It takes students with the lowest skill levels five years to seven years to become proficient in English, research by Cook and Linquanti has shown.

NPR: Instruction Of Students Learning English Bleak

The House bill calls upon schools to certify their students are proficient in English after they have logged at least three years in U.S. classrooms.

CNN: Bush impatient with Congress on education bill

Yet most black South Africans are not proficient in English.

ECONOMIST: English is dangerously dominant

Rep. WESTMORELAND: The multilingual question is this, Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act says if you are physically impaired, if you are blind, or if you are not proficient in English, that you can bring an assistant with you to the poll.

NPR: Voting Rights Act Renewal Stalled in Congress

In addition to a shrinking revenue stream from the state, another big challenge Ms. Black faces is that she'll take over just months after the state changed proficiency scores for public-school students, a move that resulted in tens of thousands more students being deemed not proficient in math and English than the year before.

WSJ: 'Superstar Manager' to Succeed Klein

Just 7 percent of fourth-grade and 3 percent of eighth-grade English learners scored "proficient" or above in a nationwide reading exam, and thousands languish for years in ineffective English-as-a-second-language programs.

NPR: Instruction Of Students Learning English Bleak

The group, labelled in the report as APT1, was staffed by hundreds of proficient English speakers.

BBC: White House vows to fight trade-secrets theft