House Bill 2064: Arizona’s ELL Funding, Criticism, and Changes

Arizona House Bill 2064, enacted on March 3, 2006, overhauled how Arizona public schools taught students learning English by creating a rigid Structured English Immersion framework built around a mandatory four-hour daily block of English language instruction, establishing a state task force to design and enforce the instructional model, and directing tens of millions of dollars in new funding to English Language Learner programs.¹ The law shaped the daily school experience of tens of thousands of Arizona children for more than a decade before being significantly reformed in 2019.

What the Law Required

HB 2064 created a nine-member Arizona English Language Learners Task Force, with members appointed by the governor, the president of the Senate, the speaker of the House, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The task force was charged with developing “research-based models” of Structured English Immersion that every district and charter school had to follow.²

The signature requirement was the four-hour block. For the first year a student was classified as an English Language Learner, the approved models had to include a minimum of four hours per day of English language development instruction.¹ The task force adopted its SEI models in September 2007, and schools implemented them statewide starting in the 2008-2009 school year. Students were grouped into classrooms by their proficiency level on the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment (AZELLA), which sorted them from Pre-Emergent to Intermediate. The four hours were devoted entirely to discrete language skills: phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, and semantics. Academic content subjects such as math, science, and social studies were excluded from the block.³

Because a typical school day runs six to six and a half hours, four hours of language-specific instruction left very little time for anything else. The statute also defined Structured English Immersion in strict terms: “nearly all classroom instruction” had to be in English, “no subject matter shall be taught in any language other than English,” and students were to “learn to read and write solely in English.” Teachers could use a student’s native language only minimally and when necessary.¹

HB 2064 built on Proposition 203, the 2000 ballot initiative that dismantled bilingual education in Arizona and replaced it with English immersion. Proposition 203 passed with 63 percent of the vote and was largely funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, but it left schools considerable flexibility in how to carry out the English-only mandate.⁴ HB 2064 eliminated that local flexibility by prescribing a single uniform model.³

Why the Legislature Passed It

HB 2064 was Arizona’s response to a federal court order in Flores v. Arizona, a class-action suit filed in 1992 by parents in the Nogales Unified School District alleging the state was violating the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974. In 2000, a federal district judge ruled that Arizona’s per-pupil funding of roughly $150 for ELL students was “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered the state to devise an adequate funding scheme.⁵

The legislature’s early attempts to comply failed or were vetoed. By December 2005, the district court had held Arizona in contempt and begun imposing daily fines that eventually reached $2 million per day, accumulating more than $20 million in penalties.⁵ Under that pressure, HB 2064 cleared the House 33-24 and the Senate 16-14.⁶ Governor Janet Napolitano allowed the bill to become law without her signature, signaling her reluctance to endorse a measure she and the State Board of Education largely opposed.⁷

The federal courts did not accept HB 2064 as sufficient compliance. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Horne v. Flores in 2009, where the Court reversed the lower courts, holding that they had focused too narrowly on incremental funding and should instead have assessed whether all of Arizona’s changes together achieved compliance with the EEOA. The Court remanded the case for that broader review.⁷

How the Law Funded ELL Programs

HB 2064 created two new funding streams. The Arizona Structured English Immersion Fund covered the “incremental costs” of implementing the approved instructional models, and the Statewide Compensatory Instruction Fund paid for instruction outside regular school hours for students who needed additional help. The law appropriated $10 million from the General Fund for the compensatory fund in its first year, $14.3 million to increase per-pupil ELL funding, $2.5 million for audits by the Auditor General, and additional money for the Arizona Department of Education to administer the programs.⁶

Per-pupil funding for ELL students rose from approximately $355 to $432, an amount that still represented only about 11.5 percent of the base per-pupil figure.³ Districts submitted budget requests for incremental costs, which were then offset by federal Title III funds and proportional shares of Title I and Title II money. Distributions from the SEI Fund were capped at two fiscal years per student, reflecting the law’s assumption that one year of the intensive model would be enough for most learners.⁶ By fiscal year 2009, the SEI Fund was distributing roughly $41 million to about 150 school districts and charter schools.⁸

Oversight ran through the Office of English Language Acquisition Services within the Arizona Department of Education, which conducted on-site evaluations and could refer continued noncompliance to the State Board of Education, with loss of SEI Fund money as a potential consequence.¹

Criticism and Outcomes for Students

The four-hour model drew sustained criticism from researchers, educators, and civil rights advocates on several fronts.

The most prominent was segregation. Because students spent four of six school hours in language-specific classrooms grouped by proficiency, they were effectively separated from English-speaking peers for most of every day. Researchers Patricia Gándara and Gary Orfield described the arrangement as creating environments where students were “stunted both academically and emotionally.”³ A qualitative study of 18 classrooms found that even during non-ELD periods like art or music, elementary ELL students often remained grouped together, reinforcing an “ELL student identity” in which children perceived themselves as “different and apart from the rest of the students in the school.” In some high schools, SEI classrooms were physically placed in isolated areas of campus, near special education wings or away from core academic departments.⁹

The model also crowded out academic content. With four hours consumed by discrete language skills, little room was left in the school day for math, science, social studies, or electives, and the law did not spell out how ELL students were supposed to receive instruction in those subjects.³ For high schoolers the consequences were particularly acute. Many could not fit required graduation courses into their schedules, and researchers found that the only apparent path for some students to graduate on time was through summer school or after-school programs, many of which had been eliminated due to budget cuts.⁹

Academic outcomes were poor. A baseline study by the Arizona Auditor General, published in April 2008, examined roughly 8,700 ELL students across 18 districts in fiscal year 2007 and found that only about 7 percent became fully proficient in English that year. Most who did reach proficiency had been in ELL programs for at least two years, and nearly two-thirds of sampled students either stayed at the same proficiency level or regressed. The audit also uncovered data problems, including a July 2007 processing error that excluded over 20,000 ELL students from funding counts and created an $8 million discrepancy.¹⁰

A four-year longitudinal analysis found that the model was effective for less than half of Spanish-speaking children placed in it. ELL graduation rates in Arizona fell from 44 percent in the 2005-2006 school year to 25 percent in 2010-2011, placing Arizona last among all 50 states.³ A 2022 study by Mahoney and colleagues found that former ELL students whose schooling was shaped by Proposition 203 and HB 2064 “fared worse over time” rather than closing performance gaps, and separate research documented psychological effects including anxiety, depression, school phobia, and eating and sleeping difficulties linked to the SEI model.¹¹

How the Law Has Changed Since

The first structural change came in 2013, when the legislature dissolved the ELL Task Force and transferred all of its authority to the State Board of Education.¹² The four-hour block itself stayed in place for another six years.

In February 2019, Governor Doug Ducey signed Senate Bill 1014, which eliminated the mandatory four-hour block.¹³ The bill passed unanimously and reduced required daily English language instruction to 120 minutes for students in kindergarten through fifth grade and 100 minutes for students in grades six through twelve.¹⁴ SB 1014 also allowed districts to craft their own research-based instructional models and submit them to the State Board of Education for approval, and it removed the one-year limit on participation in SEI programs, an acknowledgment that the original expectation of one-year proficiency had not proven realistic.¹⁵

In January 2020, the State Board of Education approved a Dual Language Immersion SEI Model, which permits instruction in English for half the day and in a partner language for the other half. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne sued, arguing the model violated Proposition 203’s English-only mandate. In March 2024, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper dismissed the suit, ruling that Horne lacked the legal authority to challenge models already approved by the State Board.¹⁶ A second lawsuit, brought by a parent represented by Horne’s wife as counsel, was dismissed in December 2024 on standing grounds.¹⁷ In July 2023, Arizona’s Attorney General confirmed that the Dual Language model remains an active, board-approved SEI model and that neither the Superintendent nor the Department of Education can unilaterally eliminate it.¹⁸

The broader framework of Proposition 203 remains Arizona law. A 2024 measure, H.C.R. 2021, sought to repeal Proposition 203’s English-only provisions and replace them with a requirement for “high quality, innovative, research-based language programs,” but it stalled in committee. State performance data from 2024 showed that 96 percent of English learners were not proficient in English Language Arts and 93 percent were not proficient in math.¹⁹

1
Arizona Legislature. HB 2064 Summary as Transmitted to the Governor
2
Arizona Legislature. HB 2064 Striker Memo
3
Morrison Institute, Arizona State University. English Language Learners
4
University of Arizona College of Education. Everything on Its Head: How Arizona’s SEI Policy Reinvents Theory and Practice
5
Cornell Law Institute. Horne v. Flores
6
Arizona Legislature. HB 2064 Appropriations as Enacted
7
Justia. Horne v. Flores, 557 U.S. 433
8
Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee. ADE Non-Formula Programs
9
UCLA Civil Rights Project. Policy in Practice: SEI in Arizona
10
Arizona Auditor General. ELL Baseline Report
11
New America. In Arizona, a New Generation of English Learners at Risk
12
Arizona Department of Education. OELAS EL Handbook
13
KJZZ. Bill Eliminates Four-Hour Block for Arizona’s English Language Learners
14
Cronkite News. English Immersion Changes for ELL Students
15
Arizona Mirror. New Law Changes How English Language Learners Are Taught
16
KJZZ. Judge Dismisses Horne’s Suit Challenging Dual Language Programs
17
AZPM. Judge Dismisses Challenge to Dual Language Program
18
Arizona Attorney General. AG Opinion I23-005
19
Arizona State Law Journal. Educating English Learners in Arizona: Is It Time for Change?