A lot of high school students load up on Advanced Placement courses to strengthen their college applications. But for many California students classified as English learners, access to even the basic college-preparatory courses required for admission to the state’s public universities can remain out of reach.

For these students, the challenge is not simply learning English – in fact, most of the high school students labeled as English learners are U.S.-born, have spent their entire school careers in U.S. schools, and are fluent English speakers – it is navigating a complex standardized testing and reclassification system that determines when they are proficient enough to move fully into mainstream academic pathways.

That challenge became a central focus for researchers at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities when they joined forces with nine local school districts, California Education Partners, and colleagues at the Stanford Graduate School of Education to establish the Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative in 2017. It is also the focus of legislative proposals now under consideration in California’s state capital, including Assembly Bill 2555.

Why it matters

In California, almost one in five public school students (17 percent) is classified as an English learner (EL), making reclassification policies significant for many students’ educational trajectories. Gardner Center research, along with prior literature, highlights that multilingual learners who are still labeled as English learners when they enter high school are less likely to complete high school or to graduate college-ready than peers who have reclassified before starting high school.

California students must reach multiple academic benchmarks and clear multiple administrative hurdles before they can be reclassified from English learner status to fluent and proficient, otherwise known as Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP). Under the current statewide criteria for reclassification, English learners must pass the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC); demonstrate readiness for grade-level curriculum on a district-identified assessment of basic skills; secure a recommendation of readiness from a teacher; and the school must consult with the student’s parents or guardians. Each of these criteria must be met within a year of passing the ELPAC, or else a student must take and pass it again – sometimes facing a more difficult version of the test.

Early collaboration provides direction

This was the state of affairs when the work of the Sequoia Collaborative got underway. Initiated by Stanford GSE Dean Dan Schwartz, the overarching goal of this effort has been to tap Stanford’s research capacity to understand and tackle challenges facing students in local school systems.

The districts quickly rallied around shared questions and concerns facing English learners in their schools. Their first hurdle was simply gathering data. Some districts lacked dedicated data staff, prompting researchers to spend hours on site, sometimes digging through file cabinets for disks containing student records. Organizing the information proved even more daunting, requiring data from multiple districts and grade levels to be standardized and linked from elementary school through high school. The effort laid the foundation for a lasting resource: today, the Gardner Center continues to maintain the collaborative’s comprehensive research data archive.

Early research findings were eye-opening about the educational outcomes for multilingual learners in local school districts. Students identified as English learners were less likely to graduate from high school, had lower grade point averages, were less likely to graduate ready for college, and had high rates of chronic absence. In fact, EL students had about a 20 percent lower chance of graduating on time than reclassified peers with the same risk indicator profile. It’s important to note that the results do not indicate that reclassification caused the differences in outcomes; rather, the analyses point to strong equity gaps in outcomes between those who reclassified and those who did not.

These findings galvanized the group to start investigating the reclassification process – and what Gardner Center researchers began to uncover was that local practices and policies meant to support English learners may have been holding them back, particularly the locally determined “basic skills” criterion. Some districts used multiple measures to determine basic English language skills, while others used only one. Some districts used different tests, or they used the same tests with different thresholds.

In some cases, this even meant that English learners were being held to higher standards than English-only students. For example, California’s primary standardized test, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), is administered to all students each spring. For students not formally identified as English learners, the stakes are very low; if they perform poorly on the test, it likely won’t have any impact on their academic advancement. Meanwhile, for students identified as English learners, the stakes are much higher because their performance is factored into decisions about their reclassification.

Platform for change

What was important about these early conversations, says Gerstein, is that the districts now had found a forum to collaborate, something that did not previously exist. With the Gardner Center serving as a key facilitator, the conversations became more open, honest, and trusting.

“Working through those early challenges helped us build an esprit de corps,” she observes. “There was a noticeable shift as we came together around our shared goals and everyone was ready to make real changes in policies.”

By 2023, the districts had committed to prioritizing the reclassification of students in seventh and eighth grades. The timing was critical because researchers found that once English learners entered high school, they were unlikely to be reclassified.

The agreements offered each district latitude in how to fulfill its commitment, but the results spoke for themselves. Two-thirds of students who passed the ELPAC test in the spring were reclassified by the end of the academic year – allowing them to be placed in mainstream pathways the following year – and almost all students who passed the ELPAC were reclassified before the next testing season.

One theme continued to emerge over and over again: “The earlier students can be reclassified,” says senior research associate Laurel Sipes, “the better off they will be in the long run.”

For multilingual elementary school students, second and fifth grades are particularly good times to target for reclassification, she explains. If students have been in U.S. schools for a while at those times, they have been able to adapt to the school system, language, and ELPAC format before it jumps up in difficulty in the third and sixth grades.

Following the data

Meanwhile, members of the collaborative voiced concern that reclassified students might struggle academically after losing some of the targeted supports for students identified as English learners – so Gardner Center researchers did what they do best: they followed the newly reclassified students for two more years into high school to understand how they were faring.

The results were reassuring. Researchers found that the cohort of reclassified students was not only doing just fine, but also outperforming peers who remained labeled as EL. Most reclassified students were passing the “A–G” courses required to be eligible for admission to California’s public university systems, and they also reported statistically significantly higher levels of engagement in school.

California Assembly Bill 2555, currently under consideration by the state Senate, proposes automatically reclassifying students who pass the ELPAC without any additional requirements. This evidence from the Gardner Center suggests that when districts reclassify most students who meet the ELPAC threshold, those students tend to perform well academically in high school.

Long-term English learners

Engaging with Stanford and the Gardner Center has also enabled the collaborative to dig deeper into the profiles and pathways of English learners more broadly, an effort that the schools and districts did not have the capacity to pursue on their own.

Researchers found many distinctions between and among English learners, even though they are often treated as a stable and homogeneous group. Rather, students classified as EL vary widely in linguistic development, academic preparation, and institutional experience.

Of greatest concern, the early research showed that students who remain in English learner status for seven years or more – designated as long-term English learners (LTEL) – demonstrate lower academic engagement and performance relative to students who reclassify, as well as an increase in high school noncompletion.

The state of California recently started requiring that districts break out data on LTELs as part of their annual reporting, so the challenges facing this group of students will only become more visible in the coming years, says senior research associate Sebastian Castrechini. To get ahead of this, the Gardner Center team has already assembled a body of research about LTELs, including their demographics and other characteristics.

The team’s findings challenge many commonly held assumptions. For example, the majority of long-term English learners are born in the United States and score highly on the oral parts of the ELPAC test. For this subgroup, providing targeted reading and writing interventions that leverage students’ oral speaking strengths may help them bridge the gap to reclassified status.

The work ahead

The work of the collaborative and Gardner Center researchers continues to delve deeper, with new research focusing on dually identified students, English learners with diagnosed disabilities. The first step, as always, is to mine the data with quantitative research to understand how they are doing and then use qualitative research methods to understand the different ways they are being supported by different districts. If past is prologue, the team expects to find a diverse array of strategies in use within the districts as well as a new opportunity to assess their effectiveness.

Ten years after the establishment of the collaborative and that initial effort to forge agreements about reclassification, the districts are in a much different place.