Education Week - February 7, 2024 - 12

In 1974, the Supreme Court Recognized English
Learners' Rights. The Story Behind That Case
Fifty years ago, the ruling required
public schools to provide language
support to English learners
" Lau became a beacon of hope for
By Mark Walsh
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme
Court issued a decision that some
considered the Brown v. Board of Education
for students whose native language
is not English.
In its 1974 ruling in Lau v. Nichols,
the court held that the failure of the
San Francisco school system to effectively
educate some 1,800 Chinesespeaking
students denied them " a
meaningful opportunity " to participate
in school.
Like the 1954 Brown decision
striking down racial segregation in
schools, Lau addressed educational
inequities faced by a disadvantaged
minority population. Like Brown, the
justices spoke without dissent (though
there were some minor differences
over the case issued in concurring
opinions).
The Lau decision was hailed by
advocates for immigrant and nativeborn
language-minority students and
it resulted in slow but genuine improvements
in the classroom for not
only the Asian-American community
but also the much larger Latino student
population in the United States.
However, there were limitations to
the scope and impact of the Lau decision.
Unlike Brown, which relied on
the 14th Amendment's guarantee of
equal protection of the laws, Lau was
decided on the basis of Title VI of the
Civil Rights Act of 1974, which bars
discrimination on the basis of race,
color, or national origin in federally
funded programs. That made it more
difficult to enforce.
And in contrast to Brown's long gestation
at the court over three years,
Lau was decided relatively quickly-
barely more than a month after oral
arguments and without the attention
surrounding most potentially landmark
cases.
" It was just never as visible as
Brown, " said Rachel Moran, a professor
at Texas A&M University's
law school in Fort Worth, a scholar
of the case.
The day after the decision, Lau was
mentioned on the front page of The
New York Times, but only secondarily
in a story about another education ruling,
also from Jan. 21, that invalidated
school district policies requiring pregnant
teachers to take leave well before
it was medically necessary.
" The legacy of Lau is that it did have
some symbolic value, even though the
court never clearly stated that English
learners had a right to education in
their home language, " said Rosemary
Salomone, a law professor at St. John's
University in New York City who has
written widely on the case.
English-language learners as a symbol
of this notion of a 'meaningful education,'
" she said. " But it never fully delivered
on that promise. "
A mother's meeting leads to a
lawsuit over her son's schooling
The San Francisco case began in the
late 1960s, when a community activist
named Ling-Chi Wang tried to organize
the city's Chinese community to
press for improvements in schooling
for their children, who were mostly
immersed in English-only instruction.
One of those parents, Kam Wai Lau,
went to the Chinatown/North Beach
office of the San Francisco Legal Assistance
Foundation in 1970 to seek
aid over a wage dispute. She met a
newly minted lawyer named Edward
Steinman, who was working at the
legal aid office on a fellowship and
seeking test cases to help improve
people's lives.
"
Lau became
a beacon of hope
for Englishlanguage
learners
as a symbol of
this notion of
a 'meaningful
education.' But
it never fully
delivered on
that promise.
ROSEMARY C. SALOMONE
Law professor at St. John's
University in New York City
Steinman learned that Lau's son, a
1st grader at Jean Parker Elementary
School in Chinatown, was struggling
with instruction because it was all in
English. The boy, Kinney Kinmon
Lau, had emigrated from Hong Kong
at the age of 5 and spoke little English.
" Every one of my clients needed an
interpreter, " Steinman, 79, said in an
interview with Education Week. " It
didn't take long for a light bulb to go
off that I had a case here. "
Steinman sued on behalf of Lau and
a class of Chinese-speaking students
under Title VI and the equal-protec12
| EDUCATION WEEK | February 7, 2024 | www.edweek.org
tion clause. Both a federal district
court and the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco,
ruled against them on both claims.
Steinman believed he had a strong
argument that would help his appeal
to the Supreme Court. In 1970, the
then-Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare (HEW) issued guidance
to school districts that Title VI's
anti-discrimination mandate applied
to students whose dominant language
was not English.
Under the guidance, federally
funded schools had to " take affirmative
steps to rectify the language deficiency
to open instructional programs
to these students. "
Steinman believed the high court
would recognize the importance of
the federal interpretation of Title VI
in a way that the lower courts had
not. There was another factor in his
mind. In March 1973, the high court
decided, in San Antonio Independent
School District v. Rodriguez, that there
was no federal constitutional right to
an education.
That decision did not bode well for
reviving the San Francisco students'
equal-protection claim. But Steinman
believes the justices were a bit
alarmed by negative public reaction to
their sweeping decision in Rodriguez.
" And then this little case comes
along, " he said, referring to the San
Francisco students' case.
The Supreme Court granted a review
of the Chinese students' case.
Students ally with the Nixon
administration
Oral argument was on Dec. 10,
1973. None of the families involved in
the suit could afford to travel to Washington,
Steinman said. He stressed in
his argument that the school system
was perpetuating their inability to
speak English.
" Our goal is that we want these
students to be taught English and to
understand English, so they can have
the type of mastered English which
our society requires, " Steinman told
the justices. " The problem now is that
they are being taught in a language
they do not understand. "
He said that the plaintiffs were not
demanding any particular remedy,
which would give the school system
the leeway to act on its own expertise
to develop one if the court ruled for
the students.
President Richard Nixon's administration
supported the students, with
J. Stanley Pottinger, an assistant U.S.
attorney general, emphasizing Title
VI of the Civil Rights Act.
" In interpreting both the basic protections
of Title VI and the regulations,
HEW has indeed gone further, "
said Pottinger, who as civil rights chief
at HEW had written the 1970 guidance.
" It has construed the meaning
of Title VI in a national origin discrimination
memorandum relevant to this
case by stating that where inability
to speak and understand the English
language excludes national origin minority
group children from the effective
participation in the educational
program offered by the school district,
the school district must take affirmative
steps to rectify the language deficiency. "
The
San Francisco school district,
in its merits brief before the Supreme
Court, said that merely because free
public education was a service provided
by the state did not mean that
the children of Chinese descent could
" compel the state to provide them
with special instruction to remedy
their own personal problems. "
At oral argument, Thomas M.
O'Connor, the city attorney of San
Francisco, sought to portray the
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
William Douglas, shown in
an undated photo, wrote the
opinion in Lau v. Nichols, the
1974 decision holding that
the San Francisco school
system had denied
Chinese-speaking
schoolchildren a meaningful
opportunity to participate in
their education.
AP
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - February 7, 2024

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