A TWO-PART LOOK AT THE DATA BEHIND ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN ARIZONA
Eleven years ago, nearly 20 percent of Arizona’s public students were not proficient in English – meaning their primary language was non-English. Today, between 4-7 percent of our students are classified as not proficient in English. These statistics seem puzzling, given Arizona is a border state, has an increasing K-12 population and is commonly thought of as growing in diversity. Either the data is askew or our rapidly rising K-12 population has a lot more English speakers than it once did.