Chapter 7: Teaching English Language Learners in Post-Proposition 203 Arizona: Structured English Immersion or Sink-or-Swim Submersion?

Arizona’s Proposition 203, passed by voters in 2000, mandates that “Children in Arizona public schools shall be taught English, by being taught in English, and all children shall be placed in English language classrooms” (Arizona Revised Statutes [A.R.S.] §17–752). The law further requires that ELLs be placed in structured (or sheltered) English immersion (SEI) classrooms and that they be taught English as effectively as possible. Like nearly identical measures passed in California (Proposition 227, 1998) and Massachusetts (Question 2, 2002), Proposition 203 was designed to make it difficult for parents to request and schools to offer bilingual education programs (Combs, Evans, Fletcher, Parra, & Jiménez, 2005; de Jong, Gort, & Cobb, 2005; Garcia, 2000; Wiley & Wright, 2004). Mandates for SEI instruction in Arizona have been intertwined with and further complicated by state high-stakes testing policies, driven in large part by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, and ongoing resistance from the state to fully address the mandates of a federal court in the case Flores v. Arizona, related to providing adequate programs and funding for ELLs (Arizona Department of Education, 2005a; Wright, 2005a, 2005b), and ongoing appeals related to this case (see Jimenez-Castellanos, Combs, Martinez, Gomez, 2013 and Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, 2013).