At the beginning of the new school year, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released a latest audit revealing systemic and severe deficiencies in the services for English language learners (ELL) within the New York City Department of Education. This has led to tens of thousands of students being unable to access the legally required courses and services. These issues disproportionately affect the Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bengali, and Arabic-speaking communities, with Spanish-speaking students accounting for 67% of all ELL students in the city.
Lander emphasized that in the greatest immigrant city in the world, English language learning services should be the cornerstone of ensuring equal education for all students. However, the audit found that the Department of Education has long failed to fulfill this commitment, and the city government has a moral responsibility to safeguard the educational rights of every student. For example, the DOE did not provide legally required courses or instructional time to 48% of sampled ELL students, and 40% of sampled students were taught by teachers lacking ELL teaching qualifications. These systemic deficiencies have resulted in students not receiving required courses, adequate instructional time, and guidance from qualified teachers.
Additionally, the DOE improperly submitted 146 waiver applications to circumvent the establishment of bilingual programs, exceeding the state’s five-year waiver limit; parental rights were also overlooked, with 31% of student records missing, making it unclear whether parents were informed in their preferred language.
Over the past three years, the number of neglected ELL students in teaching in New York City has increased from 148,933 to 174,014, a 16.8% increase, yet the DOE’s resources and services have not correspondingly improved.
The Comptroller’s Office provided the following recommendations to the Department of Education: 1. Establish a city-wide unified tracking system to ensure compliance of bilingual and ENL (English as a New Language) programs with regulations; 2. Strictly monitor ENL class hours and teacher qualifications to ensure instruction by qualified teachers; 3. Recruit and train more qualified teaching staff; 4. Strengthen oversight of waiver applications to ensure ELL students receive appropriate language services; 5. Establish a centralized process for collecting, analyzing, and handling data from all school “parent surveys” and “course agreements”; 6. Develop and implement a centralized tracking system for ATS waitlists and transfer applications, and enhance supervision to ensure timely fulfillment of preferences for all bilingual programs; 7. Implement school-level monitoring systems.