Many of the nation’s more than 5 million English learners enroll in elementary schools with educators hoping the students will reclassify out of language-development services by middle school.
But many carry the English-learner label well into middle and high school, when class schedules become more complex and graduation requirements take priority.
While the English-learner population is diverse across all grade levels, at middle and high school, educators tend to work with some key subgroups: newcomer students recently arrived in the country with varying degrees of English proficiency; long-term English learners who have been receiving language services since elementary school and face barriers to reclassification; developmental English learners who might have been newcomers at the elementary level and by middle or high school are close to reclassifying; and English learners with disabilities, also known as dually identified students.
These subgroups of older English learners require tailored support. Most districts and individual schools will likely have a mix of these students at once, said Ilana Umansky, an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon.
Research on supporting such students is still developing, while federal policy changes—including heightened immigration enforcement and the dismantling of the federal office for English learners—hinder schools’ abilities to work with some of these more vulnerable groups.
Educators and researchers spoke with Education Week about the challenges older English learners face beyond elementary grades and effective strategies schools can use to best serve them.
“Schools need to think less about whether a student is or is not an English learner and more about who you are as an English-learner-classified student. What’s your educational trajectory like? What needs do you have? How are you performing in different areas of your education? What are your interests?” Umansky said.
Newcomers require creative districtwide approaches
In the Chelsea school district in Massachusetts, close to half of its 5,700 students are identified as English learners.
In school year 2023-24, nearly one-quarter of all high school students enrolled in the district either were currently or had recently been newcomers, according to a report from the Annenberg Institute.
While most English learners are U.S.-born, some parts of the country have seen a rapid growth of newcomer students in recent years. Educators working with these students at the secondary level especially must navigate multiple realities at once.
Many older newcomer English learners balance school and employment. They often enroll after the start of the school year. They may be processing trauma from their journey to the United States. They may also have limited English proficiency as well as limited or interrupted formal education. Schools must help them reach language proficiency and graduation requirements within a small window of time.
“It’s a lot, and the teachers have to work extremely hard at making it work,” said Almudena Abeyta, the superintendent of the Chelsea district.
Over the years, Abeyta’s district has adapted to the growing newcomer population by creating targeted options. The Chelsea Opportunity Academy, for instance, is a school specifically for undercredited students 17 and older. The district also offers online tutoring programs for English learners. And schools have emphasized the importance of all teachers learning how to teach language, including in mainstream classrooms.
However, since late 2024, heightened local immigration enforcement has created disruptions. Most recently, Abeyta found the district’s newcomer enrollment decline significantly tied to students’ and families’ fears of enforcement in school communities. Despite this, schools remain committed to serving the remaining immigrant population.
At the district’s Joseph A. Browne Middle School, which offers grades 5-8, the immigrant student body is less made up of recently arrived immigrants and more of students who came to the country in elementary school. They possess baseline English skills but still need language services to fully reclassify, said Katie Cook, the school’s principal.
The school hired instructional coaches to assist teachers with integrating language instruction into academic subjects and established dedicated collaboration time for grade-level teams.- Browne Middle School is currently in the process of fully becoming a dual-language immersion program where all students would learn grade-level content in English and Spanish.
In Oregon, where Umansky works on research about English learners, developmental English learners like the ones at Cook’s middle school are more common than newcomers. But schools in the state must also navigate the education of long-term English learners.
State leaders can help support long-term English learners
Long-term English learners are students who enroll in kindergarten but remain in language-development services through middle and high school.
As a result of carrying the English-learner label for more than six years, they often miss out on core academic classes in favor of language-development classes.
“You’ll sometimes see schools assign secondary English learners one or two periods a day for English-language development, thus crowding out other content classes they could be taking, such as electives and even English/language arts classes,” Umansky said.
Effectively helping long-term English learners at the secondary level may require a reevaluation of state reclassification criteria and processes.
For instance, research in California found that even as students met the language proficiency required to reclassify, some remained in English-learner status due to academic requirements they failed to meet. Yet, because of their English-learner status, these students may not have gotten access to rigorous academic content that would have helped them meet those academic requirements to reclassify, Umansky said. State leaders in California are currently reviewing Assembly Bill 2555 that would remove the academic criteria.
But districts can also play a more direct role in helping long-term English learners succeed academically.
In a study published in August, Umansky and fellow researchers looked at statewide Oregon school data for the last 10 years to see when and how schools offer extra instructional time for secondary English learners and what effect, if any, that may have had on student outcomes.
They found that fewer than 1 in 5 English learners receive extra instructional time in the state of Oregon, and the groups most likely to get it were newcomers, English learners with disabilities, long-term English learners, and students in 11th and 12th grade. Extra instructional time could mean summer school programming, online programming, or even just filling up every school day period with classes.
Crucially, receiving extra instructional time for at least two high school years increased English learners’ likelihood of graduating with a regular diploma as opposed to a modified one, Umansky said. It didn’t have as big an impact on academic achievement, but English/language arts scores could go up if students received extra time specifically for those courses.
In general, part of what makes educating older English learners complicated is the complex nature of class scheduling at the middle and high school levels when academic tracking also comes into play.
Dually identified students depend on cross-departmental collaboration
English learners with disabilities are legally entitled to both special education and language-development services.
In practice, however, most only receive special education services, partly based on the assumption that these services are legally more significant, said Sara Kangas, the program director and an associate professor of special education and English-as-a-second-language programs at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
“If we’re not providing language-learning services to these children, how can we ever expect them to reclassify?” Kangas asked.
Scheduling constraints are the top reason teachers and administrators give for why language-development services aren’t provided to dually identified students, Kangas added. There’s also a long-standing shortage of both special education and English-as-a-second-language teachers, which further complicates schools’ abilities to offer both kinds of services to students.
When dually identified students do receive special education services, those services are restricted to lower-track courses. And often, some English learners aren’t even identified as needing special education services until around 4th or 5th grade, delaying access to key resources, Kangas said.
Structured collaboration between special education and ESL teachers and departments is crucial for working with dually identified students, Kangas added. Currently, ESL teachers might be excluded from individualized education program teams, while special education teachers may lack access to students’ language-proficiency data.
“When you have district leaders in multilingual learner and special education working together to tackle some of these issues, we see better results when they’re on the same page about the importance of dual services,” Kangas said.
She is hopeful that the research base on dually identified students is headed in the right direction, but work remains on improving the quality of education for these students, especially at the older grade levels.
“For years, the focus was really on how do we identify these children with a disability and are we doing it correctly or incorrectly. Now, research is starting to ask, what do we do after that?”
