For multilingual students, the line between learning English and being labeled with a learning disability can be thin, complicated and consequential.
A child who reads slowly, struggles to explain an answer in writing or misses instructions in class may be showing signs of dyslexia or another learning difference. But the same behaviors can also reflect the normal, uneven process of acquiring a new language — especially the academic English used in schools.
That distinction is difficult for schools to make, and getting it wrong can carry long-term consequences.
Students who are misidentified may be placed in services that do not match their needs. Students whose disabilities are overlooked may lose valuable time without support.
“A lot of my students were not getting the services that were necessarily appropriate for them, because we miscategorized them,” said Christina Jordan, a former public school teacher who now works in educational assessment at Riverside Insights. “It was a language barrier. It was not a learning issue.”
Jordan spent 25 years in public education, much of it in a Minnesota school where nearly all students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch and about 40 languages were spoken. Many students, she said, arrived from refugee camps. At the time, teachers had fewer assessment tools and less data than many districts have now.
Looking back, Jordan said, she worries that some students’ abilities were hidden by their limited English. Achievement tests, she said, are often “very English heavy,” which can make it difficult to know whether a student missed a question because of the content or because they could not yet understand or express the answer in English.
How to measure ability
The issue is not simply whether multilingual learners are overidentified for special education. Educators say they can also be underidentified when schools assume every struggle is tied to language acquisition. The challenge is determining whether a student needs language support, disability services, both or something else entirely.
Jordan said schools need to look beyond achievement data alone and consider how students think, reason and solve problems. She recommends a three-part approach that includes academic achievement, ability data and social-emotional competency or resiliency.
“When you look beyond just achievement measures, which achievement is important? We need that,” Jordan said. “But when we look at how a student thinks and their true ability, how they reason, how they problem solve, all of those things, how they approach learning, then we really can identify, especially in our non-English speakers, where they have strengths.”
Jordan said the point was brought home at a conference for bilingual educators, where students described the frustration of knowing answers but not yet having the English to communicate them.
“Just because I don’t have the words to tell you that I’m smart doesn’t mean I don’t know the answer,” she recalled students saying. “It’s your job to figure out that I’m smart.”
Dr. Ray Sanchez, superintendent of the Public Schools of the Tarrytowns in New York, said his district begins with the same question: Who is the child, and what does the child already know?
About 60% of students in the district are Latino, Sanchez said, with many coming from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador. Spanish is the dominant home language for many multilingual learners. That means the district must be careful not to measure students only through English-language tools.
“For us, it’s really carefully seeking to understand who the kids are and making sure we have the right assessments for our students,” Sanchez said.
Without the right tools to evaluate literacy, math, computation and language development, he said, schools may end up “misplacing a child.”
In Tarrytown, students may be assessed in Spanish as well as English when appropriate. Sanchez said native-language assessment gives evaluators a clearer view of what students understand, particularly when the question is whether a learning disability exists.
“It’s best to evaluate someone in their native language,” Sanchez said. “The ratings could be skewed based on the fact that they don’t know the language that you might be assessing them in.”
Conversational vs. academic
A common source of confusion is the difference between conversational fluency and academic language. A student may talk comfortably with peers but still struggle with the vocabulary, syntax and abstract concepts required for reading textbooks, writing essays or explaining reasoning in math and science.
Sanchez pointed to the distinction between basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP). The first refers to everyday conversational language; the second involves deeper academic language and literacy.
“Kids start to speak the language, and that’s what I refer to as the first phase,” Sanchez said.
“But that cognitive piece is really seeking the deeper understanding, the meaning of words, the literary component of the language itself. That takes time.”
That time lag can be easily misunderstood. A student who speaks confidently in the hallway may still be developing the academic English needed to demonstrate knowledge on a test. If schools move too quickly, language acquisition can be mistaken for a disability. If they wait too long, real disabilities can go unaddressed.
Sanchez said awareness has improved over his career as research, training and district collaboration have increased. Tarrytown, he said, looks to districts with similar demographics and continues to adjust its systems for the students it serves.
“Our system continues to adapt around the kids we have,” he said. “That’s taken time.”
The work also extends beyond testing. Sanchez said districts need staff who can support students in more than one language. Tarrytown has worked to hire bilingual staff and uses bilingual speech teachers who can provide services in Spanish and English when needed.
Families are another essential part of the process. Sanchez said parents need clear explanations of what assessments mean and what services are intended to do. For families navigating a new language or school system, special education terminology can feel intimidating or stigmatizing.
“Providing these services, particularly special education services, is in fact not a deficit,” Sanchez said. “It’s what a child needs.”
Deficits and strengths
Jordan said schools must also shift away from a deficit-based view of intervention. Too often, she said, educators focus only on what students lack, particularly because state tests create pressure to move struggling students toward benchmarks.
But multilingual learners may also have high ability in areas that are less visible on English-heavy assessments, such as quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial thinking or creativity. Those strengths can be missed if schools look only at deficits.
“We really need to look at student success from a strengths-based model instead of just a deficit-based model,” Jordan said, “and really look at what they can do well and utilize those strengths to help bolster and increase their achievement.”
Jordan also noted that misidentification can create financial strain for districts because special education services are more costly than general education or targeted language supports. But she said the larger issue is what happens to children when they are misunderstood. Students who feel unsupported may disengage, miss school more often or develop behavior concerns, deepening the academic challenges that prompted concern in the first place.
For Jordan and Sanchez, the goal is not to avoid identifying multilingual students for special education when services are warranted. It is to slow down enough to make the right decision: assess in the appropriate language when possible, gather multiple forms of data, train educators to interpret the results, involve families and treat multilingualism as an asset rather than a problem.
The question, Jordan said, is whether schools can see the whole child before assigning a label. A student learning English may need more time, different instruction, language support or disability services. The difference matters. The label should fit the learner, not the limits of the assessment.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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