LOS ANGELES (AP) - Nieves Garcia came from Mexico at age 6 and spent most of her elementary school years in California classified as an "English learner" even after she had picked up the language. Now a 32-year-old mother, she didn't want her daughter labeled the same way and subjected to additional testing.
And so she lied.
When Garcia signed up her daughter for kindergarten, she answered a standard four-question survey by saying her family spoke only English at home, even though her husband doesn't speak the language.
"I just said we spoke English, English, English and English," Garcia said.
California education officials say it's tough to know how many parents lie on the home language survey they are required to fill out before their children start public school. Educators say failing to identify students who need language assistance can set the children back and violate federal laws guaranteeing access to education.
Parents like Garcia fear by acknowledging the truth, their kids will be siphoned off from native English speakers or stigmatized, and could miss out on learning opportunities.
Rosaisela Rodriguez deliberately didn't declare that her twin son and daughter knew Spanish when she enrolled them in school, adding that most 5-year-olds are language learners, regardless of whether they are bilingual.
"If they were placed in the English language group they would have been taken out at a certain time or placed in different curriculum," said Rodriguez, 51, of Pleasant Hill. "This was a very calculated move on my part."
In an increasingly multilingual society, a slew of states are reevaluating how they define and identify English learners in the hope of moving toward a more unified system, education experts said.
California plans to roll out a new English language proficiency test in 2016, and is considering changing its home language survey, said Elena Fajardo, administrator of the state Department of Education's language policy and leadership office. The survey was developed in 1980 and the state's population and immigration patterns have changed since then.
Census data shows that nearly 44 percent of Californians age 5 and older speak a language other than English. The most common language spoken is Spanish, and 57 percent of Spanish speakers in the state say they also speak English very well.
That's a marked shift from 1990, when less than a third of the state's residents age 5 and older spoke another language, and less than half of Spanish-speaking Californians claimed to also speak English very well, the data shows.
Most states including California - where nearly a quarter of public school students are considered English learners - screen children initially through the home language survey and give an English proficiency test to those whose families speak another language.
In California, more than 200,000 incoming kindergarteners were given the test in 2012 and only 9 percent were deemed English proficient, according to state data. Those results have led some parents to slam the use of a single day of testing of preschoolers - and an exam some say is too difficult - to determine a child's educational path.