Reading aloud a novel to a class of fifth-graders, dark-rimmed glasses perched on the tip of her nose, Darby Drafts had fallen into a common teacher trap. Put simply, she was doing more work than the kids.
It was, however, a lesson plan driven by necessity. Reading the novel aloud enabled everybody to be on the same page, regardless of skill. And that was important for Drafts’s class of 23, which, by this mid-February morning, included 18 students whose primary language was not English — eight of whom were newcomers learning English for the very first time.
Drafts, a Chelsea teacher with 17 years of experience, had never seen such a need.
“I’ve had kids coming all year,” she said matter-of-factly. “I got two in the last month.”
Across Massachusetts, a growing number of educators are finding themselves in similar positions. The state’s population of English learners has grown 25 percent since 2019, a dramatic uptick fueled by the large number of migrants arriving here in the last several years. Fleeing violence and economic desolation in their home countries, families have landed in the Bay State, hoping to give their children a high-quality education.
Bringing those hopes to bear will require the state to rapidly improve its instruction, educators and advocates said. Achievement data underscore their concerns: Some two dozen other states, including high-poverty ones like Kentucky, do a better job than Massachusetts at educating English learners, national test data show.
The results are partly, experts said, an enduring repercussion of the state’s long-held and now-revoked “English only” education policy, which prohibited teaching in any language other than English from 2003 to 2017. But the numbers also cast doubt on whether the state, now eight years removed from the ban, is moving aggressively enough to expand research-backed English learner instruction.
“Massachusetts is still one of the most welcoming states” for migrants, said Jorge Fanjul, executive director of the Boston-based nonprofit Latinos for Education, Massachusetts region. “With taking on that charge, having that mantle comes an additional responsibility.”
One of the research-backed approaches advocates like Fanjul want to see the state bolster is dual language instruction in which students spend half the day learning in their native language and the other half learning in English, often with the support of a specialized teacher.
Research shows that dual language instruction benefits all students.
English-learner students in such programs achieve more in reading and math by adolescence than their peers in English-centric programs. They tend to be bullied less.
Some studies point to bilingual students — including native English speakers — having stronger executive functioning, such as better concentration or the ability to switch between tasks. And students from both sides of the language divide leave school better prepared to succeed professionally, their skills attractive attributes on job resumes.
What’s more, dual language instruction enables students to develop the language “of their home and heart” while still learning English, said Lisa Lineweaver, principal of Drafts’s school, Kelly Elementary in Chelsea, a fully dual language school since 2023.
At Kelly, instruction is split between Spanish and English.
And so, that February day, Drafts wasn’t alone as she read aloud the novel about a girl growing up in war-torn Afghanistan.
Multilingual educator Sarah Ross stood across the room, her tall frame and lively facial expressions in a constant choreography, conveying the plot in Spanish. To demonstrate a character felt grateful, she held her palms together as if in prayer, quietly saying “agradecida” as Drafts continued to read.
Throughout their lessons, the teaching duo regularly use pictures to aid their students’ understanding.
“If you don’t know the language, repeating stuff — it’s not going to help,” Ross said. “You need to see something. You need to act it out.”
Meanwhile, down the hall in Waldo Gómez’s classroom, fourth-grade students were immersed in a novel study of their own. But there, they spoke, read, and wrote in Spanish.
As Gómez peppered his class with questions about their book — a Spanish-language novel about a dyslexic student’s struggles — kids in every corner tilted their torsos forward, arms outstretched, hoping to be called upon.
At Kelly, Spanish instruction happens in math and science, too, giving students the opportunity to feel proud of themselves during a long school day, Lineweaver said. Without that chance to show off what they know, students can grow easily frustrated and act out, she said.
A lesson like Gómez’s wouldn’t have been legal during the 15 years of Massachusetts’ English-only policy, approved through a 2002 voter referendum. The policy would come under federal scrutiny and face harsh criticism from researchers, educators, and advocates before lawmakers in 2017 revoked the ban with the Language Opportunities for Our Kids (LOOK) Act.
The new law gave schools explicit permission to create dual language programs.
Many districts took advantage. From 2018 to 2020, 16 dual language programs sprung up across the state, according to the Multistate Association for Bilingual Education, Northeast. Then, the pandemic hit, stymying progress, with just six new dual language programs opening over the following two years.
Things started to improve in 2023, when five new programs emerged, and, according to the state education department, more are in the works today.
But Fanjul, the advocate, worries about a loss of momentum, especially at a time educators are grappling with an increased arrival of newcomers, students who arrived in the US in the last three years.
At the time of the LOOK Act’s passage, the state reported that 97,000 English learners were enrolled in Massachusetts schools. Today, there are nearly 128,000.
In fact, most Massachusetts school districts have seen their English learner populations grow by more than half since 2017-18. As of this school year, just 21 districts of the state’s nearly 400 have no English learners, and in 177 districts, they now account for more than 5 percent of the population, the Globe found.
Largely, these mostly Spanish-speaking newcomers are not getting a bilingual education, data show. In all, just 4 percent of Massachusetts’ English learners are enrolled in dual language programs, according to education department data.
“Frankly, I think it’s something we’ve got to bring back attention to,” Fanjul said.
At the state level, recent focus on English learners has revolved around the Trump administration’s threats of deportation to migrants in the country without legal authorization.
While President Trump is working to gut the federal education department, including its English learner office, Massachusetts Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler acknowledged the state’s academic responsibility to newcomer students and their families.
“It’s incumbent upon us as educators and school leaders to meet the moment and address the unmet needs of our most vulnerable students,” Tutwiler said.
Though the LOOK Act came with no funding, the state has since granted over $11.8 million to districts to expand bilingual programming, according to the education department.
Still, finding people who are bilingual and effective teachers remains a top challenge. During the English-only ban, colleges shuttered their bilingual teacher training programs. Today, many programs have reopened, but the pipeline remains stubbornly dry.
“It’s a needle in a haystack,” said Meg Burns, director of professional learning for the bilingual education association.
The state’s teacher certification requirements, which, in 2018, were revised to include a bilingual endorsement, don’t always help, said Christine Leider, president of the Massachusetts Association of Teachers of Speakers of Other Languages, or MATSOL.
Massachusetts’ high certification standards make it difficult to recruit bilingual educators from other states, and immigrant adults who were teachers in their home countries must provide detailed documentation of their training. Moreover, bilingual teacher applicants must pass certification tests written in English, regardless of the content area they plan to teach.
Back at Kelly Elementary, Drafts and Ross continue their carefully orchestrated lessons.
Advancing through the Afghanistan novel, students one day in March met in small, mixed-level groups to read and summarize a chapter. One newcomer student, a boy whose haircut resembled Sonic the Hedgehog, froze when it came to his turn to read aloud. Without hesitation, his classmate, a girl with oversized glasses, picked up her pencil. She tapped its stubby eraser to each word, reading slowly enough for the boy to repeat the English words after her.
A week-and-a-half later, this time seated alongside his newcomer peers at a table with Ross, the boy pleaded to read aloud as one of the novel’s main characters, a girl whose own schooling was interrupted by factors beyond her control. Ross discreetly helped the boy read his part, then offered him a fist bump to celebrate.
Soon after, Drafts and Ross received a message from the administration:
Another newcomer student would join their class, starting Tuesday.
Mandy McLaren and Christopher Huffaker wrote this article for the Boston Globe. New England dual language educators preserve Title III funding was published on The Public News Service and is republished with permission.
Featured Photo: Nearly 22% of U.S. children speak a non-English language at home, and over 15% of U.S. children speak Spanish, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (Adobe Stock)