Williams: In Trump's America, stupidity is the official language

In an article as a law student at the University of Virginia, future Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan rebutted as un-American a movement that had gained momentum to make English the nation’s official language.

In the nation’s early days, government accommodated language minorities, she noted. “The code of Virginia used to be printed in German because we had such a large German population,” McClellan, D-4th, said in an interview Thursday.

The nation’s founders saw no need to make English the official language. Donald Trump, in his infinite folly, has done so by executive order — even as he undermines laws mandating English access for those not proficient in it.

His Education Department’s rescission of guidelines for English language instruction is the latest incoherent action by an administration whose consistent theme is the targeting of immigrants and nonwhite people and the unraveling of civil rights protections. Having placed roadblocks and arrests on the pathway to citizenship, this administration now seems intent on impeding the learning of the language Trump has designated as official.

“This is his latest attack on immigrant communities and an effort to eliminate a key tool used to ensure every child has the ability to learn and succeed,” McClellan said. “And he’s trying by executive fiat to roll back decades of civil rights protections writ large, and this is just one more example of that.”

The rescinded guidelines — now marked on the Education Department website as available “for historical purposes only” — were crafted in 2015 during the Obama administration.

The point of the Department of Education is to protect the civil rights of students because state and local governments either wouldn’t or couldn’t, McClellan said. “And while Congress has had a mandate for decades to accommodate the needs of English learners, it wasn’t until these guidelines were provided that our schools really had a useful tool to help them do that. So this takes that tool away, but it also signals ‘we’re not going to enforce students’ civil rights.’”

In 2021, there were nearly 5.3 million English language learners enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — more than 1 out of every 10 students.

According to the Virginia Department of Education website, school divisions in our state serve more than 145,000 English learners who speak more than 280 languages. Henrico County Public Schools currently serves 5,938 K-12 students in English language learner programs in a division where about 130 languages are spoken by students and staff, said division spokesperson Eileen Cox.

In Richmond Public Schools, about 22% of the students — approximately 4,500 — are active English learners, spokesperson Alyssa Schwenk said. That’s not counting former learners who have been deemed proficient.

“By not meeting the educational needs of all students, you will create or perpetuate a permanent underclass of citizens who will never be able to succeed, whether that’s by design or not,” McClellan said.

The Trump administration apparently would rather deport these students than teach them. But many of these English learners are U.S. citizens.

“All I can say right now is that the loss of federal guidance does not erase the moral obligation schools have to provide English learners with meaningful access to education,” said Deanna Fierro-Kin, a Virginia public school administrator who formerly taught in Richmond and Henrico. “This sends the wrong message ... or a very intentional message to close doors to newcomer families.”

“Removing federal guidance for English learners is a major step backward. I want to see how our state responds because students still need strong protections and support to succeed,” she said.

Conor Williams, a senior fellow with The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, says the rescission of the guidelines should be considered in a broader context that includes this summer’s withholding of Title III funding for ESL instruction, Trump’s executive order “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States,” and the Department of Justice’s minimization of language services such as interpreter services and translation support.

“If this were about making sure that children become proficient in English, the research is pretty clear that you support them in exposing them to English and in developing their other non-English language, and you provide resources for that. But that’s not what this is about,” Williams said.

“What this is about is this sort of cultural proxy that language has in the United States — that a country where there are other languages beyond English starts to feel like a certain culture-war battlefield for some politicians. And so it doesn’t really matter what the research says is best for kids about learning English. It’s more about what declaring English by fiat the official language means for conservative activists.”

“The guidance itself is one thing,” he said, “but it’s part of this very broad assault on the broader systems of the federal government and how they meet multilingual communities’ needs.”

The guidance is nonbinding; it created no new legal obligations, Williams said. But the rescission “signals to school districts that the law might not be enforced as thoroughly as it used to be, so they might be able to deprioritize English learner students in terms of resources, in terms of language access supports.”

That would be a mistake, Williams said, noting that the rescinding of the guidelines doesn’t mean that the civil rights laws underpinning them went away.

“The actions that you take now will still be subject to scrutiny” by a future administration that decides those laws still matter, he said. “Districts should be very wary of interpreting this repealed guidance as license to just ignore these kids.”

McClellan described this situation as part of the weaponization of civil rights institutions and laws to undo the very protections they put in place. “And this is the latest example of that, wrapped up in his larger attack on immigrant communities,” she said of Trump.

We should be expanding our national language palette, not shrinking it, while equipping English learners with the tools to meet the challenges of a competitive world. Instead, Trump is demanding assimilation amid his deportation program. He wants everyone to speak English, but is resistant to teaching it.

At the National Association for Bilingual Educators Conference in 2022, Miguel Cardona, then the U.S. Education Secretary, expressed a more forward-looking view of multilingualism, from his perspective as an English learner.

“It is because of the bilingual educators I have been blessed to serve alongside that I often remind our students that their bilingualism and their biculturalism is their superpower,” he said, describing bilingualism as an asset, not a deficit. “Multilingualism should be the norm, not the exception.”

In designating a language but not enforcing its access to those who would learn it, America becomes exceptional only in its stupidity.