The Trump administration has quietly rescinded a longstanding Department of Education guidance explaining how schools must comply with civil rights laws and court decisions mandating they provide services to English language learners, alarming education advocates.
The guidance, issued in 2015, details how schools must comply with longstanding parts of U.S. law like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars national origin discrimination. Courts have interpreted this provision to mean that schools must offer support services to students who don’t speak English.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has been pushing to prioritize English-speaking as a national priority while cutting support for the roughly 5 million U.S. public school students who don’t yet speak the language, as well as non-English speakers more broadly.
In February, the president signed an executive order designating English the official language of the U.S. while rescinding a federal mandate requiring agencies and institutions receiving federal funding to provide language assistance.
Since then, the Department of Education has laid off nearly all the workers in its Office of English Language Acquisition.
In July, the Department of Justice wrote in a memo to all federal agencies to “minimize non-essential multilingual services” and argued that treating people differently based on English proficiency didn’t necessarily constitute national origin discrimination.
The memo added that by next January, the DOJ will create guidance to “help agencies prioritize English while explaining precisely when and how multilingual assistance remains necessary,” part of the White House goal to "promote assimilation over division” through language policy.
Critics said rescinding the Education Department guidance will, in fact, make it harder for U.S. students to learn English, while freeing up districts to potentially ignore past rulings and legal mandates to support pupils who are still learning the language without fear of federal enforcement.
“For a teacher, it was kind of like the Bible,” Montserrat Garibay, head of the Biden-era Office of English Language Acquisition, told The Washington Post, which first reported on the rescinded 2015 guidance. “If, in fact, we want our students to learn English, this needs to be in place.”
“Instead of providing this office with more capacity and more resources to do exactly what the executive order says — to make sure that everybody speaks English — they are doing the total opposite,” she added.
Last month, the administration temporarily withheld $890 million in English language learning funds and called for their elimination next year.
“We’re put in a position where, we want you to learn English, but at the same time, we’re going to de-emphasize anything that will help provide you the opportunity to learn English,” Jeff Hutcheson, the director of advocacy and public policy at the English-language learning group TESOL International Association, told K-12 Dive last month.
Outside of education, other parts of the government have been quick to embrace the Trump administration’s language mandates.
“HUD is ENGLISH only,” Housing Secretary Scott Turner wrote on X on Tuesday, sharing an image of eliminating a Spanish-language page on the Department of Housing and Urban Development website.
