Up to half of all Latino kindergartners enter school as English language learners (ELLs) and have access to various forms of language acquisition support until they formally reclassify as English proficient (Galindo and Reardon 2006). Once these ELLs meet rigorous performance standards to qualify for reclassification, their achievement outcomes are detached from the ELL community and absorbed into the Latino subgroup for academic research and state and federal accountability measures. This effectively disconnects successful long-term achievement narratives from the ELL community. One of the many goals of this dissertation is to reconnect ELLs with these lost achievement narratives, and to utilize segmented assimilation theory to highlight why we should expect promising achievement outcomes from Latino English learners over time. In particular, I characterize schools as a context of reception that sets a comprehensive climate for Latino student achievement (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). I argue that two fundamental ELL experiences in school—language acquisition programs and reclassification—are imbued with significance as assimilative processes that can both promote ELLs’ connection to cultural resources from their ethnic community, and bolster their acquisition of English-based resources. In this dissertation, I examine how these two critical experiences in school are associated with Latino ELLs’ educational outcomes that span middle school academic growth, dropping out of high school, and postsecondary entry.

I developed three empirical chapters utilizing student- and campus-level data compiled and managed by the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC). Each chapter highlights ever-ELLs, which includes ELL students who have reclassified as well as students who have yet to reclassify. Chapter 2 examines middle school reading and mathematics growth to determine whether there is an additive advantage linked to participation in language acquisition programs that pursue full bilingualism. Results show largely comparable reading and mathematics growth across language acquisition programs, with limited evidence of an additive advantage in reading growth for two-way bilingual program participants, and significantly lower growth across subjects for English as a Second Language participants. The third chapter examines reclassification timing as one of several dropout indicators for a cohort of 9th grade ever-ELLs and a reference group of Latino native English speakers. Findings show that reclassifying between grade 4 and the end of grade 5 is related to significantly lower dropout risk than native English speakers. Factors linked with an increase students’ odds of dropping out include a lack of advanced course taking, being overage, mobility, and measures of academic failure. School context also has noteworthy association with dropping out. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of reclassification timing in predicting enrollment in four-year colleges (relative to two-year colleges), and four-year college selectivity. I find that the reference group of native English speakers are more likely to enter four-year colleges than ever-ELLs regardless of reclassification timing. Ever-ELLs who reclassified early in elementary school have similar odds of entering increasingly selective colleges as native English speakers. Taken together, these findings reinforce that schools are influential contexts of reception for Latino youths; moreover, schools should take the limited but significant associations between reclassification and educational outcomes as a signal that greater attention should be paid to reclassification timing and the factors that influence students’ reclassification.