How Harmful Is Segregation? English Learners’ Conditions For Learning In Segregated Classrooms

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic study compares the educational experiences of Bangla-speaking and Spanish-speaking English Learners (ELs) served by officially identical bilingual instructional models within one public middle school. Building on theories of policy implementation and a case within a case analysis, I ask: How do EL’s conditions for learning in segregated settings vary within schools? What varies the degree of harm or benefit entailed by linguistic segregation within schools? I argue that administrative choices related to program design and staffing, as well as the characteristics of the US-born population and the staff’s beliefs about culture, impacted Bangla- and Spanish-speaking ELs’ conditions for learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The name of the school and of all individuals are pseudonyms in order to maintain confidentiality. I utilize the term English learners (ELs) to refer to students placed in a legal category that entitled them to supports at the time of the study under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (most recently reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 2015). Terms that decenter English and value multilingualism and multiculturalism, such as “emergent bilinguals” (García, 2009b), remain aspirational as they do not reflect current policies and practices in the US.

2. Teachers and administrators offered various explanations for why few ELs tested out and were reclassified, most often citing the difficulty of the exam, which had been recently aligned to the common core state standards. Former ELs, especially Bengali former ELs, were reluctantly placed in mainstream classrooms because, as staff explained, bilingual classrooms could offer continuing support, cultural familiarity, and protection from US-born students’ behaviors that staff perceived as disruptive.

3. I rely on statements made and documents used by administrators in staff meetings, leadership team meetings, and in interviews to compare the outcomes for Bangla- and Spanish-speaking ELs, since district administrative data did not disaggregate ELs by language, ethnicity, or country of origin.

4. In this way, the argument structurally parallels scholarship that has drawn attention to the culture of high academic expectations and care for Black students in pre-Brown segregated schools that has complicated a simple dichotomy between racial segregation as harmful and racial integration as beneficial while maintaining a critique of systemic racial oppression in US education (Walker, 1996).

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research that was made possible in part by financial assistance from the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, a program of the Reed Foundation.