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There's the right, assumed to result from due process concerns, that children have to expect an equal education. That means if there are enough students with a common first language other than English they must receive instruction in their primary language. Moreover, since English is a bit of learning that is generally necessary in the US, they have a right to an adequate training in English.
The SCOTUS case is referred to as Lau, the Chinese student in San Fran in whose name the case was brought in the '60s. Since then ESL programs in public schools must be Lau compliant. What that means, however, has shifted and metamorphosed over time.
The Flores consent decree, a parallel case in Arizona in the '90s, pointed out that there was no guarantee that the Lau-compliant program yielded the Lau goals. Some assessment had to be instituted. This had to be properly funded.
Before the consent decree was implemented, Arizona passed a bilingual education measure that mandated structured English immersion as the dominant, nearly the only, permitted form of ESL education. Students could have 1 or 2 years' bilingual ed while they were trained in English; then they were to be mainstreamed, and every content teacher was also an ESL teacher.
Of course, as with the Lau decision the idea that "every" student has the same right is patently false. Lau only works if there's a (ill-defined) sufficient number of students. In practice, with that number of students comes political power. The children of recent Macedonian immigrants don't merit the right unless there's a lot of them. Those who benefit most even with the restrictions tend to be potentially politically powerful and visibly minorities; those who benefited from the previous policies were potentially politically powerful and visibly minorities; and what's advocated for benefits those who are potentially politically powerful and visibly minorities.
The AZ law, however, stipulated a few alternatives. Parents must be given the option of applying for additional years of bilingual ed if they think their kids aren't able to do adequate work in English. Teachers can refer kids back to bilingual ed programs for the same reason. The schools must assess whether or not bilingual ed programs are meeting their goals. Home language is relatively unimportant in this evaluation: If my parents are Finnish and speak primarily Finnish at home, that's going to be my home language--even if I became conversationally fluent by 2nd grade and academically adequate by 4th grade. I could go on to win national essay writing contests, and still my home language might be almost entirely Finnish. (It probably wouldn't be: all the Finns I've known have pushed themselves and their kids towards fairly good English competence very quickly. The Macedonians did the same.)
Of note is the wordage that the AZ test used either doesn't test every language domain or doesn't distinguish between students that are overall adequate versus those who fail in one domain and excel at others. I'm not sure what they mean by "domain"--whether they mean the usual 4 skills of speaking, writing, reading, and listening or conversation vs. academic (with subdisciplines: math, science, history, etc.). It's very, very hard--probably too hard--to ensure even development in all 4 skills and in all contexts.
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