After Flores: The Evolution of State Legislation and Perspectives on English Language Learner Education

• In Event: Flores v. Arizona: Legal, Political, and Pedagogical Implications for English Language Learners

Abstract

Flores v Arizona spans over 20 years worth of litigation and has become the impetus for creating House and Senate bills that have all but stalled out the education of English language learners (ELLs) in Arizona (Martinez-Wenzl, Pérez, & Gándara, 2012). Twenty years later, educators and scholars are still discussing the same inadequacies about the curriculum and instruction provided to ELL students. The Latino influx has not stopped in these twenty years (Morrison Institute for Public Policy, 2012), nor has the Flores case, but the evolution of ELL education has seemingly ground to a halt. For better or worse, Arizona’s legislators have impacted the way ELL education is approached at not only the local level but also the state level. In order to properly understand the impact of this case, it is necessary to draw connections through time to the written legislation and its overall impact on public education and the state of ELL student outcomes.

There are approximately 166,000 ELL students in need of appropriate English language instruction (Migration Policy Institute, 2010). Informal discussions with front line teaching staff all point to a stringent immersion curriculum as part of the challenge in resolving this issue. Using scholarly literature, grey literature and data surrounding Flores legislation, this paper describes the evolution of state legislation alongside perspectives on ELL education in order to understand how Arizona continues to struggle in creating educational opportunities for all of its children. Data used was collected from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the National Center For Educational Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, the Arizona Department of Education, the Arizona English Language Leaner Assessment, the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards, as well as scholarly articles, state court mandate documents and grey literature.

The overall result of Flores has been 20 years of litigation, state legislation, federal guideline change, mandates, and court posturing. The decisions made have left ELL students with as inadequate an education as they received 20 years ago. ELL student outcomes are not improving. Students are still without adequate funding for their education, and as of now Arizona is 46th in overall per pupil spending funding (Dixon, 2013).

Using legislative historical data as part of this symposium allows for exacting research of the overall process through the courts, as well as Arizona’s House and Senate floors. The scholarly contributions of this symposium introduction will also help the audience examine the actual judicial verbiage and possible reasons why this case has stalled out. Finally, this paper invites conversation about potential remediation through this same system of legislation and court litigation.

Authors

• Oscar Jimenez-Castellanos, Arizona State University

• David G. Martinez, University of South Carolina - Columbia