NEWSLETTER
We recently wrote about some of the reasons that may prevent teachers from going the bilingual educator route, despite the widespread need for teachers who can instruct English learners.
The need has taken on new urgency as The immigrant population is growing in the US.. Politicized confrontations On the country's immigration policy, the governor of Texas has bused newly arrived immigrants across the Mexican border to cities like NY, chicago and Denver. All districts in the three metropolitan areas report a shortage of bilingual teachers.
But this shortage is nothing new, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, showing that more than one-fifth of school districts had trouble filling at least one bilingual education or English as a second language position in 2011-12. That number increased to nearly a third of districts during the 2020-21 school year.
We dug into data from the National Center for Education Statistics to find out how the rate of English learners enrolled in public schools has changed over time.
In 2000, the concentration of English learners was strongest in the Southwest and other Western states, where nearly one in four California students was classified as an English learner.
By 2020, English learner populations had shifted away from only border states and major cities. Delaware had the largest increase of all states in its share of English learners, growing from 1.8 percent to 10.7 percent over the 20-year period. English learners are fastest growing Student demographics in the state, according to a Delaware nonprofit educational organization, account for one-fifth or more of students in some counties. By the numbers, Delaware saw an increase from about 2,000 English learners to nearly 14,600.
Tiny Rhode Island made the top 10 list with its share of English learners that year at 12.2 percent (or nearly 16,700 students), making it the fastest-growing student group in the state. In the capital of Providencia, one third of the students are English learners who speak one of 54 different languages at home.
The Midwest and Pacific Northwest also have more English learners than 20 years ago. While perhaps growing at more modest rates, all but nine U.S. states experienced an increase in the number of English learners during that period.
The three states that lost the largest percentage of English learners were California, Arizona and New Mexico, although the number of English learners they serve is not small. California, for example, had more than 1 million schools enrolled in 2020. That number had been more than 1.4 million in the Golden State back in 2000.
Texas was the only border state to buck the trend of losing English learners, increasing its English learner population to one-fifth of public school students in 2020, or 1 million English learners, up from about 570,000 two decades earlier.
