By The Editors

The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling that the state of Arizona has failed for 17 years to follow federal law in providing access to a quality education for non-English speaking K-12 students.

By a narrow 5-to-4 decision that provoked a lengthy dissent from Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the Court sent the case back to the lower federal courts for further review.

Miriam Flores, now in her 20s, is the original named defendant in the case.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), which had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, said in a statement that the Court’s action “is likely to make it more difficult for courts to provide meaningful and lasting remedies for clear violations of federal law.”

John Payton, LDF’s President and Director-Counsel, added that “The Court’s ruling discounts the impact of Arizona’s failure for almost two decades to provide equal educational opportunities to its schoolchildren. But when the (federal) district court takes another look at Arizona’s educational programs, as today’s decision requires, we fully expect that it will ensure that no student faces serious educational deficiencies.”

The Court’s decision came on the second-last day of its spring term. It sprang from a class-action lawsuit a group of parents and students in Nogales, Arizona filed in 1992. They charged that their school district’s inadequate implementation of a federal school aid program for non-English-speaking pupils deprived them of an equal chance to gain a quality education. The Nogales Unified School District, which is near the state’s border with Mexico, has a predominantly Hispanic school population.

In 2000 a federal district court declared that Arizona had failed to provide Nogales and other school districts in the state with the resources necessary to comply with the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act. That law requires states to take actions which enable students whose native language is not English-speaking to overcome language barriers in their quest for learning.

Arizona never attempted to comply with the law. LDF officials said the Supreme Court’s ruling in fact makes it easier for state officials to evade court orders with which they’ve never complied. But they expressed hope that the “extreme facts” of the case – the state’s blatant disregard of the law – would result in “continued federal court oversight to ensure Arizona’s compliance …”

Anurima Bhargava, Director of LDF’s Education Practice, said they were looking for the federal Department of Education to be significantly involved in monitoring the state’s compliance efforts, noting that the federal agency had recently issued a sharp criticism of the state’s current efforts in that area. “We urge,” she said, “the federal government to use all of its enforcement power so that students receive the educational opportunities to which they are entitled under federal law.”

The video below, titled “Immersion”, gives one perspective on the difficulties kids learning English face in school.