Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, Head of the Civil Rights Division, Delivers Remarks On Completion of English Learner Toolkit

Remarks as prepared for delivery

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to visit this dynamic school.

Today, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is delighted to stand with the Department of Education to announce the completion of its terrific English Learner (EL) toolkit.  This toolkit brings to life the English Learner guidance that our departments jointly issued in January by giving educators the tools they need to make the promises of the guidance a reality.  The first chapter of the toolkit was released with the guidance, and we are thrilled that now all 10 chapters are available for use in classrooms like the ones we just visited.  Feedback from the field has already demonstrated that the toolkit is an invaluable resource to schools and state education agencies as they work hard to provide high-quality services to our English Learners. 

Ensuring that English Learner students have equal opportunities to succeed in school is a priority of the Civil Rights Division.  The completion of the toolkit makes our jobs and those of educators far easier by offering user-friendly, practical ways to support these students.  As our classroom visits remind us, English Learner students reflect our nation’s rich diversity and exhibit a great enthusiasm for learning.  The toolkit and EL guidance equip educators with effective ways to overcome the language barriers that these students face in their quest to learn. 

For example, each chapter of the toolkit provides helpful checklists for educators to consider as they work to ensure English Learners are timely identified, appropriately served, and fully integrated into their schools alongside their native-English-speaking peers.  These checklists and sample documents – like the home language surveys provided in several languages – reinforce the work of the Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education by giving schools examples of how to meet their legal obligations.  For teachers and administrators who wish to delve deeper into a topic, the toolkit also provides examples of current research and best practices from the field.  In this way, the toolkit encourages schools to examine, reflect upon, and improve their services to English Learner students and Limited English Proficient parents. –

Last year we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lau v. Nichols.  This anniversary led us to reflect deeply on the progress that has been achieved for English Learner students, how much more needs to be achieved, and how fast this population has grown.  To ensure that this progress continues, we and our colleagues at the Department of Education issued the joint EL guidance to remind schools and states of their civil rights obligations to English Learner students and to provide examples of how to meet those duties.  The EL toolkit greatly expands these examples and is an evolving online resource that will offer even more over time.

We at the Civil Rights Division wish to thank the Department of Education for the remarkable efforts it made to produce this much-needed resource.  We also thank all of you who work tirelessly each day to help our English Learner students, and all students, reach their full academic potential.  We encourage you to use the toolkit and the EL guidance.  We hope the many examples each provides will facilitate your critical work educating our nation’s children.  Investing in their success is essential, and the toolkit offers many sensible ways to do so. 

Thank you again for this wonderful opportunity.  I wish you all a successful school year.