The Decade of the 1990s: The Lost Years of Opportunity for North Carolina’s ESL Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Issues and Possibilities in New Immigrant Gateway States: The Case of North Carolina

Abstract

Beginning in the 1980s, but gaining momentum in the 1990s, North Carolina’s k-12 schools experienced a dramatic increase in the number of limited English proficient (LEP) students enrolling in schools across the state. Largely due to the unprecedented number of Latinos migrating to the state, the schools reflected the demographic patterns of this new population. Unaccustomed to linguistic diversity, the state’s k-12 school systems struggled academically and economically with the new and novel demands placed on them by not only a desire to educate their LEP students, but by federal mandate. Looking to the North Carolina General Assembly for funding, k-12 school systems were denied any relief until 1999. In failing to acknowledge the looming educational crisis, politicians in the state effectively lost a decade of opportunity to fund effective English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for this new population. This lost decade of opportunity to fund ESL programs would result in negative consequences for the state’s k-12 LEP students, local education agencies, and potentially North Carolina as a whole. The objective of this study is to examine the funding of ESL programs in North Carolina in the 1990s. This is investigated via public news sources, North Carolina state legislative documents, published research, governmental public policy papers and documents, and personal communication. Using these resources this study demonstrates that despite a relatively rapid rise in the immigrant population in the 1990s, the pattern was identified in the early stage in the early 1990s, along with the concomitant effect this surge would have in the numbers of k-12 LEP students in the state’s schools. Secondly, drawing on Cervantes-Soon and Valenzuela's notion of subtractive policy (2010), this study seeks to explain that through a variety of political forces which became prominent during the 1990s, many North Carolina state politicians either did not recognize the need or were unwilling to take an unpopular political stand to provide funding the state’s ESL programs. As a result, North Carolina suffered significant negative consequences, both at a financial and societal level, because of the inability to address the need for ESL programs when it first became apparent. As a result, this study helps to elucidate the historical origins of ESL finance in North Carolina, the lack thereof, and the results of early inaction by politicians into the early 2000s.

Author

• Sharon LaBurt Shofer, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill