Eight years removed from the initial implementation of English Language Development (ELD) instruction in Arizona classrooms, the political and policy context has shifted with the election of a new governor and State Superintendent of Public Instruction as well as the shift in responsibility of the ELD model from the task force to the State Board of Education (HB 2425, 2013). Sworn into office in January 2015, new Arizona governor Doug Ducey promptly cut public education funding to yield one of the lowest states for per-pupil funding in the nation (Cochran, 2015) and increased the budget for private organizations, including Teach for America (TFA). Educators have left Arizona by the thousands (Strauss, 2015) – not least because of conservative attempts through state legislation to prevent educators from publicly sharing political viewpoints, paired with the lowest teacher salaries in the US – leaving a dire teacher shortage across the state. After the former State Superintendent did not re-run for office amid racist online blog comments targeting Spanish-speaking Latinos (Hendley, 2014; Longo, 2014), the new official, who ran on the platform of eliminating the Common Core Standards (CCS) from Arizona schools, took the reins.

Meanwhile, the Board of Education approved preliminary ‘refinements to the SEI [Structured English Immersion] models’, which school districts and charter schools can begin to implement in the 2015–2016 school year (State of Arizona, 2014). In elementary settings, English learners (ELs) must still receive four hours of skill-based instruction, but teachers can integrate the hourly blocks of writing and grammar as well as those for reading, oral conversation and vocabulary. Once ELs reach intermediate proficiency on the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment (AZELLA), the 4-hour block can be reduced to three hours. In secondary settings, EL coordinators may decide to reduce the 4-hour requirements by two hours for ELs testing at intermediate proficiency when deemed appropriate for the individual student.