At the end of March, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) held its annual conference in Austin, Texas that brought together multidisciplinary researchers to discuss inclusion and how to incorporate diverse voices in public policy.
Unlike students who traditionally come to mind when it comes to needing language support services, Indigenous ELs are not required to have a non-English home or primary language. In fact, federal law has specific eligibility criteria that differentiates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ELs. These criteria place more of an emphasis on whether the student comes from an environment where a language other than English has had a significant impact on their level of English language proficiency, rather than what the home language may be (see Box 1). However, as authors Ilana M. Umansky, associate professor at the University of Oregon, Taiyo Itoh, graduate student at the University of Oregon, and Jioanna Carjuzaa, professor at Montana State University found in their paper, “Indigenous Students and English Learner Identification: A Fifty-State Policy Review,” very few states and localities have actually figured out how to operationalize this differentiated criteria.