USDOE) became one of the earliest federal agencies to identify EL students as linguistic minorities, to develop cutting-edge “evidence-based research practices” for them, and to invest in bilingual education as “the fundamental tool to overcome inequality in education.”Footnote ¹³ For nearly sixty years, the USDOE and OELA have served as arbiters of educational and linguistic justice. Their loss returns us to a moment in time when deliberate discrimination reigned in our public schools and intentionally limited opportunities for English learners—immigrants, refugees, and citizens alike.