Samantha Ramos stood at the front of her second grade classroom, a small mic clipped to her lanyard amplifying her instructions as she began a phonics lesson.

“Can we get our arms ready?” asked Ramos, who’s taught at the John B. Wright Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, for 15 years. She brought her right palm to her left shoulder as the students imitated her movements.

Ramos, who specializes in teaching English as a second language, was leading a lesson that day on the short “i” sound. She told the students to pronounce each letter with a different gesture — touching the shoulder for the “w,” the elbow for the “i” and the hand for the double “l” — before sounding out the word “will.” They repeated the process for other short “i” words — “dig,” “wig” and “fit.”

The lesson is part of a daily block of language instruction, ranging from two to four hours long, that Arizona students learning English as a second language are required to take. The students, most of them Spanish-speaking Latino children, remain in the program, separated for part of that time from their peers whose primary language is English, until they pass a test showing they’re fluent enough to learn in a mainstream classroom.

The program is known as “structured English immersion,” or colloquially as “English-only” because all instruction is required to be in English. This limits their time for core subjects, like math and science, that are critical to academic success and college readiness. Arizona is the only state with English-only laws still in effect for its public schools.

But the number of students enrolled in the curriculum has tumbled dramatically this year. At the Tucson Unified School District, where Ramos teaches, the percentage of test-taking students who scored high enough to be classified as proficient in English more than doubled — from 10% in 2025 to 24% in 2026.

Rather than a big leap in fluency, however, the test results reflect the Arizona Department of Education lowering the grade needed to pass. The changes were approved by outgoing Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a longtime Republican defender of Arizona’s English-only policies.

Experts warn this change will do lasting harm to tens of thousands of Arizona students who will exit the structured English immersion program before they know the language well enough to succeed. Such students are already part of the lowest-performing group on standardized tests, and the loss of specialized instruction could further harm their long-term academic success, according to education researchers.

Past attempts by the Arizona Department of Education to reclassify large numbers of children learning English as fluent prompted federal investigations by the departments of Justice and Education. Federal officials contended placing such students in classrooms where they struggled because they lacked knowledge of English violated their civil and educational rights, and Arizona agreed to a settlement more than a decade ago.

What’s happening now could be a repeat of that, said Katie Bernstein, an applied linguist and professor of early childhood education at Arizona State University.

“If you’re put in a class where you don’t understand what’s going on at all, you’re not learning language or content,” she said. “And so those are the worst outcomes of all, are students who are not given any language services.”

Nearly 1 in 10 students enrolled in Arizona public and charter schools marked in their school registration forms they speak a language other than English at home. State law mandates that they be assessed for fluency and placed in structured English immersion, and each spring they take the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment, or AZELLA, to measure their progress in reading, writing, speaking and listening.

This approach has been required since Arizona voters passed a 2000 ballot initiative, Proposition 203, banning bilingual education in public schools. Still, officials have periodically made changes to the proficiency test.

The U.S. departments of Justice and Education determined the version of AZELLA administered between 2006 and 2012 — coinciding with Horne’s first two terms as the state’s top education official — was “not a valid measure of English language proficiency and readiness.” As a result, the state had removed at least 28,000 students from structured English immersion who still lacked proficiency in reading and writing the language.

The Arizona Department of Education was found to be in violation of civil rights laws that ban discrimination on the basis of race and national origin by schools that receive federal funds. The state voluntarily entered a settlement, which stressed that the law requires “education agencies to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede students’ equal participation in instructional programs.”

The settlement agreement stipulated that the state would immediately help school districts find the students who had been harmed and offer “reading and writing intervention services.” In the long term, the state was required to revamp the AZELLA test.

Similar issues prompted a second voluntary settlement four years later, which instructed the state to raise the threshold for a test score to qualify as proficient in English. The state was also required to retest English-language learners using more rigorous standards, among other things.

Ida Rose Florez, a psychologist and former professor and researcher at Arizona State University, conducted a study published in 2012 that found the AZELLA test was “ineffective and obsolete” and its results could be arbitrary. The research concluded there was no evidence the test could “accurately differentiate” between children who need English-language services and those who don’t.

“What I examined, and what I saw, was a test that was absolutely not developed correctly,” Florez told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “I don’t see any basis for validity whatsoever.”

After dropping during the pandemic, AZELLA passing rates held steady at 12% statewide for three school years, including in 2025, when more than 118,000 took the test and just over 14,000 scored well enough to be reclassified as proficient.

After the Arizona Department of Education lowered the score needed to pass the test, the statewide reclassification rate for 2026 jumped to 26%, according to the department’s official tally announced to teachers at a September training. Nearly 113,000 students took the 2026 AZELLA, according to the department, resulting in the reclassification of about 30,000 students as proficient and their removal from English-language services this school year.

The state Department of Education said its decision to make it easier to pass the AZELLA came after it administered the test last year to 600 native English speakers.

Each new version of the test is given to native speakers first and the results are used as a baseline, said Deputy Superintendent Margaret Dugan, who chaired the group that advocated for passage of Proposition 203 and has served with Horne during all three of his terms as superintendent.

The department skipped this step in 2020, when it made the last major change to the test, following a State Board of Education decision granting more flexibility in how schools teach students English. “Because of COVID and all of that that went on in 2020, things were not done in order,” Dugan said. “When we walked in, it was a new test and they had never tested the native speakers, so now they had to.”

When that version was belatedly administered to native English speakers, nearly half failed, said Adela Santa Cruz, who leads the Office of English Language Acquisition, which oversees the test. “With a native not being able to pass that test at a high percentage, there’s something that was just quite awry,” she said.

She said the issues were reflected in the pass rate of English learners plateauing at 12% for three years.

Using this information, education officials adjusted the grading criteria for students learning English, requiring a lower score to pass all four portions of the test: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Previously, all students needed a combined score of at least 1,000 out of a possible 1,405 to pass. This year, the minimum passing score for all grade levels ranged from 962 for high schoolers to 944 for kindergartners.

“My hope is that all of you will see an increase in proficiency,” Anju Kuriakose, the director of psychometrics at the Arizona Department of Education, told school district representatives upon announcing the changes in April.

Kuriakose noted half of the native speakers who had been tested to inform the changes were in kindergarten and first grade. Students in fifth grade or higher accounted for less than one-fifth of test takers.

Florez’s 2012 study found that when scoring guidelines are based too heavily on the test results of native-speaking kindergartners — without enough data from older children with more advanced language skills — pass results can be artificially elevated. She sees similar problems with the 2026 changes.

The Arizona Department of Education said Horne, who approved the changes, was unavailable for an interview. But he has played an outsize role in the state’s structured English immersion program. 

This is Horne’s third nonconsecutive term as superintendent, having served from 2003 to 2011 before returning to the office in 2023. In a 2024 interview with Arizona Luminaria, he boasted that students’ reclassification rates were highest during his terms from 2003 to 2011. “After I left office, things deteriorated,” he said. “I implemented structured English immersion, and equally important, undertook intensive training for the teachers as to how to do it, and then we got it” — the reclassification rate — “up to 31% in three or four years,” he said.

The Arizona auditor general, however, questioned the validity of the test’s results during Horne’s tenure. An audit released in 2011 found that “because data is either unavailable or unreliable, the effect of SEI models is unknown.”

Horne lost his bid for reelection in July’s Republican primary and will leave office in December.

Juana Casas was relieved when her son Arturo, a fourth grader at Tucson’s John B. Wright Elementary School, passed the AZELLA test this spring after three years in structured English immersion classes.

Casas said she learned from the experience of her oldest daughter, who had struggled to learn English and fell behind her classmates. She and her husband sought after-school tutoring to help Arturo, and his two older sisters helped him learn English at home.

“I couldn’t help my oldest daughter, and she really struggled,” Casas said in Spanish. “Their two experiences are totally different. Arturo doesn’t speak Spanish very well because they’ve always spoken to him just in English so that he wouldn’t have to struggle like my oldest struggled.”

English learners already lag far behind their peers, resulting in lower rates of graduation and postsecondary attainment. In 2025, standardized reading tests administered to all Arizona third graders showed a 31% disparity between English-language learners and other students, according to the Center for the Future of Arizona’s Education Progress Meter. The standardized math exam administered to all Arizona eighth graders in 2025 showed a 23% disparity between English-language learners and other students.

Since Proposition 203 was debated 26 years ago, proponents have argued it helps students learn English more quickly and gets them into mainstream classes faster. There is limited research to support this. Ample studies, however, show students taught under English-only policies have bigger achievement gaps compared to students instructed using bilingual or multilingual education, which reinforces the student’s primary language while accelerating their learning in academic subjects and a second language.

A landmark 32-year study spanning 16 states analyzed various language-learning models, including structured English immersion, and found that “the key to accelerated progress is for English learners to receive peer-equivalent, grade-level bilingual schooling,” according to researchers Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas.

Florez, the former ASU professor who studied Arizona’s model, said, “The fundamental problem with the AZELLA is that it’s trying to measure a system that should never be in place to begin with.”

Bernstein, the ASU early childhood education professor, said, “There is no linguistic, educational, economic, or research-based reason why we shouldn’t have dual-language programs in the state. And so I think that potentially leaves politics as the only answer to why.”

With more students passing this year’s proficiency test, the Tucson Unified School District is preparing to continue supporting students like Arturo within the mandates approved by voters in 2000.

Patricia Sandoval-Taylor, the district’s director for language development, said state law requires teachers to track reclassified students’ progress in their classrooms for two years and intervene with additional support like tutoring or summer school if needed. Arizona schools don’t receive additional funding for such services, as they do for students who are not proficient in English.

And since part of the district’s funding for English learners is based on the number of students in structured English immersion, more students passing the 2026 AZELLA will mean less funding in the 2027 school year.

“They’re not going to have the direct services to ensure they become fully English proficient,” Sandoval-Taylor said.

At John B. Wright Elementary, Ramos is still getting to know her second graders’ abilities and adjusting her teaching methods accordingly.

Teaching students who are learning English comes with additional responsibilities but no additional pay. Still, Ramos believes it’s where she can make the biggest difference. For her, that includes celebrating when students pass AZELLA and are classified as proficient in English.

“I think they need to be celebrated because they’re going above and beyond,” she said. “Before they did the change to the cut scores, it was like, ‘Well they passed this really incredibly difficult test that even English speakers couldn’t even pass themselves.’”