Conscripted into thinking of scarce, selective, privatized, and precarious seats in dual language bilingual education: the choice discourse of mercenary exclusivity

ABSTRACT

This multimodal critical discourse analysis is part of a larger equity audit of how the websites of 11 of the largest U.S. school districts discussed access to dual language bilingual education (DLBE). Prior research has frequently documented how administrators utilize DLBE programs to compete with one another for the supposedly necessary resource of privileged students, while deprioritizing language-minoritized students in ways that resemble gentrification. This study assessed how website content of these large (and thus influential) districts reflected or contradicted this pattern. Findings showed DLBE programming was linked frequently and strongly to themes of the school choice movement and exclusive tracking or within-school segregation. The themes were (1) a normalized scarcity of seats, (2) the privatized responsibility for transportation to those seats, (3) a discourse of having to earn one’s seat, and (4) the potential to lose one’s seat. We theorize this framing of DLBE policy as based in what we term mercenary exclusivity, which inequitably benefits privileged populations by inviting stakeholders to see their participation through a competitive, warlike lens. We offer equity recommendations for scholars and policymakers and call for the adoption of countervailing peaceful discourse and praxis for the benefit of language-minoritized and racialized students within DLBE.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual language bilingual education
• multimodal critical discourse analysis
• school choice
• competition
• gentrification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We choose to capitalize the word Choice as a proper noun to indicate the particular ‘school choice’ discourse and movement that emerged in the U.S. in the late twentieth century. We hope this will help the reader denormalize the neoliberal conception of choice in public education and the dangers it often represents to equity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by David O. McKay School of Education, Brigham Young University.

Notes on contributors

M. Garrett Delavan

M. Garrett Delavan is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. His research focuses on equitable access for students to quality language education programming as well as access to curriculum that builds consciousness for stewardship of the Earth, including the intersections of environmental harms with economic, racial, and linguistic power relations.

Juan A. Freire

Juan A. Freire is an Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He worked for several years as an elementary school teacher, both in Spain and in a Spanish-English dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program in Utah. His research focuses on equity in DLBE in the area of teachers’ discourses and practices and a second area in the analysis of policy, planning, and programming.

Trish Morita-Mullaney

Trish Morita-Mullaney is an Associate Professor at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the intersections between multilingual language learning, gender and race and how this informs the identities of educators and families of bilingual students. Guided by critical and feminist thought, she examines how these intersecting identities shape policy brokering for bilingual students.