Foundations of Bilingual Education and the Learning Environment (Competency 001) · 12 min read
History and Demographics of Bilingual Education
The TExES Bilingual Education Supplemental (164) has one domain with four competencies, and the official framework does not publish separate weights for them. This guide estimates that Competency 001 accounts for roughly a quarter to a third of the questions, because the official sample items lean heavily on program decisions, LPAC procedures and culturally responsive practice. Expect knowledge items (match a court case to its holding, a model to its goal) and many scenario items (a parent declines services, a campus chooses a model, a newcomer arrives in March). Read this section for understanding rather than memorization: when you know the reasoning behind each law and model, the best answer usually becomes obvious.
This chapter traces bilingual schooling in the United States and Texas from the colonial period to the present and describes who emergent bilingual students in Texas are today. It serves the descriptive statements of Competency 001 that ask you to know the historical development of bilingual education, the demographic characteristics of the bilingual population, and the way policy has swung between support for home languages and English-only approaches.
Bilingual Schooling Is Older Than the Nation
Many candidates assume bilingual education began with the civil rights movement. In fact, schooling in languages other than English is as old as European settlement in North America. In the colonial era, German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania, Dutch speakers in New York, and French speakers in what became Louisiana ran church and community schools in their own languages. Spanish was the language of missions, settlements and early schools across the Southwest, including the territory that became Texas, long before English-speaking settlers arrived. Indigenous nations had their own languages and, in some cases, their own written materials and schools; the Cherokee, for example, developed a writing system and printed materials in Cherokee.
During the nineteenth century, bilingual public schooling was common and often legal. Several states passed laws permitting instruction in German and English, and cities such as Cincinnati, St. Louis and Milwaukee operated German-English public schools. Louisiana allowed French in its schools, and the New Mexico territory used Spanish. In Texas, German immigrants who settled the Hill Country around towns such as New Braunfels and Fredericksburg ran German-language and German-English schools, and Czech, Polish and Wendish (Sorbian) communities kept schools in their languages too. Spanish remained a language of schooling in many South Texas communities.
The key exam idea is that these programs were mostly additive and community-driven: families wanted children to keep the heritage language and also learn English. Language choice was a local matter, not yet a battlefield of national identity.
The English-Only Period and Meyer v. Nebraska
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and especially in the early twentieth century, attitudes hardened. Large waves of immigration, the push to "Americanize" newcomers, and anti-German feeling during and after World War I led many states to pass English-only instruction laws. Some made it a crime to teach young children in a foreign language. Texas passed laws requiring English as the language of instruction and penalizing teachers who used other languages, and for generations Mexican American children in Texas were punished, fined or shamed for speaking Spanish at school. Many older Texans still describe "Spanish detention" or being made to write "I will not speak Spanish" over and over. Native American children in federal boarding schools experienced harsher versions of the same policy, with deliberate efforts to erase tribal languages.
Meyer v. Nebraska, a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in the years after World War I, is the landmark from this period. Nebraska had prohibited teaching any subject in a language other than English, and teaching foreign languages at all, to children who had not completed the eighth grade. A teacher at a Lutheran parochial school was convicted for teaching a child to read in German. The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that it violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: the liberty it protects includes the teacher's right to teach and the parents' right to engage him to instruct their children. The Court accepted that a state may require English instruction and may promote a common language, but it may not forbid the teaching of other languages.
Memory Aid: Meyer protects the right to teach other languages; it does not require bilingual education. Think "Meyer = may teach," not "must teach."
Common Trap: An item may describe Meyer v. Nebraska and offer "established the right of English learners to bilingual instruction" as a choice. Meyer was about a ban on foreign-language teaching; no court has held that the Constitution guarantees bilingual education. The rights of language minority students to meaningful instruction come later, from Title VI and Lau v. Nichols.
The Civil Rights Era and the Rebirth of Bilingual Education
The mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement changed the conversation. Mexican American advocates in Texas and the Southwest documented segregated "Mexican schools," high dropout rates, and the misplacement of Spanish-speaking children in classes for students with intellectual disabilities. At the same time, Cuban families arriving in Miami after the Cuban Revolution helped launch a two-way Spanish-English program at Coral Way Elementary in Dade County, which showed that bilingual instruction could produce strong results for both English speakers and Spanish speakers. A few Texas districts, including programs in San Antonio, Laredo and other border communities, also began pilot bilingual programs during this period.
The Civil Rights Act made it illegal for programs receiving federal funds to discriminate on the basis of race, color or national origin (Title VI). Soon after, Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act as Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas was its chief sponsor, which is a useful Texas connection to remember. The original act provided competitive grants for districts to develop programs for low-income children with limited English ability. It did not require bilingual education and did not prescribe a single method, but it signaled that the federal government saw home-language instruction as legitimate. Over later reauthorizations, the act added funding for teacher training, research and program development, and at times expanded or restricted how much English-only instruction could be funded.
Texas Builds Its Own Bilingual Law
Texas moved from punishing Spanish to requiring bilingual instruction within a few years. During the civil rights era the Legislature repealed the old rule that made English the only permissible language of instruction, allowing districts to offer bilingual programs. Shortly afterward, the Bilingual Education and Training Act made bilingual instruction mandatory in the elementary grades where enough students of the same language were enrolled. Later in the twentieth century, a stronger state bilingual education law, passed partly in response to federal litigation (United States v. Texas, discussed in Chapter 1.2), extended requirements, set identification procedures, created the Language Proficiency Assessment Committee, and required ESL for students not served by bilingual programs.
Today those requirements live in Texas Education Code Chapter 29, Subchapter B, and in the commissioner's rules in 19 Texas Administrative Code Chapter 89, Subchapter BB, which form the state plan for educating emergent bilingual students. Texas law states a clear policy: every student whose primary language is not English should have the opportunity to participate in a bilingual or ESL program, and the goal is for students to become competent in English while the home language is used as a resource. In recent years Texas also changed its terminology from "limited English proficient" and "English learner" to "emergent bilingual student," a change that reflects an asset-based view.
English-Only Swings in Other States and the Federal Shift
In the late twentieth century and early in the twenty-first century, the pendulum swung back toward English-only in several states. Voter initiatives in California, Arizona and Massachusetts replaced most bilingual education with "structured English immersion," typically intended to last about a year, and required parents to request waivers for bilingual programs. Later, California and Massachusetts reversed course by repealing or loosening those restrictions and expanding dual language programs; Arizona's restrictions lasted longer. Texas never adopted an English-only initiative, which is one reason it has one of the largest bilingual education systems in the nation.
At the federal level, the No Child Left Behind Act replaced the Bilingual Education Act. Title VII disappeared, and the funding for English learners moved to a new Title III, the English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement Act. The word "bilingual" dropped out of the federal program name, and the emphasis became English proficiency and accountability for test results, although districts could still use federal funds for bilingual programs. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) later replaced No Child Left Behind. ESSA kept Title III grants but moved accountability for English language proficiency progress into Title I, so every state's accountability system must include a measure of progress toward English proficiency. ESSA also requires statewide standardized entrance and exit procedures for English learners and allows recently arrived students some flexibility in how their first-year test scores count.
| Period | Prevailing approach | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Colonial era and nineteenth century | Permissive, community bilingual schools | German-English public schools in Ohio; German schools in the Texas Hill Country |
| Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries | Restrictive, English-only laws | State bans on foreign-language teaching; Meyer v. Nebraska strikes down one |
| Civil rights era | Opportunistic, then protective | Coral Way two-way program; Bilingual Education Act; Lau v. Nichols |
| Late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries | Mixed: English-only initiatives in some states, growth of dual language elsewhere | Structured English immersion laws; Title III replaces Title VII |
| Today | Accountability plus renewed interest in dual language | ESSA; Texas emergent bilingual terminology and dual language expansion |
Exam Tip: When an item asks about the federal law that first funded bilingual programs, the answer is the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII of ESEA). When it asks which federal law now funds English learner programs, the answer is Title III. When it asks which law put English proficiency progress into state accountability systems, think ESSA.
Demographics of Emergent Bilingual Students in Texas
Texas serves one of the two largest emergent bilingual populations in the United States, well over a million students, and emergent bilingual students make up more than one in five students in Texas public schools. The share has grown steadily over recent decades. Spanish is by far the most common home language, spoken by roughly nine in ten emergent bilingual students. Other common languages include Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin and other Chinese languages, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Swahili, Burmese, Nepali, Telugu, Hindi and Korean, along with growing numbers of speakers of Indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America such as Mam, K'iche' and Mixteco. A student registered as Spanish-speaking from Guatemala may in fact be dominant in Mam, a fact that affects placement and instruction.
Emergent bilingual students are concentrated in the early grades, because many enter school in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten and later reach English proficiency. Most were born in the United States; they are not all immigrants. Large concentrations are found along the border, in the Rio Grande Valley, and in the major metropolitan areas of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, but nearly every Texas district enrolls some emergent bilingual students. Many come from families with lower incomes, though socioeconomic status varies widely, as do prior schooling, literacy in the home language and immigration history. Newcomers include refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors and students with interrupted formal education.
| Characteristic | General pattern |
|---|---|
| Size | Well over a million students; more than one in five Texas students |
| Most common home language | Spanish, roughly nine in ten emergent bilingual students |
| Other languages | Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese languages, Urdu, Indigenous languages of the Americas and many more |
| Grade concentration | Highest in pre-kindergarten through the elementary grades |
| Birthplace | Majority born in the United States |
| Variation | Wide range in prior schooling, home literacy and income |
Common Trap: Do not assume that an emergent bilingual student is an immigrant, is from Mexico, or is literate in Spanish. Exam scenarios often hinge on the detail that a student born in Texas speaks Spanish at home but has never been taught to read it, or that a student from Central America speaks an Indigenous language first.
Classroom Scenario: A third-grade teacher in a Dallas suburb receives a new student, Ixchel, whose enrollment form lists Spanish as the home language. In class Ixchel says very little in Spanish, and her mother speaks to her in a language the teacher does not recognize. The bilingual teacher assumes Ixchel is simply shy and plans standard Spanish literacy instruction. This situation shows that the home language survey can hide a student's true first language; Ixchel's family may speak Mam or another Indigenous language, with Spanish as a second language. Best move: talk respectfully with the family (with an interpreter if needed) about all languages used at home, share the information with the LPAC, and plan instruction that does not assume Spanish is Ixchel's strongest language.
Key Takeaways
- Bilingual schooling in the United States and Texas dates to the colonial era and was common in the nineteenth century, including German-English schools in Texas.
- English-only laws rose in the early twentieth century; Meyer v. Nebraska struck down a ban on teaching foreign languages but did not create a right to bilingual education.
- The civil rights era produced Title VI and the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII of ESEA), sponsored by Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough; Texas then moved from English-only rules to mandatory bilingual education.
- Federal policy later shifted to Title III and English proficiency accountability under No Child Left Behind and ESSA; some states adopted and later reversed English-only initiatives, while Texas did not.
- Emergent bilingual students are more than one in five Texas students, mostly Spanish speakers, mostly U.S.-born, and very diverse in schooling and language background.
Study coach
Ask about this chapter
Answers come only from “History and Demographics of Bilingual Education”. If the chapter doesn't cover it, the coach will say so.
Finished reading?
Lock it in with a quick Foundations of Bilingual Education and the Learning Environment (Competency 001) quiz.