Interesting Statistics
- In 2007, there was an estimated 11 million (21%) elementary and secondary students who spoke a language other than English at home; of those 11 million students, 5% of them had difficulty speaking English.
- There is an overrepresentation of English Learners (EL) in special education classes.
- The Office of English Language Acquisition Study and the Office of Civil Rights Survey of 2002 estimate that annually 13.5% of students are referred to special education and the number of EL with disabilities is 9.2%.
- There is an estimated 948,000 students who are both EL/bilingual and have special needs.
- In 2012-2013 the percentage of students in EL programs was higher for urban school districts.
- In Illinois in 2012-2013, 9.4% (about 4.4 million students) of school age students were English Learners.
- The dropout rates for English Learners is 15-20% higher than the dropout rate of non-English Learners.
- The percentage of English Learners has grown from 3.5 million to 5.3 million which is more than 51% in the past decade.
- The four states with the highest percentage of English Learners were California with 28.9%, Nevada with 16%, New Mexico with 15.5% and Texas with 15%.
- The state with the lowest percentage of English Learners was West Virginia with 0.6%
The map below indicates the percentage (by state) of public school students who were English Learners during the 2012-2013 school year: