The Potential Plus of Having a Former ‘English Learner’ as Education Secretary

When Miguel Cardona was 5, he started kindergarten in public school. His parents had moved from Puerto Rico to Meriden, Conn., where he was born. His father worked as a city police officer, and his family lived in public housing. They spoke Spanish at home. When Miguel began school, English was something of a mystery. He was, in the term educators use today, an English learner.

Last month, President-elect Biden announced his intention to make Mr. Cardona the Secretary of Education, replacing Betsy DeVos. If confirmed, he could play a role in puncturing the conventional wisdom that has cast English learners as weighed down by shortcomings — as a problem that must be solved quickly.

He would be responsible for a vast and varied system of schools and colleges that has changed in many ways since he first enrolled 40 years ago. Academic standards are tougher, testing is more prevalent, and economic inequality has widened. And there are a large and growing number of students who speak a language other than English at home, just as he once did. As the nation’s first education secretary who was an English learner, he will have the opportunity to apply his considerable experience and expertise in language learning nationwide, as research and experience are pushing more states and districts to teach English learners in both English and their home languages.

When Mr. Cardona was born in 1975, America was near the bottom of a half-century-long decline in immigration. The percentage of foreign-born residents has more than doubled since, and the number of students from households where English is not the dominant language has grown along with it. But it’s a mistake to assume that most English learners are foreign-born. Seventy-one percent are, like Dr. Cardona, born in America. Among young children, the proportion is even higher.

Today, one in 10 K-12 schoolchildren are English learners. Among children 8 or younger, over 30 percent have at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home. The percentages can vary because language fluency is changeable: Once students achieve mastery, they are English learners no more.

While most English learners come to school speaking Spanish, nearly a quarter do not. Arabic, Chinese and Vietnamese together make up 5 percent of the home languages of English learners. Nearly every language spoken on Earth can be found among the nation’s K-12 students. English learners are also no longer wholly concentrated in border states and cities that have typically received more immigrant newcomers. The states that experienced the biggest percentage increases in English learners from 2004 to 2014 were South Carolina, Maryland, Mississippi, Arkansas and Kentucky.

Conventional thinking once held that the best way to teach English learners was to throw them into the deep end of the language swimming pool and teach them exclusively in English. In 1998, California voters went so far as to ban most bilingual education in public schools. Massachusetts and Arizona soon followed. Many immigrant parents might have internalized the message that they shouldn’t practice their native language at home.

But time and research have revealed a more complicated picture. If you give Spanish-speaking math prodigies an exam in English, you’ll get the wrong idea about their math skills, and therefore teach them the wrong way.

Language learning is about much more than just vocabulary words and syntax rules. Students learn to read and write by learning facts and ideas about the world around them, even as they strengthen skills common to all languages. For many students, a mix of teaching in English and their home language is best. California reversed its bilingual education ban in 2016, and Massachusetts did the same the following year. States including New York, Texas and Illinois require bilingual education.

The pandemic crisis is badly disrupting education for many English learners, who rely on a combination of additional school programs and the benefits of face-to-face interaction with teachers and peers. As education secretary, Mr. Cardona will face an immediate challenge in offsetting those losses while safely reopening public schools nationwide.

In the long run, giving English learners the education they need is an issue of both pedagogy and politics — something he knows well (he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject). Local communities, he wrote, needed to focus political will on addressing the inequalities that often plague schools educating many English learners. Teachers need extra hours and training to help a student body that has changed over time.

Mr. Cardona started as a public-school teacher in Meriden; become the state’s youngest school principal; and ultimately ascended to Connecticut commissioner of education.

“As I learned through my experience as the principal of an elementary school,” he wrote, “the more engaged members of the school community are in changing the complacency, the better chances there are for improvement.”

As education secretary, Mr. Cardona could push for federal funding for programs that have lagged behind the growing English learner population, as well as more research on the complex task of training teachers and developing new digital tools devised specifically to help English learners. American public schoolteachers are, on the whole, substantially more likely to be white and monolingual than are public school students. In Seattle, one school district has developed a program to help bilingual teacher’s aides get on a fast track to full teacher certification.

Mr. Cardona’s ascension may also change how people think about English learners. In an interconnected world where goods, information and people cross borders with ease, being multilingual is more an asset than a liability. Notably, wealthy parents pay top dollar to enroll their English-speaking children in private immersion schools that teach Spanish, Mandarin and other languages.

They know that fluency in more than one language can expand a student’s perspective, open up whole libraries of literature and culture, and help form relationships and ideas in new ways. The multilingual advantage can take different forms throughout a life. It may propel one English learner all the way to a Cabinet post.

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America. You can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarey1.