Bilingual education is a specialized service for English learner students (ELs) that teaches them in a combination of their native language and English. The motivation for placing EL students into bilingual programs is to ensure access to content while building a general language capacity that supports the acquisition of English. However, some have pointed to the low English proficiency of EL students in these programs as a cause for concern. As a result, a number of states (California, Arizona, and Massachusetts) have adopted policies eliminating bilingual education in their public schools. Little rigorous work has been done looking at how the speed at which ELs reach English proficiency is affected by such policies.

In this study we estimate how switching from a bilingual program into English immersion affects the speed at which ELs get redesignated as English proficient students. We use California’s Proposition 227 as a natural experiment that eliminated bilingual programs in public schools. ELs that demonstrate a sufficient level of English proficiency are reclassified as Fluent English Proficient (RFEP). This redesignation process of ELs to RFEP is often used as evidence of the student’s grasp of the English language. We look at two channels through which the elimination of bilingual programs might have an effect on the classification of ELs as RFEPs.  First, placing EL students into structured English immersion programs, where all of the instruction is delivered in English, might have a beneficial impact on their time to reach English proficiency. Some theories of English language development suggest that schools should maximize the time ELs are exposed to English and immersion programs would provide this setting. Second, EL students placed into immersion programs are more likely to be placed into classrooms with proficient or native English speakers. We focus on measuring both the effects of the change in the language of instruction and classroom composition on the speed to redesignation of EL students.

We find that, following the same classroom over time, redesignation of first grade ELs actually dropped as a result of the policy. To make the result more concrete, we find that, assuming no change in classroom composition, a 60% drop in bilingual program enrollment would be associated with a 2% decrease in the redesignation rate of first grade ELs. Taking into account classroom composition, we find that the redesignation rate would rise another 2% (4%) with a 20 percentage point increase in the percent of EOs in the EL classroom. We also understand that at this time, reclassification was mainly determined through a subjective process and that any of our findings may reflect both a program shift as well as a change in the criteria for redesignation. After an EL has been reclassified, they lose access to the specialized programs such as bilingual education. The elimination of bilingual education may reduce the incentive to leave the “EL” label on certain ELs. We provide an analysis of the changing characteristics of RFEP students and see how this informs our results.