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One in Four Texas Students Now Learns English as a Second Language

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Texas 2025-26 Enrollment.

Half the students in Dallas ISD^↗ are classified as English learners. Not in a magnet program or a single campus, but across the entire district: 70,422 students who need language support services in a system of 139,776. Twenty years ago, that share was 30.6%.

Dallas is not an outlier. It is the leading edge of a transformation that has reshaped every corner of Texas public education. In 2024-25, 1,345,031 students statewide were classified as limited English proficient, 24.3% of all enrollment. One in four. The state added 661,024 English learners over two decades, a 96.6% increase, while total enrollment grew just 26.2%.

The fastest-growing student population in the state

The raw numbers are staggering, but the acceleration since 2020 is what should command attention. Between 2019-20 and 2024-25, Texas added 232,357 English learners. Over the same period, total enrollment grew by just 51,326. English learner growth was 4.5 times larger than total enrollment growth. If EL-classified students had merely held their 2020 share, Texas would have about 220,000 fewer students in language support programs.

The growth accelerated sharply after the pandemic. From 2015 to 2020, LEP enrollment grew by 164,283. From 2020 to 2025, it grew by 232,357, a 41% faster pace. The single largest annual jump came in 2022-23, when Texas added 97,747 English learners in a single year, an 8.3% increase that dwarfed every prior year.

Then, in 2024-25, the count dropped by 869 students, the first dip since the COVID year of 2020-21. At 24.3%, the statewide LEP share ticked down from 24.4% the year before. Whether this is a plateau or a one-year pause will shape the next decade of Texas school finance.

Arrivals, identification, or both

The most contentious question in Texas EL policy is how much of this growth represents new students arriving in schools versus existing students being identified at higher rates. The enrollment data alone cannot answer it, but one metric offers a partial signal.

In 2005, English learners represented 34.9% of all Hispanic students in Texas. That ratio held remarkably stable through 2018, never rising above 36%. Then it surged: to 38.5% in 2020, 43.5% in 2023, and 45.8% in 2024. Nearly half of all Hispanic students in Texas are now classified LEP, up from roughly a third.

If the growth were driven entirely by newly arrived immigrant families, you would expect the LEP-to-Hispanic ratio to remain relatively stable, since both numerator and denominator would grow together. The sharp rise suggests something else is happening: either more existing Hispanic students are being identified as English learners, or newly arrived families have higher LEP classification rates than settled Hispanic families, or reclassification out of LEP status has slowed.

The reclassification explanation has direct evidence behind it. A study by IES's Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest found that the share of Texas English learners reclassified as English proficient dropped from 11.8% in 2017-18 to 4.2% in 2020-21, a decline of 7.6 percentage points. The 2018 redesign of TELPAS, the state's English language proficiency assessment, was a likely contributor. Research from Rice University's Kinder Institute found that among first-graders in the 2018-19 cohort, 83% remained unclassified before middle school, compared to 48% of the 2011-12 cohort.

Slower reclassification does not mean students are not learning English. It means they stay classified as LEP longer, which inflates the count. Immigration is certainly a factor too. Immigration accounted for nearly 57% of Texas's new residents between 2023 and 2024, according to the Texas state demographer. But the data makes clear that reclassification policy, not just new arrivals, is a substantial driver of the headline number.

The suburban front line

The districts absorbing the most English learners are not all border communities. They are the fast-growing suburbs of Houston, Dallas, and Austin where immigrant families increasingly settle directly, bypassing the urban core.

Katy ISD^↗, west of Houston, had 4,678 English learners in 2005, 10.6% of enrollment. By 2025, it had 23,488, a share of 24.5%. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD^↗ went from 10,821 (13.7%) to 24,907 (21.2%). Prosper ISD^↗, in Collin County north of Dallas, saw its LEP count more than quadruple from 956 to 4,316 in five years, its share jumping from 5.7% to 13.7%.

Cleveland ISD^↗, northeast of Houston in Liberty County, went from 47.0% to 62.8% LEP in five years. Alief ISD^↗, inside the Houston metro, reached 58.6%. Irving ISD^↗, between Dallas and Fort Worth, hit 57.5%. These are not small programs operating at the margins of a district. In 54 Texas districts, a majority of students are now classified as English learners.

The charter sector is growing fast on the same axis. IDEA Public Schools^↗ added 16,671 English learners between 2020 and 2025, the largest absolute gain of any entity in the state, and its LEP share rose from 38.2% to 44.8%.

Where the teachers are not

The surge in English learners has collided with a persistent shortage of certified bilingual educators. The Intercultural Development Research Association reports that only 22% of Texas's emergent bilingual students are enrolled in dual language immersion programs, the approach most recommended by researchers for achieving bilingualism and biliteracy. The rest are in transitional bilingual or ESL pullout programs that research consistently finds less effective.

"Bilingual education is more than a quality education program, it is a civil right." -- IDRA policy brief, citing Lau v. Nichols (1974)

Texas's bilingual education allotment, restructured under HB 3 in 2019, provides a 0.1 weight on the basic allotment for most EL program models and 0.15 for dual language immersion. But per-pupil spending has not increased since 2019, according to analysis by the Kinder Institute, even as the population needing services has grown by more than 230,000 students.

The staffing gap is acute in suburban districts that built their infrastructure for a different student body. A district like Round Rock ISD^↗, where LEP share jumped from 10.8% to 19.5% in five years, must recruit bilingual-certified teachers into a labor market where every neighboring district faces the same need.

The twelve largest EL programs

Houston ISD^↗ carries the second-largest EL program in the state at 69,145 students (39.3%), up from 28.5% in 2005. Fort Worth ISD^↗ reached 42.2%. Across the top 12 districts by EL count, every single one saw its LEP share rise over the past five years.

The concentration is notable. Dallas and Houston alone account for 139,567 English learners, more than 10% of the statewide total. Add IDEA Public Schools, Fort Worth, Aldine, Cy-Fair, and Katy, and seven entities account for 280,319 students, roughly 21% of all Texas EL enrollment.

What the first plateau signals

The 869-student decline in 2024-25, from 1,345,900 to 1,345,031, could be statistical noise. Or it could mark the beginning of a deceleration. Border encounters dropped substantially in late 2024 and early 2025, which would reduce new enrollments with a lag. If reclassification rates stabilize or improve under the latest TELPAS framework, exits from LEP status could begin to offset new identifications.

The more structural question is whether the reclassification bottleneck that accumulated 1.35 million students in the LEP pipeline will ease. The enrollment data cannot distinguish a student who arrived six months ago from one who has been classified LEP for eight years. Both count the same in the headline number, but they represent very different instructional needs and very different costs. Until Texas disaggregates its English learner counts by years in classification, the one-in-four figure will remain a blunt instrument for a population that demands precision.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

The Growth Machine Stalls

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Texas 2025-26 Enrollment.

For 15 consecutive years, Texas added students. Every year from 2006 through 2020, the enrollment count climbed, absorbing 1.1 million new students over a period when most large states were already shrinking. The pandemic interrupted that streak with a 120,133-student drop in 2021, but the state recovered quickly, posting a 101,222-student rebound in 2023 and setting an all-time high of 5,530,499 in 2025.

Then 2026 happened. Enrollment fell by 47,195 students, a 0.9% decline, to 5,483,304. It is the first non-pandemic drop in 22 years of data, and it did not arrive as a surprise. Growth had been decelerating for nearly a decade: from gains of 96,574 in 2010 to just 13,035 in 2025. The machine was slowing long before it stopped.

A decade of deceleration

The 2026 decline did not materialize overnight. Annual growth peaked at 121,701 students in 2006, then gradually eroded. By 2018, the state was adding fewer than 42,000 students per year. By 2019, just 31,388. A one-year spike in 2023, when post-COVID recovery inflated the numbers by 101,222, masked the underlying trend. The two years that followed, 2024 and 2025, each added only about 13,000 students, a growth rate below 0.25%.

The 2026 loss of 47,195 is smaller than the pandemic's 120,133-student hit. But the pandemic drop had an obvious external cause and an immediate rebound. This decline has neither.

The state now sits 501,578 students below where a pre-COVID linear trajectory would have placed it. That gap, equivalent to roughly the enrollment of the state's 10 largest districts combined, represents both students who never materialized and growth that will not return.

The Big 5 are all shrinking

Texas's five largest traditional districts are each well below their peak enrollment, and all five declined in 2025-26. Houston ISD^↗, the state's largest, lost 7,227 students in a single year, dropping to 168,812. Since its peak of 215,408 in 2017, the district has shed 46,596 students, a 21.6% decline. Dallas ISD^↗ fell by 5,468 to 134,308, now 16.6% below its 2006 peak. San Antonio ISD^↗ has lost a quarter of its enrollment since 2005.

Fort Worth ISD^↗ is down 22.6% from its 2017 peak of 87,233. Austin ISD^↗ has fallen 19.9% from its 2013 high of 86,233.

Across the state, 517 of 1,197 districts lost students in 2025-26. The top 10 losers alone account for 35,199 students, 74.6% of the statewide decline. The top 25 losers lost 59,717, more than the total statewide loss, meaning hundreds of growing districts merely offset a fraction of the hemorrhaging at the top.

Houston's accelerating exit

Houston ISD's trajectory stands apart. The district's 4.1% single-year decline in 2025-26 accelerated a pattern that researchers at the University of Houston have linked to the state's 2023 takeover of the district.

"Was there a trend of decline before the takeover? Yes. Has that trend been exacerbated by the takeover? We think those two things are coinciding." — Toni Templeton, UH Institute for Education Policy Research and Evaluation, Houston Public Media, Jan. 2026

The UH report found that more than 13,000 students left HISD in the first two years under state management, with the percentage of students leaving nearly doubling from 4.4% to 8.1%. High school enrollment dropped 15.1% in two years, a steeper decline than the pre-takeover trend. The share of uncertified teachers rose from 0.3% in 2016-17 to 19.8% in 2024-25.

The 7,227-student loss in 2026 pushes HISD's total decline since its 2017 peak past 46,000 students, a loss larger than the entire enrollment of Aldine ISD^↗, the district's northern neighbor. Aldine itself lost 4,178 students in 2025-26, a 7.4% drop, the steepest percentage decline among the state's top 15 losers.

Where the growth went

The top of the gainers list reveals a pattern: charter networks and exurban boomtowns. IDEA Public Schools^↗, the state's largest charter operator, added 30,128 students since 2020, a 60.9% increase, reaching 79,608. Prosper ISD^↗, north of Dallas, doubled from 16,789 to 33,651 over the same span.

Among the 2025-26 gainers, seven of the top 15 are charter networks: Premier High Schools, BASIS Texas, Harmony Public Schools (three regions), Great Hearts Texas, and YES Prep. Charter enrollment rose from 422,836 in 2024 to 449,066 in 2026, an 8.2% share of statewide enrollment, up from 7.7% two years earlier. Over the same two-year period, traditional districts lost 60,380 students while charters gained 26,230.

That divergence has a fiscal dimension. Under Texas's ADA-based funding formula, each student who leaves carries per-pupil state revenue with them, but the sending district's fixed costs, its buildings, buses, and central office, do not shrink proportionally. Districts losing 3-5% of enrollment annually face a structural mismatch between revenue and overhead.

The pipeline is closing

Perhaps the most consequential signal in the data is not what happened in 2026, but what has been building for years in the lower grades. Kindergarten enrollment peaked at 391,421 in 2014 and has fallen steadily since, reaching 350,815 in 2026, a 10.4% decline. Over the same period, 12th grade enrollment rose from 305,243 to 394,947, a 34.8% increase.

The lines crossed in 2021, when for the first time, Texas enrolled more 12th graders (362,888) than kindergartners (360,865). In 2026, the gap is 44,132 students: the K-to-12 ratio has fallen to 0.89, meaning the state is graduating students substantially faster than it is enrolling new ones.

The demographic math behind this is straightforward. TEA's own attendance projections note that "the Texas state demographer estimates a significant decline in the number of four-year-olds in Texas, with a loss of over 40,000 from 2020 to 2025." TEA projects statewide average daily attendance will decline 0.31% in 2025-26 and 0.38% in 2026-27. The agency's projected ADA for 2026-27, 4,990,784, would represent a continued contraction.

Reporting from the Fort Worth Report found that a majority of ZIP codes in Fort Worth ISD saw declining birth rates between 2014 and 2023, and that Arlington ISD's kindergarten count fell from 4,610 in 2014 to 3,347 in 2024.

"We are still the fastest-growing state in the country and yet, we are seeing these low numbers." — Rocky Gardiner, demographer, Fort Worth Report, May 2025

Frozen funding meets falling headcount

The enrollment decline arrives at a particularly bad time for Texas school finance. The state's basic allotment, the per-student foundation of the funding formula, was frozen at $6,160 from 2019 through 2025 before HB 2 raised it to $6,215 for the 2025-2027 biennium, a 0.9% increase against six years of cumulative inflation. Districts are absorbing both inflationary cost increases and declining student counts simultaneously.

For the 201 districts now at all-time low enrollment, the formula compounds in a single direction: fewer students means less state funding, but buildings still need heating, buses still need drivers, and debt service on construction bonds issued during the growth years does not adjust downward. The 307 districts that reached all-time high enrollment in 2026, many of them suburban or exurban, face the inverse problem: growth without proportional facility capacity.

Neither group is well-served by a funding formula built on the assumption that enrollment always rises.

What the data leaves unresolved

Charter growth of 13,185 students in 2025-26 accounts for some redistribution within the public system, but home-schooling, private schools, and interstate migration are invisible in TEA enrollment data. The state does not publish a comprehensive accounting of where exiting students go.

The Houston metro complicates any single explanation. HISD lost 7,227 students, the largest single-district decline. But neighboring Cypress-Fairbanks ISD^↗ lost 2,961, Aldine lost 4,178, and Pasadena ISD lost 2,257. The entire metro is contracting, not just the district under state management.

The turn

For two decades, Texas school administrators could plan around a reliable assumption: next year, there will be more students. Bond elections, staffing plans, and facility master plans all embedded that assumption. In 2026, for the first time outside a pandemic, the assumption broke.

The state's school finance system was built on the assumption that enrollment always rises. The basic allotment sat frozen for six years. The 201 districts at all-time lows and the 307 at all-time highs need opposite things from that formula, and neither group is getting them. The 2026 numbers are the first test of whether Texas can govern a school system in reverse.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.