Keeping an eye on equity in bilingual education

ABSTRACT

In 2016, California voters approved state Proposition 58, repealing an almost 20-year ban on bilingual education for English Learners (ELs), who represent nearly 20% of the state’s public school students. The state’s reversal on bilingual education reflects a national trend of promoting bilingualism and expanding bilingual (also referred to as dual language) programs for all students, not just ELs. This expansion comes with many challenges. Chief among them are issues of equity for linguistically minoritized students, whose needs are subverted to their middle-class English-dominant peers. For over 10 years, SEAL has worked with preschool and elementary school educators in California to center the needs of linguistically minoritized students and their families. This article focuses on SEAL’s work to reduce inequities in bilingual education by fostering ideological clarity among bilingual teachers and the meaningful engagement of Spanish-speaking families. It suggests that stakeholders at multiple levels should play an active role in advancing equity in bilingual education and offers an example of how organizations that provide professional development can do so.

Disclosure statement

A potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the term “bilingual programs” to refer to preschool and K-12 programs that use two languages for instructional purposes, including one-way (i.e., those designed to serve a single language group) and two-way programs (i.e., those designed to serve two language groups). Although “dual language” and “dual language immersion” are terms frequently used for these programs, we use “bilingual programs” in this article for two reasons: to reclaim the status of a term that was mostly (negatively) associated with ELs and to foreground equity concerns as they relate to ELs and other linguistically minoritized groups (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017).

2. Translanguaging practices in the classroom reflect the complex reality of bilingual lives (García, 2009). SEAL instructs teachers to expose students to activities that encourage translanguaging, particularly to strengthen students’ bilingual identities, bilingual development, metalinguistic awareness, and combat notions that language mixing is bad.