Court reverses judge on school case
PHOENIX - The Supreme Court yesterday handed a partial victory to Arizona officials who are challenging federal court supervision of a program to educate students who aren’t proficient in English.
By a 5-to-4 vote, the court reversed an appeals court ruling in a 17-year-old lawsuit intended to close the gap between students in Nogales who are learning to speak English and native English speakers.
Justice Samuel Alito, in the majority opinion, said a federal judge in Arizona must take another look at the program to see whether Nogales now is “providing equal opportunities’’ to English language learners.
Alito, joined by his conservative colleagues, was highly critical of rulings by both the judge and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco that have kept Nogales, and more recently the entire state, under federal court supervision with regard to teaching nonnative English speakers.
In 2000, a federal judge found that the state had violated the Equal Educational Opportunities Act’s requirements for appropriate instruction for English-language learners. A year later, he expanded his ruling and placed the state’s programs for non-English speaking students under court oversight. Since then, the two sides have fought over what constitutes compliance with the order. Arizona has more than doubled the amount of funding that schools receive per non-English speaking student.
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