From minimal English to class valedictorian: Half of top HISD grads start as English learners

By Asher Lehrer-Small

As early as first grade, Angela Trujillo grasped why learning English in her Houston ISD classroom was so important. If she mastered the language — silent letters, flat “R” sounds and all — her parents, who had immigrated to Houston from central Mexico, and three younger siblings would have someone to help them navigate an English-dominant city.  

By third grade, her first year of English-only instruction, Trujillo achieved fluency by leaning on teachers for extra help at school and watching lots of English PBS television programs at home, she said. Then, year after year, she excelled academically, eventually graduating as Waltrip High School’s 2023 valedictorian and the first member of her family to complete high school.

“I wanted to be the first person in my family to go to university,” said Trujillo, who now is a second-year nursing student at the University of Pennsylvania. “That was my motivation to do well in school, because I really wanted to get into a good career so I could help out my family and help out my sisters, too.”

It’s a remarkably common tale in Texas’ largest district: Over the last decade, children who entered school as non-native English speakers have been slightly more likely than their classmates to become high school valedictorians, according to a Houston Landing analysis.

Students who were current or former English learners have made up about 46 percent of all HISD valedictorians over the past 10 years, while accounting for about 44 percent of all the high school seniors during that span, district data show.

English learners’ high rate of receiving top honors stands out, in part, because the achievement comes despite cultural and linguistic barriers that can make it harder for such students to succeed in the classroom. At a time when migrant families have faced disparagement from the highest ranks of U.S. office, the numbers speak to the motivation, hard work and academic successes of many immigrant students in Houston, a city defined by its multiculturalism.

Still, the finding is limited to roughly 230 of HISD’s highest-flying English learner students, compared to hundreds of thousands of children learning the language that the district has served over the last decade. On the whole, HISD’s emergent bilingual students tend to score lower on state exams and graduate from high school at a rate below district average.

This year, roughly 69,000 of HISD’s students — 39 percent — are considered “emergent bilingual,” meaning they’re not yet fluent in English. The vast majority are native Spanish speakers, though a smaller share of students speak one of dozens of other languages. 

“For every group of students that has made it, we have a large group of students who haven’t,” said Sonya Monreal, HISD’s director of multilingual education. “Our goal is to make sure that all of our students have a fighting chance.”

With graduation season soon approaching, the Landing set out to understand what’s behind the historical trend of English learners going on to receive top honors. We spoke with five HISD valedictorians from the classes of 2023 and 2024 who began school without English fluency to learn what it took for them to achieve their success.

Here’s what they told us, in their own words.

MOTIVATION AND SACRIFICE

Several students described seeing education differently than their classmates. For some, their drive to succeed came from understanding what their parents had sacrificed — leaving homes and families behind — to give them a U.S. education. Others said they knew they were at a disadvantage not having English-speaking parents at home, so they worked harder than their peers to catch up.

In each case, students saw academic success as a passport to a better life, fueling a work ethic that propelled them to perform well in class.

Acxel Campuzano, 2024 valedictorian of Jones Futures Academy, now a University of Houston biology major: Both of my parents are Mexican immigrants (from Michoacan), so I think that’s what’s had the most impact on my work ethic, which is school. My whole life I’ve seen them work their hardest, so that’s kind of made me want to try to do my best, too.

Frank Castellanos, 2023 valedictorian of Challenge Early College High School, now a University of Houston mathematical biology major: I didn’t want to disappoint my parents considering the debt that I felt that I owed them because of the entire notion that your parents, they immigrated from another country to this one and they went through a perilous time so that you can have a better life than they did. I’ve always felt that nagging in the back of my mind.

Angela Trujillo: I couldn’t go home and ask my parents, “Oh, hey can you help me with this?” So, I had to really learn it on my own. So, I would ask a lot of questions to the teachers. I’d be like, “Can you tell me what this is? Can you clarify what this is?” Because I knew, if I didn’t get it done at school, then I couldn’t really do it at home, because then I was going to struggle. One of my main goals, I told myself, was that I really wanted to learn English fully, so then I could help my younger sisters so that they could actually do their work at home in English and I could help translate.

EARLY YEARS CRITICAL

Outcomes for students who begin school without English fluency tend to split along one key factor, research shows: how soon a child learns the new language.

A 2024 study from the University of Chicago found that English learners who quickly develop proficiency, shedding the “English learner” title, graduate at a higher rate than their classmates who never needed English language services. But students who remained in English as a Second Language classes into the middle and upper grades saw worse outcomes, with lower standardized test scores.

All students interviewed by the Landing joined English-only classes by mid-elementary school. Most spent their first few years of public school in Spanish-dominant classrooms, where instructors slowly introduced more English. Then, usually in third or fourth grade, their classes became mixed with native English-speaking students.

Arhely Rodriguez, 2023 valedictorian of Middle College High School at HCC Gulfton, now a University of Houston nursing major: My fourth grade teacher, he didn’t like talking Spanish. He knew how to talk it, but he didn’t want to. He would do mostly English. … Most of my teachers (before that year), they would try to teach us, like, “It’s only going to be English. Y’all are going to have to only talk English.”

Acxel Campuzano: In second grade it was pretty much all Spanish, and then just switch over to third grade and it was all English. I did summer school between those two years. According to my mom, it was to help me and my sister practice English, even though, at that point I remember not wanting to do it.

Alexander Hernandez, 2024 valedictorian of Energy Institute High School, now a Harvard University freshman: That was definitely kind of a shocker (when our classes merged with native English speakers). I knew there were kids that I hadn’t met, but … I didn’t realize that they were separated because of language. It was really interesting to have all the kids join. Then some of those kids ended up becoming my really good friends in elementary school.

TOUGH TRANSITION

Quickly learning English did not always shield students from the difficulties of attending school in their non-native language. In some cases, they mixed up English punctuation, got teased by classmates for their accents or experienced culture shock when they moved to schools with fewer Hispanic students. 

Some students said they could listen and read just fine, but got words mixed up when they wrote or spoke — making them more shy in English than they were with Spanish-speaking friends or family.

This article was orinally published by The Houston Landing.