Month: January 2025

1985: ELC Files Class Action, Wins Improvements for Asian Immigrant Students

As Education Law Center marks our 50th anniversary, we are highlighting ELC milestones and successes over the decades.

In 1985, the Education Law Center filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Asian immigrant students who were being left to languish in Philadelphia classrooms because of a school district failure to provide language supports.

Our successful lawsuit, Y.S. v. School District of Philadelphia, resulted in a consent decree requiring the district to improve its academic program: the district expanded English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) instruction; hired bilingual teachers, counselors, and paraprofessionals; and provided translation and interpretation services. Under the “Y.S. Stipulation,” the district worked with ELC to monitor district progress annually for nearly three decades, pressing for continued improvements for multilingual learners.

Y.S. was precipitated by the arrival of many children from Southeast Asia who had been denied opportunities for formal schooling and spoke languages that were not familiar to district personnel, former ELC executive director Len Rieser, lead attorney in the case, recalled.

The district had relied on “the immersion model,” placing children in subject-matter classes taught in English, with no additional help. Without supports from school, students were receiving no meaningful instruction, Rieser told Education Week at the time.

Y.S., a 16-year-old who was a named plaintiff, had come with his family from war-torn Cambodia. School officials had tested him with an evaluation designed for English speakers, labeled him as having mental retardation, and assigned him to a special education classroom with no language support.

Translation and interpretation services were never offered to his parents, making it impossible for them to participate in developing the Individualized Education Program that impacted their son’s placement.

Y.S.’s placement was not unique: It was common in that era for districts to inappropriately place students identified as “limited English proficient” in special education classes. The success of our Y.S. litigation was a wakeup call to other districts to do better in their programming for immigrant children.

For its part, the district did not contest the allegations, initially moving to boost the numbers of teachers fluent in Asian languages.

“I like to think that Y.S. at least made the immersion ‘model’ unacceptable, expanded the district’s capacity to provide ESOL classes and more comprehensible subject-matter instruction, and did away with the idea that parents who speak other languages would have to fend for themselves,” Rieser said.

Today the district touts that its Office of Multilingual Curriculum and Programs supports over 25,000 English learners from 130-plus countries and speaking more than 100 home languages.

“But while Y.S. may have gotten the ball rolling, the district has a long way to go to build a truly adequate system of services for children and families whose native language isn’t English,” Rieser said.

ELC continues our advocacy to ensure multilingual learners throughout Pennsylvania have access to quality public education.

1975: ELC Opens Pa. Office; Congress Adopts a Landmark Education Law


As Education Law Center marks our 50th anniversary, we are highlighting ELC milestones and successes over the decades.


This year – 2025 – marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Education Law Center serving students and families across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The field of education law was less developed back then.

1975 was also the year that one of the nation’s most important education laws was passed.

A congressional investigation in 1972 had found that of 8 million children with special education needs nationwide, 3.9 million were being served, 2.5 million were receiving substandard education, and 1.75 million were not in school.

Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in 1975, mandated that all public schools in the United States provide “free and appropriate education” for all children, spurring major improvements in accessibility and education quality for children with disabilities. The landmark law was recast as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) when it was reauthorized and retitled in 1980.

At its opening in 1975, the Philadelphia office had a staff of just three but harbored the same big ambitions in education advocacy as its parent, the New Jersey-based Education Law Center, Inc., in Newark, N.J., founded two years earlier.

Legal services attorney Janet Stotland took the helm as managing attorney of the new office in 1976 and launched a telephone helpline as a means of maintaining direct contact with the public, while also pursuing litigation for systemic reforms.

“Our mission statement was to improve public schools in Pennsylvania and make them more equitable and more effective,” Stotland recalled.

“We had to build a new organization here in Philadelphia pretty much from scratch. … In those early years, we were really trying to find our footing and identify the range of strategies we would deploy.”

Two early cases that we brought —Frederick L. v. Thomas (1977) and Armstrong v. Kline (1979)—demonstrated the office’s expertise in special-education litigation, ensuring that the new federal law was implemented.

Our Armstrong case established the mandate for extended school-year programming when needed to ensure a free, appropriate public education, challenging the notion that a 180-day school year was always sufficient. The case set a national standard that impacted ensuing federal regulations.

Stotland said that in pursuing these cases, “we were instantly backed up by a vast array of community groups.” These early partnerships with a growing disability rights movement led to an approach that ELC has stuck with for 50 years: combining legal and advocacy strategies to bring about meaningful change.