Could a new shift in education policy help immigrant students master both English and their home language?

Years ago, Stanford professor Guadalupe Valdes observed that many students from immigrant families often become trapped in dysfunctional “English as a Second Language” programs and rarely find their way out.

“In the current context in which anti-immigrant sentiment is at an all-time high, newly arrived children are routinely accused by the general public of not wanting to learn English and failing to profit from the education that the state is giving them at great cost,” Valdes wrote in “Learning and Not Learning English,” published in 2001, adding that “immigrant children are relegated to inadequately trained teachers working in ill-equipped classrooms. These children wind up having to fend for themselves, most often doing a poor job of it.”

U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said much the same during a recent telephone briefing about changes to how English learners are taught in public schools. King said that the new guidance is vitally important because, “In too many places across the country, English learners get less access to quality teachers, less access to advanced coursework, and less access to the resources they need to succeed.”

English learners are estimated to represent nearly 10 percent of the nation’s K-12 population, according to King, who also said that about 45 percent of these students are Hispanic. And though education for them still needs a lot of improvement, it’s a lot better than it was a decade ago when the tide started turning away from segregating English-learning students.

Today, a combination of Department of Education regulations and a let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach to helping English learners has yielded an environment in which rigor and accountability for language acquisition are no longer a joke.

“We have a new opportunity ... to seize the moment to make the right policy decisions and engage all stakeholders,” King said. “We have come a long way in recognizing that speaking more than one language is a strength and an asset and not a weakness.”

Wow!

Hearing the secretary of education say that a non-English home language is an advantage that states and their schools should nurture and then capitalize on is nothing short of amazing to all the former English learners out there who had their families pressured into speaking only English at home .

King suggested that states and school districts should be looking to leverage native languages to support academic success through a variety of methods and strategies. Students should be encouraged and given tools to become truly literate in both their home language and English. King noted that dual-language programs that combine native English and native Spanish speakers, which have become increasingly popular across the country, have been shown to speed bilingualism among both groups.

Best of all — from the perspective of someone who has taught English learners and seen programs that were doing more harm than good — the new guidance calls for states to establish entrance and exit procedures for these students.

Additionally, and crucially important, states will now have to disaggregate their data on English learners to uncover how well students with disabilities are performing and being served — and how better to address the issue of “students who have been in programs for several years and are still not getting it,” as King put it.

There is hope that this shift in policy will make a difference. Not only has the Department of Education recently announced $22 million in grants for teacher preparation programs to provide professional development for school staff who work with English learners, but new data show that the educational attainment of newly arriving immigrants is steadily increasing.

This means that parents and schools will be better able to help their students not only maintain their native language, but actually push them toward mastery of reading, writing and speaking their home language and English, too — a win-win situation.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.