How School Leaders Can Accent Inclusion for Bilingual Students, Families, and Communities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Who’s Segregated Now? Latinos, Language, and the Future of Integrated Schools
Educational Administration Quarterly, 2014
Background: Since the passage of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the demographic landscape of American schools has changed dramatically. By 2011, there were 12.4 million Latinos enrolled in prekindergarten to 12th-grade public schools, which constitutes 23.9% of the U.S. student population. A primary challenge that faces schools today is the increasing segregation of these Latinos, who are now the most segregated group of students in the West. Despite the Supreme Court decision to address the plight of segregation of Latino students, desegregation and language programming to assist English learners has been viewed as contradictory and competing with each other. Implications: The authors contend that school and community leaders should focus on the promotion of dual immersion, International Baccalaureate, and magnet programs to provide Latino, and particularly, English learners, the opportunity to attend strong integrated schools.
The intersectional gap: how bilingual students in the United States are excluded from inclusion
At the onset of nearly every American civil rights movement there are two pivotal messages: the first is the group’s claims of exclusion from the life that the privileged lead and the second is a demand to be included. In all cases the first step in creating sustainable change has been the recognition that society was functioning on a multi-tiered system that grants access to some but not to all. Currently there is a civil rights movement taking place that focuses on the integration of students with diverse ability levels. In the United States this movement is called Inclusion. Unfortunately, the primary focus of inclusion is on the integration of students with disabilities; thus children who represent intersectional identities are often passed over and continually left on the margins of inclusive classrooms, schools and society. This paper will focus on a subgroup of students who are currently being left behind in this movement: bilingual special education students. Due to the fact that separate policies exist to address their linguistic and academic needs bilingual students with disabilities fall into what can be considered an intersectional gap. This paper addresses how this gap came to be as well as offering recommendations for mending it.
Segregation and Integration in the Education of English Learners: Leadership and Policy Dilemmas
Leadership and Policy in Schools, 2020
In this introduction, we establish why school leaders must be attentive to how the organization of educational programs for English Learners impacts the degree to which they are segregated or integrated. We preview each article in the special issue and clarify the contributions that these pieces collectively make to research and practice. We argue that taken together the articles make the case that school leaders must balance separation and integration in a way that fosters equity of opportunity and affirms English Learners' multilingual and multicultural identities.
" Who Is Excluded From Inclusion?" Points of union and division in bilingual and special education
TRAUE, 2017
In our current political climate, inclusion is a term that is most oen used to describe a programmatic phenomenon within special education. In this setting, inclusion refers to the integration of people with dis/abilities into mainstream academic settings on the basis of social demographics or qualifiers such as age and grade level regardless of academic capacities. However, on a more pragmatic level inclusion refers to the strides or measures that are put in place in order to ensure that all minoritized people are included in the overall academic realm. For students with disabilities this means being welcomed into spaces that are occupied by their typically developing peers and being provided with the necessary accommodations. For bilingual students this means having access to spaces that allow them to use all of their linguistic resources. However, for a student who is both dis/abled and bilingual, the way the system frames inclusion means students and families must choose one academic identity over another, tending to the needs of one aspect of identity rather than both. These experiences of exclusion are even more pronounced for students of color. As Flores (2016 and also reprinted in this issue) states: Black students are welcome to participate in [bilingual] programs in the same way that everybody else is welcome to participate in these programs. Yet, this logic parallels the #AllLivesMatter counter to #BlackLivesMatter that refuses to engage with the specific manifestations of anti-Blackness that #BlackLivesMatter seeks to bring attention to. In a society that was founded on anti-Blackness and continues to perpetuate anti-Blackness through its institutions, bilingual education is by default anti-Black regardless of how inclusive it prides itself on being. This anti-blackness is even more pronounced when we begin to discuss issues of inclusion relating to dis/ability and bilingual education. Given the overrepresentation of African-American[1] students in special education and the underrepresentation of special education students in bilingual education it is critical for educators to identify the ways in which the exclusion of students with disabilities from bilingual spaces also contributes to the ongoing discrimination of Black students. By continuing to maintain bilingual spaces as primarily spaces of privilege – reflective of longstanding hegemonic views about class, race and/or ability we contribute to the pervasiveness of White supremacy by denying all students access to interactions with peers of diverse abilities as well as ethnic and racial backgrounds. Additionally, by maintaining special education programs as monolingual spaces we continue to deny the cultural and social possibilities for African-American students as well as the cultural and social identities and experiences of ethnic students with African phenotypes. In our current political climate, all educators should actively seek to make visible the narratives of Black people and blackness in the United States. For the bilingual education specialist this means considering these narratives in relation to discourses and national policies about and within immigrant, ethnic and/or multilingual communities. National policies like Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) and the more recent policies, No Child Le Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RttT), were designed to be safeguards for special education students and bilingual students respectively. They also play a role in shaping the academic performance and lived experiences
Dual-language education is often lauded for providing high-caliber bilingual instruction in an integrated classroom. This is complicated, however, when a dual-language program does not include all members of a school community. This article examines a " strand " dual-language program that attracts middle-class white students to a predominantly black and Latino community; yet, only some Latino students and almost no black students are included in the dual-language program. Although rarely directly discussing race, teachers and parents simultaneously commend the program for bringing diversity and enrichment to the campus, and accuse it of exacerbating inequities in the educational experiences of different children at the school. Taking a critical race perspective, and in particular using the principle of " interest convergence " and the frames of
Linguistics and Education, 2024
Drawing on a LangCrit perspective conscious of overlapping (or intersectional) processes of privilege and marginalization, we used a QuantCrit-informed critical discourse analysis to assess how the websites of 12 of the largest US school districts were communicating student demographics related to their dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs across race, socioeconomics, ability, and English-learner designation. Findings show that explicitly DLBE-related documents never referred to student demographic percentages and none of the data portals could show overlapping demographic categories. Only one district offered program-level data, which suggested starkly lower inclusion of students with disabilities compared to school-level and district-level data. School-level data for other districts suggested equal to equitable access in all categories except ability. We call for (1) more research and advocacy to rectify demographic exclusions and (2) program-level reporting that can show overlapping demographics so that the public can better check for equity in special programs like DLBE.
P.S. 25, South Bronx: Bilingual Education and Community Control
2018
Through a methodology of oral history interviews with primary subjects and archival research, this dissertation explores the creation and evolution of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, the first Spanish-English bilingual elementary school in New York City, as well as the entire Northeast. The Bilingual School, founded in 1968, was a product of the civil rights movement in the United States and one key manifestation of that movement in New York City, the struggle for community control of schools. Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular have been written out of the official narrative of the educational civil rights movement in New York City, although they played an integral role. This dissertation attempts to examine the contours of their participation through the lens of the creation of a single school, P.S. 25. In so doing, I highlight the singular contribution of Puerto Ricans in changing the educational landscape of New York City. The story of P.S. 25 also contributes to the body of literature that challenges the dominant narrative of the Bronx as solely a zone of destruction and despair during the 1960s and 1970s. P.S. 25 exemplified the ideas of the movement for community control, confounding the conventional wisdom that community control of schools was attempted but failed in New York City. Its story contributes to a new narrative: that social justice movements of the 1960s did indeed lead to successful education reform, creating high-quality schools accountable to the communities they served. An examination of P.S. 25 during its early years gives us an indication of how education in New York City might have developed if the community control movement had prevailed. This dissertation explores why P.S. 25 succeeded in its endeavors whereas schools with similar goals in the same years failed. v Bold in its efforts to break with the status quo in language policy, pedagogy, curriculum, personnel and parental involvement, P.S. 25 served as a model for future bilingual schools in New York and as a petri dish for the fomentation of leadership in the field of bilingual education. Its history demonstrates how a group of committed educators in one school worked to realize activist goals that have had a lasting impact on the education of Latino and other marginalized students up to the present day. While this dissertation tells the story of the founding and development of P.S. 25, it is at once the story of a little-known manifestation of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. The War on Poverty brought not just federal money but a philosophy that enabled communities to forge solutions for educational problems on their own terms. Through an examination of the founding and growth of P.S. 25, The Bilingual School, we can see one such design realized on the ground in the South Bronx. P.S. 25's restructuring of standing educational paradigms represented a logical outcome of the War on Poverty's maxim of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor. With autonomy and funding to back them, the founders of P.S. 25 created a prototype that I call a "Latino bilingual/bicultural community school." For the original visionaries of the Bilingual School, the purpose of bilingualism was not only to facilitate English acquisition and integration into American society but to reinforce the value of cultural and linguistic pluralism for Puerto Ricans and all Americans. At its inception, P.S. 25 exemplified this vision through a developmental bilingual education model and was poised to set the standard for bilingual education throughout New York City. This dissertation examines how upon implementation of the Aspira Consent Decree in 1974, transitional bilingual education programs became the new norm for bilingual students, thus destroying the possibility for a wide scale replication and expansion of the P.S. 25 model. vi An analysis of P.S. 25 during its early years gives us an indication of how a school realized the demands of the Puerto Rican community in the 1960s in the form of holistic, decolonizing, community-centered bilingual and multicultural primary schooling. A look at P.S. 25 benefits all those interested in the education of English learners and the creation of bilingual subjects in today's schools. An understanding of the unique pedagogical model, curriculum and environment established at P.S. 25 can provide social justice educators with an educational alternative that is both practical and additive.
The power of educational leaders to influence school climates towards equity and sustainable change in bilingual education. In R. Shankar-Brown (Ed.) Bending the arc towards justice: Equity-focused practices for educational leaders (pp. 21-48)., 2021
We begin this chapter by exploring the current educational climate and then introduce theoretical concepts that underlie our proposed theoretical framework, emancipatory pedagogies of hope. We then present the framework, describing four tangible strategies that support positive changes in school climates centering equity and justice in bilingual education. Next, we showcase the portraits of two educational leaders with illustrative vignettes that highlight each strategy in the framework. We conclude the chapter with recommendations for an anticipative pathway forward. The aim of this framework is to serve as a useful tool for educational leaders aspiring to "bend the arc towards justice" in their schools and communities in practical and substantial ways.