When I filled out my daughter’s kindergarten intake form, I thought I was honoring her bilingualism. Instead, I triggered a test that told me how little our schools value languages beyond English.
The U.S. education system uses home language surveys to identify children who may need English support. A necessary step. But these same tools also lump bilingual kids into the same category, flagging them for testing as if knowing more than one language is a liability.
Every child entering a U.S. public school is greeted by the same set of questions: What language is spoken at home? What language does your child first learn? On the surface, these intake forms and Home Language Environment Questionnaires serve an important function. They help schools identify English learners who may need additional supports to access curriculum and thrive academically. This is, in theory, a good thing. But in practice, the system fails to recognize or honor the assets of children who arrive at school bilingual. Multilingualism is framed as a problem to be remediated rather than a resource to be celebrated.
Take my daughter’s story. We have raised her bilingual in Mandarin and English since birth. When I indicated this on her kindergarten intake form, she was flagged to take an English language assessment... at five years old. Not because she struggled in English, but simply because she also knew another language. She was then required to demonstrate her reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills through a formal test, despite the fact that very few five-year-olds know how to “take” tests in any meaningful sense. My concern was never whether she had the English proficiency expected of a kindergartener. I knew she did. My concern was that the act of testing itself would set her up for failure. And no parent should feel pressured to coach their child to become a test-taker before they even enter school.
Research in bilingualism is clear: children do not learn a second language at the expense of their first. In fact, bilingual children often demonstrate a broader conceptual vocabulary and richer language awareness than their monolingual peers. Yet our school systems are designed to treat bilingualism as a deficit. By flagging children simply because they live in multilingual households, schools send an early and enduring message: English is what matters, and other languages are incidental. Even when my daughter passed the test, she was labeled “IFEP” (Initial Fluent English Proficient), a designation that will remain on her record as a permanent marker for teachers and administrators to interpret however they wish.
The problem is not that we assess children who truly need additional English supports. That is both necessary and just. The problem is that our current system collapses the identities of bilingual children into the same category as children who are learning English for the first time. There is no space in these surveys to affirm the value of speaking multiple languages. There is no mechanism to distinguish between children at the beginning of their English journey and children with English as a thriving part of a broader linguistic repertoire. Instead, our forms and policies reinforce a narrow, monolingual vision of what it means to be ready for school.
As a parent, scholar, and teacher educator working with multilingual communities, I wish I could confidently encourage parents to indicate bilingualism on these forms with pride. But the reality is more complicated. Right now, my advice has to be pragmatic: only mark bilingualism if your child is ready to sit for an English test. Policymakers can do better. Instead of flagging bilingualism as a risk, intake forms should ask parents about their child’s proficiency in each language and trust parents’ knowledge of whether their child can navigate school in English. A bilingual child who can access learning in English should be treated no differently than a monolingual child arriving with only English. Until we change the questions we ask, families will continue to feel torn between affirming their identities and protecting their children from unnecessary testing and stigmatizing labels.