How a dubious proposition turned into a bureaucracy
For most of Chicago’s history, immigrant education was built around a hard but simple bargain: When you came to America you were expected to speak the native tongue. It was not always gentle. It was, however, clear. The child adapted to the English-speaking school, and the family, parish, neighborhood, and classroom all pushed in the same direction.
That older world is easy to caricature. It can sound like the gruff neighborhood command: “You come to America, you speaka da English!” Yet millions of children from Italian, Polish, Greek, Czech, Lithuanian, Jewish, and other immigrant families did learn English that way. Some failed, some muddled through, and some soared. It was a sink or swim mentality. At the very least it punctured the modern assumption that English immersion is educational malpractice.
Today, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) operate in a very different legal and bureaucratic universe. The old sink-or-swim model is gone. English Learner (EL) services are no longer optional. Under federal civil rights law, state bilingual education rules and decades of court precedent, CPS must identify students with limited English proficiency and provide language support. Bilingual Education Act
The first major federal milestone, the Bilingual Education Act, also known as Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was signed in 1968. It provided federal grants to school districts to create programs for students with limited English-speaking ability. The landmark case was Lau v. Nichols in 1974, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that San Francisco schools could not simply place Chinese-speaking students in English-only classrooms and consider that to be equal treatment. Equal treatment, the Court said in effect, is not meaningful if the child cannot understand the instruction.
Also in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which required school districts to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by students in instructional programs. This helped turn language assistance from a discretionary program into a broader legal obligation. A relatively recent EL funding case was Horne v. Flores, 2009, from Arizona. That case dealt with whether the state was doing enough to help EL overcome language barriers. A lower court had focused heavily on inadequate funding, but the Supreme Court said courts should not treat funding levels alone as the test; they must look at whether the state’s overall program is actually working. That is at least somewhat of a break.
Illinois law goes further. If a school has 20 or more EL of the same language classification, it must offer Transitional Bilingual Education, or TBE. If the number is smaller, the district provides a Transitional Program of Instruction, or TPI. CPS also has dual-language programs and a newcomer refugee support system. The umbrella has grown into a system of teachers, coordinators, compliance staff, professional development, data reporting, and central-office management. The alphabet soup of new programs is spreading like cancer. One bureaucracy is not much different than another.
The scale is not small. CPS’s FY 2026 budget overview puts the district’s total budget at $10.25 billion. The district’s EL and multilingual apparatus sits within the Office of Multilingual-Multicultural Education, or OMME. CPS budget materials show roughly $84.7 million in OMME-related funding when central department spending and school-based allocations are combined. CPS also reports more than 88,000 EL, roughly a quarter of the district’s students.
That number matters because mandates are never costless. CPS identified roughly 597 OMME-related positions, including central department personnel and school-based positions. About 86 of those were department-level positions, while 511 were budgeted at schools. So, department level positions account for 15% of the employees. Somehow I don’t think there would be that high of a percentage in private and parochial schools. Not all 86 are “administrators” in the narrow sense. Some may work in compliance, curriculum, family outreach, data, professional development, or newcomer services. But to taxpayers, the distinction is less comforting than officials imagine. A support position is still a paid position, with salary, benefits, and, eventually, pension cost.
Pensions are where the real public cost hides. CPS does not assign long-term pension liability by program. But if one allocates pension debt by headcount, the EL apparatus carries a meaningful implied burden. The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund’s unfunded liability is systemwide, not program-specific, but any staff-heavy program necessarily adds to the payroll base on which retirement obligations accumulate. The direct OMME line item is therefore not the full price. The full price includes the shadow costs of benefits, pensions, and future fiscal pressure.
The annual contribution estimate uses the FY 2026 pension numbers: CPS says its required FY 2026 contribution is $663.6 million, while the State is projected to pay $363.1 million, for a total employer contribution of roughly $1.03 billion.
This is the familiar Chicago story: a legally mandated service, partly funded by state and federal money, but ultimately underwritten by local taxpayers. The mandate may come from Washington or Springfield, but the bill still lands in Chicago. English immersion can work, especially with young children, orderly classrooms, strong phonics, clear expectations, and a peer culture where English is unavoidable. That is why many older immigrant children succeeded without formal English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. A disciplined Catholic school, for example, may be well suited to that model. It can offer structure, moral formation, high expectations, and a culture of assimilation that many families actively want. Shouldn’t that be the norm for all schools?
The argument is that bilingual and dual-language programs can also work well. Their strongest argument is not that children cannot learn English by immersion. Of course they can. The better argument is that students may lose academic ground while trying to understand math, science, history,. and literature in a language they have not yet mastered. A well-run bilingual program can preserve academic learning while English develops. So, if it’s a well run school then EL works, and if it’s a poorly run school, it doesn’t. That sounds more like an endorsement for school choice rather than an endorsement for EL.
It has been established that bilingual programs are costly. Are they effective? There is an example of English immersion from 1998 until 2016 in the nation’s largest state. California’s Proposition 227 is the big natural experiment. California moved sharply toward structured English immersion after Proposition 227 in 1998. Scores rose afterward, but the official evaluation warned that the gains could not be attributed solely to English immersion because other reforms and accountability changes were happening at the same time. In other words, the “English immersion improved scores” claim is not airtight. Of course it wasn’t airtight. That wouldn’t fit the narrative. If the evidence is mixed, is it worth it to keep a massive and ever growing bureaucracy alive when Chicago is suffering from serious fiscal constraints?
Illinois once had a modest mechanism for this: "Invest in Kids," the state’s scholarship tax-credit program. Donors received a state income-tax credit for contributions to scholarship-granting organizations, which then helped low- and middle-income families pay private-school tuition. The program expired at the end of 2023. The Illinois Department of Revenue says donations after December 31, 2023, no longer qualify for the Invest in Kids credit.
The politics were predictable. Teachers unions and public-school advocates argued that the program diverted money from public education. Supporters argued that it gave poor families the kind of choice affluent families already exercise through home purchases or tuition checks. The program died, and many families lost a path out.
Now, Illinois may face a new version of the same question. The IRS says that beginning January 1, 2027, individual taxpayers may be able to claim a federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for cash contributions to scholarship-granting organizations, but states must choose to participate and list eligible SGOs before taxpayers can claim the credit for donations in that state.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, reportedly plans to opt Colorado into the new federal scholarship program, despite opposition from public-school advocates. His reasoning is hard to dismiss: Refusing to participate would not abolish the federal credit; it would simply mean Colorado students would not benefit from it. Even New York’s left wing governor, Kathy Hochoul, is signaling that New York will be opting in.
Illinois should draw the obvious lesson. If federal scholarship money is available, why should Illinois families be excluded? Why should a Chicago immigrant family that wants a Catholic immersion school, or a private school with a different English-acquisition model, be told that the only acceptable option is the CPS bureaucracy?
The federal program's funding allows the parents to use the funds in a wide array of choices. If a little extra help is needed for English proficiency, then this could be one avenue available. The Illinois legislature should then vote to revive Invest in Kids. It, of course, would need the signature of Governor Pritzker. He has always lived in mortal fear of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Hopefully he can overcome that fear. It would be much better to leave it in the hands of the parents versus the continuation of the present day bilingual BLOB.
It needs to be gutted. Not reformed, but gutted.
