Courageous Leadership for Multilingual Learners

A new, transformative framework that helps leaders design coherent, equity-minded systems to promote the success of multilingual students

Multilingual learners (MLs) are a protected class of students entitled to certain educational services designed to ensure equitable access to the same educational opportunities as other students. Yet MLs are often siloed from core school programs. To address this pressing issue, Courageous Leadership for Multilingual Learners offers an original, research-backed framework for leaders to ensure that MLs are considered from the start across all levels of the educational system.

Drawing on her deep expertise in the field, Hopkins shows how the marginalization of MLs in schools is neither neutral nor inevitable. Rather, it is the product of longstanding, systemic patterns that require collective action to disrupt. This accessible and practical book provides a roadmap for this work, showing how leaders can center the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of multilingual learners. The framework presented in this book identifies the two essential dimensions of transformative ML leadership—individual change and organizational change—and outlines core components of each, including policy knowledge, asset-based dispositions, and collaborative norms. Hopkins demonstrates how leaders can leverage the framework's dimensions to design coherent, equity-minded systems that honor the diverse learning experiences and backgrounds of MLs while strengthening educational opportunities for all students.

This book empowers school, district, and state leaders by offering concrete strategies to support MLs, while making clear that meeting the minimum requirements of legal compliance is insufficient. It challenges leaders to pursue equitable practices, protect vulnerable students, and cultivate communities where MLs and their families can thrive. Hopkins shows what becomes possible when responsibility for ML education is shared and when policies are designed to uplift the strengths of ML students.