Demographic Myths

When reading "Demographic Myths" out of our "Myths and Realities" book, I was surprised by the numbers stated in these.  Percentages only say so much, but when given specific numbers to compare is a reality check.  I knew that the fastest growing group of students in the U.S. today are ELL students, as Demographic Myth # 1 states.  But what I didn't know was exactly how many that meant.  As stated, "More than 5 million ELLs were enrolled in public or nonpublic elementary or secondary schools during the 2003-2004 school year, representing an increase of approximately 2 million ELLs over the past decade (NCELA 2005)."  This directly states that we have 2 million more English language learning students than only a few years ago!  This statistic is exciting but leaves me with questions.  Are we fulfilling their educational needs?  Highly doubtful.  The percentage of functional illiterate high school graduates is very surprising (we were discussing this in another one of my classes) and so this makes me wonder, how many ELL students are out there that are functionally "illiterate" as in they can get by with certain language skills but aren't where they need to be?