Ensuring the Educational Rights of Multilingual Students: New Policy Perspectives on English Learner Research

Abstract

English learners (EL) status is a federally-protected student category that ensures equal educational rights for multilingual students in the United States. In this dissertation, I conducted two studies to advance the understanding of how and to what extent current policies and practices uphold the educational rights of students classified as ELs.The first study explored the relationship between EL students and their peers in secondary school academic content courses, an under-studied topic in EL education research. I conducted three sets of analyses with course-taking data in Oregon: describing the average characteristics of EL students’ peers in academic content courses using social network analysis; causally estimating the impact of exiting EL status on peer composition with a regression discontinuity design; and estimating the association between peer composition and EL students’ academic achievement through a linear-in-means model. I found evidence that secondary EL students are often placed in low-level academic content courses with other EL and low-achieving peers. Findings from this study point to the need to reconsider curricular structures, course placement practices, and instructional models altogether to improve the learning experiences of EL students. The second paper examined how long students typically take to exit EL status, or time to EL reclassification—an area where research has been actively conducted but remains un-synthesized. I conducted a meta-analysis with survival analysis and longitudinal studies on time to EL reclassification, using a meta-analytic technique to synthesize individual survival curves into a single summary survival curve. I estimated that the majority of kindergarten-start students likely exit EL status before grade 5. I also found significant variation in time to reclassification by students’ initial English proficiency level, special education status, and socioeconomic status, as well as reclassification policies set at the state and district levels. Importantly, this study provides an empirical benchmark that state departments of education can reference to set English proficiency growth goals as required by the federal education law and to identify ways to improve EL services.2027-10-1