Integration as Perpetuation: Learning from Race Evasive Approaches to ESL Program Reform (original) (raw)

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.

Bilingual Latino Middle Schoolers on Languaging and Racialization in the US

2016

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A Critical Review of Bilingual Education in the United States: From Basements and Pride to Boutiques and Profit

In this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.

Promoting Biliteracy and Biculturalism in Bilingual-Maintenance Secondary Classes: A Key Measure in the Creation of a Gateway to Post-Secondary Education for First and 1.5 Generation Latino Students in Northwest Arkansas Public Schools

2017

In the context of the Northwest Arkansas (NWA) regional setting, this study examines the effects of the Spanish for Heritage and Native Speakers (SHNS) model from multiple vantage points. Educational capital and biculturation approaches are employed to help theoretically frame post-secondary educational success and ethnic identity, respectively. Study methods are briefly described and paired with a description of the NWA region as an ideal southern Latino emerging community in which to conduct research on educational outcomes. The manuscript then turns to an ethnographic examination of how and the extent to which curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular aspects of a Spanish for Heritage and Native Speakers program in a secondary school setting shape Latino students’ ethnic identity. The ethnographic examination further assesses the extent to which such an SHNS program enables Latino students to envision post-secondary educational success. The major findings garnered from a tri...

Race, Power, and Equity in a Multiethnic Urban Elementary School with a Dual-Language " Strand " Program

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

“She was born speaking English and Spanish!” co-constructing identities and exploring children’s bilingual language practices in a two-way immersion program in central Texas.

This ethnographic and longitudinal study examined how the language practices of emergent bilingual students in a two-way immersion classroom, dual language (TWDL) program contributed to the co-construction of their and each others’ identities. I drew from theoretical frameworks related to the concept of identity specifically: sociocultural linguistics, figured worlds, and positioning theory. Key findings suggest that the strategies teachers used to promote language learning played a role in the ways students were positioned. Additionally, a critical curriculum opened up spaces in the classroom where children could draw from their linguistic repertoire despite the strict separation of the language of instruction in TWDL programs. Finally, when teachers modeled flexible bilingualism they promoted the use of both Spanish and English, at times simultaneously, and the academic content became the focus. As a result, students engaged in deeper conversations about social inequities experienced by minoritized language communities. The findings have implications for our 1st and 2nd generation Latino immigrant students learning alongside language-majority students, particularly in the areas of teacher education, research, and language policy in TWDL programs.

Racist and Raciolinguistic Teacher Ideologies: When Bilingual Education is “Inherently Culturally Relevant” for Latinxs

The Urban Review

Many schools attempt to address the needs of “English-language learners,” who usually are Spanish-dominant Latinxs, by offering dual-language (DL) bilingual education. While undertaking a larger ethnographic study of one such secondary-level dual-language program, I examined how dual-language teachers understood the program as equitable for Latinxs. I found that teachers believed DL met Latinxs’ needs by providing Spanish-language/biliteracy schooling, which deemphasized the need for explicitly enhancing youths’ critical consciousness. This teacher ideology of assuming DL is “inherently culturally relevant” led to significant issues. For example, teachers believed DL would improve Latinxs’ academic achievement, but when teachers perceived Latinx achievement was not on par with White dual-language students’ outcomes, teachers made sense of Latinxs’ underperformance in DL through racist explanations and did not interrogate the program’s cultural relevance. Specifically, teachers point...

Linguistic and racial re-formation of indigenous Mexicans' languages and races in Florida Heartland K-12 schools

Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2019

I interrogate how consequential representations of student characteristics are fashioned by analyzing identification, recording, and reporting of student and parent language, race, and ethnicity in K-12 school registration, school records, and state reporting. In the Florida Heartland, analysis of ethnographic school observations, school electronic records, a language inventory (survey), interviews, and official state data show that language, race, and ethnicity information for some K-12 students and parents (especially indigenous Mexicans) collected during enrollment are not recorded accurately and undergo transformation from collection to reporting. According to my language inventory, students' parents were indigenous language speakers 19 times more often than reflected in raw school records. In records from the local middle school, 10 percent of students were American Indian, though the state reported this as 0 percent. This linguistic and racial reformation resulted from several factors, including registrars recording languages as others (i.e. Spanish instead of Náhuatl), differential questioning practices, and state reporting policy. As discussed, enhanced procedures and updated policy should improve areas affected by inaccurate data. 1. Introduction. Student demographic information, such as language, race, and ethnicity, is consistently quantified in US educational institutions after it is gathered during school registration. Representations of this demographic information are then used in a myriad of consequential ways, including during making decisions on affirmative action programs, investigations into school segregation (NCES 1996; Renn 2009), balancing classrooms, investigations of discrimination in ability grouping (Lopez 2003a; Vizcarra 2017), federal and state reporting of student progress by aggregated subgroups , screening children for language services, informing culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2014), and accessibility in school-home communication. Prior research has examined issues surrounding school registration interactions and the subsequent quantification of student characteristics (e.g., Baquedano-López. Yet none highlight the important site of the on-the-ground micro processes that occur during school registration, tracing it all the way to codified reporting at the state level, as the present study does. In investigating how representations of student and parent language, race, and ethnicity are constructed by schools and the state, I introduce the terms 'linguistic re-formation' and 'racial re-formation' as theorization tools. With roots in Omi and Winant's (1986) 'racial formation', the terms respectively describe the processes of transformation that characteristics (i.e. language, race, and ethnicity) reported by students and parents may undergo by the time the information is used at school or in state reports. With this in mind, this study showed:

A Speech Community Model of Bilingual Education: Educating Latino Newcomers In the USA

International Journal of Bilingual Education and …, 2007

With the rapid increase in immigration from Latin America to the USA, many US high schools are struggling with the thorny question of how best to educate newcomer immigrant youth with low levels of English proficiency. This paper examines what some might consider an anachronistic educational model Á a segregated bilingual high school for Latino newcomers. Drawing on a qualitative case study of an unusually successful high school in Washington Heights, New York City, the paper argues that the school's vision of second language acquisition as a social process building on the speech community itself, and not just as the individual psycholinguistic process of students , is the key to its success. The paper specifies the factors characterising this speech community model of bilingual education. This school's anomalous success educating its immigrant Spanish-speaking population holds important lessons for the schooling of immigrant youth in an era of standards.

The Color of Language: The Racialized Educational Trajectory of an Emerging Bilingual Student

Charise Pimentel, 2011

This article examines how bilingual programs are often guided by larger social constructs of race and language ideologies that give rise to the often inconsistent, and even contradicting, perceptions of Latina/o, Spanish-speaking students’ aca- demic preparedness and abilities. I examine a number of language ideologies as they manifested in a case study of an emerging bilingual student who went from being labeled at risk in a pre-K remedial bilingual program to gifted in a kindergarten two- way dual-language program, as he naturally progressed through one of the school district’s bilingual education trajectories.