While potential cuts to federal funding for English learner (EL) services in schools are currently making noise, some timely new research takes a preliminary look at EL students whose parents choose to forgo the services they are entitled to under the Every Student Succeeds Act. How widespread is the practice? And who are the families opting out?
A research team led by Karen Thompson of Oregon State University looked at data from three states: Oregon, Texas, and Michigan. These include cohorts of students who entered ninth grade for the first time between 2011 and 2016; the total sample comprised over 116,000 EL students followed through 2020. They focus on grades 9–12 for this initial analysis because high schools saw the highest prevalence of students waiving services and because the limited prior research on the topic also focused on high school, allowing the team a reasonable comparison for their findings.
The majority of EL students in Oregon and Texas were Hispanic and reported speaking Spanish at home. In Michigan, about 40 percent of EL students were Hispanic (with about the same percentage reporting speaking Spanish at home) and just over 43 percent were White, with Arabic, English, and Albanian languages reported. There were slightly more males than females in all states, and more than 80 percent of EL families in every state were reported as economically disadvantaged.
The percentage of students whose families waived EL services varied widely across states: 2.1 percent in Michigan, 4.7 percent in Texas, and 14.3 percent in Oregon. Those rates remained relatively stable across high school years in Michigan and Texas; however, the rates rose sharply in Oregon, from 9.3 percent of freshmen to 26.3 percent of seniors. In all three states, families of students in special education, families of students considered long-term English learners (those who had received EL services for 7 or more years), and families of higher-income students were the ones most likely to waive services.
This is as far as the preliminary analysis goes for now (future studies will examine student outcomes), but the researchers do advance two broad possibilities to explain the opt-out patterns. First is variation in what services are provided for EL students. They offer the example of Oregon, where services at the time consisted of a single daily language course that did not result in credit toward a diploma. As graduation grew closer, it stands to reason that optional, non-credit-bearing courses would be jettisoned if students were in danger of not meeting their diploma requirements. By comparison, a majority of Texas EL courses provided graduation credit, and EL services in Michigan were largely provided via pullout interventions separate from course schedules. Of note, EL courses began bearing graduation credits in Oregon in 2021 in the wake of Covid disruptions, so subsequent analysis could bear out their supposition.
Second is variation in parental calculation of need or utility of services. They point to the subset of students who received both EL and special education services in all three states and suggest that waiving EL services would likely open up time for more special education courses or other interventions, which may have been attractive to families—especially, again, as high school graduation approached. They suggest further research on long-term ELs who also were identified with a disability in each state to investigate this possible mechanism.
There are more questions than answers here, obviously, but the avenues for further research seem clear and intriguing. Most relevant to the current political discussion: How do EL students fare academically with and without those services?
SOURCE: Karen D. Thompson, et al., “Waiving English Learner Services: Prevalence and Student Characteristics,” Educational Researcher (September 2025).
