Identification of Bilingual Special Education: The Crisis of Under- and Over-Identification

It is Saturday, April 25, 2026. I write this from San Antonio, where I have just spent the day at the TABE BESO Symposium, surrounded by nearly 100 bilingual educators from universities across the State of Texas. Together with Dr. Polo, we facilitated a conversation at his university, Our Lady of the Lake University (OLLU), that touched a nerve, opened wounds, and stirred something the field has been trying to ignore for decades. The topic that pulled the air out of the room: how Texas identifies, and misidentifies, bilingual students for special education.

What we know is undeniable. What we keep doing about it is, frankly, indefensible.

A SYMPOSIUM, A ROOM FULL OF TEACHERS, AND ONE MOTHER WHO TRUSTED HER HEART

Among the educators in the room was a graduate student. She raised her hand quietly, the kind of quiet that announces a story heavier than its words. She told us about her own daughter — two years old, growing up in a multilingual home, immersed in the symphony of three languages.
A specialist had recommended that this two-year-old child be classified under “speech impairment.” The reason? In the specialist's professional opinion, three languages were too much for the child's developing brain. Three languages were the problem.
Two years old. Three languages. “Speech impairment.”

Let that sit for a moment.

The mother, the educator, the human being inside her, knew. Her heart, her eyes, her soul knew. She refused. She trusted what every shred of contemporary research on bilingual development tells us: the child was not impaired. The child was building, in real time, one of the most extraordinary cognitive architectures the human brain is capable of constructing.
Today, that little girl is developing beautifully. She continues her path, multilingual, intact, and unlabeled.
But how many other mothers across Texas trusted the system instead of their hearts? How many other two-year-olds were quietly funneled into special education simply because a professional confused multilingualism with pathology?
​This is the conversation Dr. Polo and I opened yesterday at OLLU. And it is the conversation Texas and many other states and countries can no longer afford to delay.