- The House Appropriations Committee voted 34–28 to advance a bill eliminating Title III entirely, filed as H.R. 9260.
- Texas has more than 1.18 million Title III-eligible students according to House Democratic staff, while the state's broader emergent bilingual population has climbed past 1.4 million — roughly one in four public-school students.
- Illinois has roughly 333,000 English learners; its Title III-specific allocation runs about $30 million — far smaller than the $240 million figure often quoted, which actually covers five combined federal grant programs.
- A stopgap funding bill passed the House September 1 and was signed into law September 2, buying Congress until December 11 to settle the fight.
- UnidosUS and 123 partner groups want Congress to fund Title III at $1 billion instead of zero.
A House committee just voted to zero out the only pot of federal money built specifically to teach English to schoolchildren, and the two states with the most students to lose are Texas and Illinois.
The House Appropriations Committee cleared a fiscal 2027 spending bill on a 34–28 party-line vote that would eliminate Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act entirely, wiping out all $890 million the program sends to school districts every year for English learner tutoring, teacher training and outreach to immigrant families. No other federal funding stream is written specifically for these students, most of whom are Hispanic and many of whom were born in the United States.
A Fight Washington Has Already Had Once
This isn't the first time lawmakers have tried to kill this program. The administration's budget proposed eliminating Title III for fiscal 2026 too, but Senate negotiators pushed back and the final bill signed in February kept the allocation flat at $890 million. Whether that pattern repeats now depends on a Senate that, as of this writing, hasn't released its own education spending bill for fiscal 2027 at all.
Inside the Committee Room
During the markup, Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas offered an amendment to put all the Title III money back in, arguing the administration cannot simultaneously push English as the country's official language while defunding the programs that teach it. "We can't have it both ways," she told colleagues. Subcommittee Chairman Robert Aderholt countered that states and localities are better positioned to run these programs than Washington. The amendment went down on a voice vote — meaning there's no official party-line tally of who supported it.
The bill's overall price tag depends on which point in the process you're looking at. The version the committee released before markup carried a total of $189.3 billion for the three departments it funds, a 3% cut from current levels. After amendments were adopted during the markup itself, an outside tracker put the final approved total at $201.8 billion — a steeper 9% reduction, with the Education Department's own share cut 10% to $70.7 billion. Title III isn't alone in getting zeroed out: the bill also eliminates the $2.2 billion Title II-A teacher-training program and trims Title I grants to low-income schools by roughly $1.9 billion.
What Texas Has on the Line
Texas's emergent bilingual population has grown to more than 1.4 million students — about one in four kids in the state's public and charter schools, according to a 2026 analysis from the nonprofit Every Texan. A narrower count used in a House Democratic staff analysis, focused specifically on students who benefit from Title III dollars, put the figure above 1.18 million.
The state already got a taste of what losing federal money looks like. Last summer, a separate nationwide funding freeze — unrelated to this bill — left Austin Independent School District short $9.6 million meant for English learners, migrant students and after-school programs, money the superintendent said covered more than 100 positions before Washington eventually released it.
Where the Illinois Numbers Get Muddled
State education officials tallied 332,936 English learners statewide for the 2023–24 school year, a population that has climbed steadily and includes both newly arrived immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrant families. That's the backdrop against which a widely cited dollar figure needs some untangling.
News coverage of a 2025 funding freeze put Illinois's exposure at roughly $240 million, and that number has since gotten recycled in later stories as if it described Title III alone. It doesn't. State officials who tallied the withheld funds broke the total across five separate programs, and Title III's actual share was about $30.4 million, earmarked to directly support close to 293,000 English learners across 274 districts. The rest of the $240 million covered teacher training, academic enrichment, afterschool programming and migrant education, all bundled together in the same federal freeze. If the House bill's full elimination of Title III becomes law, Illinois would lose that $30 million piece specifically — not the larger combined figure often attached to English-learner coverage.
On the ground, the uncertainty has already forced hard conversations. Monica Diaz, who leads bilingual programming at McHenry County's Harvard School District 50, described classrooms full of kids who arrive speaking no English at all, and said delayed federal payments made it tough to plan ahead. Administrators in nearby Mendota and Rochelle told local reporters they were holding off on new curriculum purchases and tutoring contracts until they knew whether the money was actually coming.
Chicago's Enrollment Keeps Climbing
Chicago Public Schools offers a preview of what's at stake if support keeps shrinking while the student population keeps growing. A Chalkbeat analysis of preliminary district data found the number of English learners climbed by more than 7,500 in a single school year, pushing the total above 85,000 kids — nearly a quarter of everyone enrolled in the district.
The Hispanic Caucus and Advocates Push Back
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat has joined other lawmakers pressing the administration on this issue for months, though he isn't the one driving this particular effort. Florida Representative Frederica Wilson led a September 2025 letter, co-signed by Espaillat and Illinois Representative Jesús "Chuy" García along with dozens of colleagues, demanding the Education and Justice Departments restore civil-rights guidance for English learners after it was quietly pulled. "Every student in our nation deserves the opportunity to learn, grow and achieve," Espaillat said at the time.
Outside Congress, UnidosUS and 123 partner organizations are pushing in the opposite direction from the House bill, asking appropriators to fund Title III at a full $1 billion for fiscal 2027 rather than eliminate it.
What Happens Between Now and December
Congress bought itself breathing room on September 1, when the House passed a stopgap funding bill 370–48; President Trump signed it into law the following day, keeping the government open through December 11. That timeline pushes the real fight over Title III into the lame-duck period after November's midterm elections, and it leaves district administrators in Texas, Illinois and every other state trying to plan next year's staffing and curriculum purchases without knowing whether the only federal program built for English learners will still exist by the time students walk back into classrooms.
