A quarter of California’s public school students are English learners who are entitled by state and federal law to receive instructional support to become English proficient. This educational opportunity, however, has been denied to more than 20,000 of the English learner students who attend our state’s schools.
When English learner students receive no language services, they are forced to sit in classrooms where they comprehend less of the instruction. Denied access to the core curriculum that is afforded to their English proficient classmates, English leaner students have to repeat grade levels and a disproportionate number of them eventually drop out.
Based upon a proposal by Michael Kirst, Alan Bersin and Goodwin Liu, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) provides local school officials with increased funding generally, and additional grants for students with greater needs, such as English Learners.
Kirst argued that:

 [B]ecause not all students come to school with the same individual, family or neighborhood advantages, some need more resources than others to meet a given achievement standard. In allocating education dollars, the finance system should systematically account for differing student needs.

Governor Jerry Brown’s recent signing of the LCFF takes an important step towards providing local school districts with additional funding to meet the needs of English learners. But it falls short of ensuring that districts will provide required instructional services.
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In a state ranked 49th in education spending, we still have a long climb ahead of us to reach a point where we appropriately support our public school children, but the LCFF takes a step in the right direction by recognizing the fundamental truth in State Board President Kirst’s argument and restructuring our state’s education finance system around that principle. The promise of LCFF will be hollow, however, if we can’t ensure that English learners receive even the most basic required instructional services.
If California is serious about ensuring that the new supplemental and concentration funds actually benefit English learners, the logical first step would be to commit to addressing the reports it has received from hundreds of districts regarding English learners being denied required English language instructional services. Districts receive state and federal funding to serve these children, yet year after year districts report denying tens of thousands of English learners required services. The state is responsible under our State Constitution for ensuring equal educational opportunity, yet it provides no consequence for or response to these reports, other than making the information available on the Internet.
Until California adopts accountability measures that ensure the delivery of services, and acknowledges that it must act when local districts report that students received “no services,” we risk allowing the state to continue to deny thousands of English learners access to basic educational opportunity.
Jessica Price is Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Southern California

Today, we won another victory against one of the most draconian parts of our immigration system: the federal government’s practice of putting immigrants in long-term detention without the basic due process of a bond hearing.
In Rodriguez v. Robbins, a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU, a federal district court held that the government must provide automatic bond hearings to immigrants detained six months or longer in the Los Angeles area while fighting their deportation cases. The decision follows on the heels of a victory at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this spring, which previously ordered bond hearings for some class members.
The government's track record on detention makes the importance of this ruling clear. The immigration lock-up system is massive, wasteful, and hugely expensive to taxpayers.  In 2011, the government detained a record-breaking 429,000 immigrants at a price tag of $2 billion, even though most immigrants pose no threat to public safety and do not need to be locked up to make sure they show up for court. In many cases, the basic due process of a bond hearing would have prevented months or years of arbitrary detention and saved countless taxpayer dollars.
One example is Byron Merida. Byron has lived in the United States for nearly three decades and started several successful small businesses. All of his immediate family members are U.S. citizens or green card holders. Nonetheless, the government detained Byron without a bond hearing after it put him in deportation proceedings following his conviction for a non-violent crime. The government kept Byron behind bars while his immigration case wound through the courts, including his successful appeal to the Ninth Circuit. When Byron finally got a bond hearing as a result of our case, the immigration judge ordered him released on a $2,500 bond. In total, the government needlessly detained Byron for three years and four months—at a cost of nearly $200,000 to taxpayers.
Today’s ruling also establishes key safeguards at prolonged detention hearings, requiring that the government provide them automatically and with adequate notice to the detainees, and noting that immigration judges should consider cost-effective alternatives to detention, such as ankle monitors, that avoid the fiscal and human costs of long-term lock-up. These safeguards will help ensure that the government stops arbitrarily stripping people of their liberty.
Rodriguez v. Robbins is being litigated by the ACLU of Southern California, ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic of Stanford Law School, and the law firm of Sidley Austin LLP.
Michael Tan is Staff Attorney at the ACLU