Bilingual education in the United States has been contested and reformulated within varying historical, political, social, and economic contexts. Guided by three interrelated research questions on ideology, policy, and politics, this article examines the various interpretations of the historical forces that have determined language policy in the United States by first briefly discussing the permissive, restrictive, opportunist, and dismissive periods and then focusing on the current challenges to bilingual education. The author argues that changing political, social, and economic forces, rather than any consistent ideology, have shaped the nation's responses to language diversity. He concludes that language ideology in the United States has shifted according to changing historical events, and the absence of a consistent U.S. language ideology has enhanced the role of symbolic politics—the resentment of special treatment for minority groups.

Bilingual Education in the United States: Historical Development and Current Issues

Race, social class, and gender tend to be treated as separate issues in education literature. We review a sample of education literature from four journals, spanning ten years, to determine the extent to which these status groups were integrated. We found little integration. We then provide an example from research on cooperative learning to illustrate how attention to only one status group oversimplifies the analysis of student behavior in school. From findings of studies integrating race and class, and race and gender, we argue that attending only to race, in this example, oversimplifies behavior analysis and may contribute to perpetuation of gender and class biases.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1170375.pdf

Race, Class, and Gender in Education Research: An Argument for Integrative Analysis

Bilingualism and Hispanic scholastic achievement: Some baseline results

As bilingual enrichment programmes that integrate language majority and language minority students, two-way immersion (TWI) programmes have the potential to overcome the harmful effects of segregation and remedial education that are the frequent byproducts of educational programmes for native speakers of languages other than English. Native/non-native speaker integration is considered essential in these programmes to achieve positive academic, linguistic and cross-cultural outcomes for all students, but these benefits have been largely assumed by educators and programme developers. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the distribution of the linguistic benefits of student integration in TWI classrooms. We argue that, in the absence of a bilingual perspective that takes into consideration issues of differential language status and language acquisition contexts, TWI classrooms may fail to optimise language learning opportunities for all students, particularly for language minority stu...

Integration in two-way immersion education: equalising linguistic benefits for all students

This study examines the self-esteem, acculturation, and ethnic identity of 150 Latino adolescents enrolled in either a bilingual or traditional education program. Bilingual education programs were established to ensure that academic failure was not the product of limited English proficiency. Grade point average (GPA), acculturation, and ethnic identity significantly predicted self-esteem for students in bilingual programs, whereas only GPA and acculturation significantly predicted self-esteem for students in traditional educational programs.

http://www.humanresourcefulness.net/CypressCollege/docs/HUSR224/articles/Education_Ethnic_Identity_and_Acculturation_as_Predictors_of_Self-Esteem_in_Latino_Adolescents.pdf

Education, Ethnic Identity, and Acculturation as Predictors of Self-Esteem in Latino Adolescents.

The Lau v. Nichols decision of the Supreme Court, which upheld the right of non-English-speaking students to educational programs designed to meet their language- skill needs, has suddenly created a presumption in favor of bilingual education that is causing nationwide repercussions. In this article attorneys Herbert Teitelbaum and Richard Hiller review Lau and subsequent cases and point out that the bringing and winning of such cases will not overcome all the obstacles to equitable education. One hurdle may be the sluggish federal enforcement of remedies to Lau violations; another may be school districts' resistance, explained on the grounds of increased costs, contract rights of teachers, the small number of students involved, or the need to avoid segregation. Although such defenses are rarely successful in court, Teitelbaum and Hiller acknowledge that fears of segregation may impede the implementation of bilingual programs. Accordingly, they present options for remedying discrimination against linguist...

Bilingual Education: The Legal Mandate

(1976). A Court Ordered Bilingual Program in Perspective: Aspira of New York vs. Board of Education of the City of New York. NABE: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 67-71.

Richard J. Hiller

Papers

Bilingual Education: The Legal Mandate

A Court Ordered Bilingual Program in Perspective: Aspira of New York vs. Board of Education of the City of New York