Across the country, teachers are naming the same problem in different ways: Multilingual learners feel disconnected from school. High school feels overwhelming, and many students simply don’t see the point. Some believe English is too hard to learn. Others assume school doesn’t matter because they’ll work with family or follow a predetermined path after graduation. For many multilingual learners, apathy isn’t defiance—it’s self-protection . I’ve felt this myself. As a student

Isabel moved to the U.S. when she was seven. She’s now a junior — bright, polite, and responsible. She passes every class, every test, and rarely asks for help. She has a major problem--she has never reclassified. She is considered a Long-Term ML. Last week in chemistry, she was asked to summarize her lab results. She hesitated. “Can I write it instead?” she asked. Her report card is full of Bs and Cs and every year it is a coin flip as to whether she gets approaching or not

Walk into any middle or high school classroom and you’ll likely see students working. Maybe they’re annotating a text. Maybe they’re listening to a lecture or answering questions in a journal. But what you won’t often see—especially from multilingual learners—is speaking . Not casual speaking. Academic speaking. The kind that builds confidence, builds vocabulary, and builds the bridge between language and content mastery. And here’s the real problem: We don’t have a system f