The open-border policies of the Biden Administration are putting the nation at risk from terrorist attacks, unleashing criminals (especially pedophiles) into our neighborhoods, and placing an enormous burden, fiscally and educationally, on our public school system.
The burden on our schools can be seen in the staggering growth in “English language learners” (ELL) in schools. ELLs require special accommodations from a teacher – even if not enrolled in an official ELL program, their lack of English will require extra attention from the teacher. As the population of ELLs has grown rapidly over the last decade-and-a-half, what has not grown is the academic achievement and graduation rates of these students.
Not knowing English makes it harder for these students to achieve in school, as test scores consistently show worse results. And the prospects for these students are only getting worse. For example, in Pennsylvania, only 12.4% of ELLs were “proficient” at math in 2009; by 2017, the rate of “proficiency” was a shockingly low 5.7%. For high school graduation rates, ELLs are behind by more than 20 percentage points compared to their English-speaking classmates.
This statistic is more troublesome because of the growth in the number of students classified as ELLs. As of last school year, 5.2% of Pennsylvania K-12 students are ELLs, about 88,000 out of 1.7 million. Zooming in on native Spanish speakers, we see that in the 2009-10 school year, the Keystone State had about 26,500 students whose first language was Spanish; by 2022-23, that population had nearly doubled to about 55,000. In Philadelphia alone, ELLs have gone from 11.7% of students in 2018-19 to 17.6% in 2022-23. At this rate, 1-in-5 students will be English language learners by next school year.
The underperformance of ELLs has been a consistent story in American public education since at least the early 2000s wave of migration from Mexico. No matter the level of special programs in public schools, students who do not speak English at home have a hard time at school where English is the primary language. The Biden Administration’s flood of illegal immigration is only making this situation worse, for these students and their classmates.
