Misinterpreting School Reform: The Dissolution of a Dual-Immersion Bilingual Program in an Urban New England Elementary School

Abstract

This article explores local state bilingual-education policy vis-à-vis pervasive dominant-language ideologies about language-education policy and practice. State-level language-education policy, especially for English Language Learners (ELs), spans a wide range, from states that through policy legally require some form of bilingual education to states that have made bilingual education virtually impossible in lieu of English-language immersion. This research is part of an ongoing ethnographic case study of a large urban elementary school in Connecticut that explores the dissolution of a dual-language immersion program due to a school reconstitution, despite the state policy requiring bilingual education. This article examines the interwoven contexts of Connecticut bilingual-education policies, the language-education policies of the school, and how they are interpreted and enacted by teachers. We find on the one hand, official state policy calls for transitional bilingual education in specific EL contexts; on the other, the teachers within the school exhibit deficit perspectives toward bilingual education and develop erroneous perceptions about how to implement that policy, including their use of languages other than English in their classrooms.

Notes

¹For the purposes of this article we use Connecticut's definition of English Learner that defines students as English language learners or fluent based on how they score on state standardized tests. Standardized achievement tests that have been constructed for mainstream students do not take into account the special needs of English learners and that the impact language background variables have on students' achievement outcomes undermines the legitimacy of using only these tests to measure language learners' abilities (Abedi & Gándara, 2006). We realize that, as Celce-Murcia's (Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, & Thurrell, 1995) model of communicative competence suggests, language learning is in fact a complex process that interacts with many different sociocultural factors. Students are not simply English learners one academic year and not English learners the next, as our current terminology might suggest.