Citizenship Status and Language Education Policy in an Emerging Latino Community in the United States

• In Event: Status and Schooling in New Latino Communities: Ethnographic Perspectives on Immigration Status in K-12 Contexts

Abstract

This paper draws on a twenty-three month ethnographic study of an emerging—newly established and rapidly growing—Latino community in the New Latino Diaspora of the U.S. in order to examine how educators and parents interpret language education policy (LEP). Language education policy (LEP) is defined as the “decisions that people make about languages and their use in society…in the specific context of schools and universities” (Shohamy, 2003, p. 279). The analysis of LEP presented here draws on the work of scholars who have reconceived of language policy as disseminated, implemented, and interpreted across different layers of society—national, institutional, and interpersonal (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996). The paper addresses the following questions: How does LEP structure the types of opportunities that an undocumented parent has for participation in her children’s schooling? How do an administrator and a parent interpret these policies and how does this understanding shape educational practices?
Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and informal conversations, the author specifically analyzes how an English as a Second Language director and one undocumented Mexican mother respond to the federal education legislation of 2002, known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which seeks to improve educational achievement by assessing student progress through standardized testing, mandating curricular reforms, and improving teacher quality. The author engaged in a recursive process of analytic induction in which she scanned the data for recurring topics and themes, and grammatical patterns in the participants’ speech (Ochs 1996). She focused on the ways in which families and educators referenced macro categories of citizenship status through micro instances of talk. The findings presented in this paper focuses on the portion of NCLB known as Title III, which is the section of the legislation that attempts to enlist parental participation in public schooling by mandating that schools communicate with parents in a language that they can understand.
The findings indicate that various conceptualizations of citizenship circulate between home and school settings, and that those conceptualizations shape approaches to enlisting and offering parental participation. In school districts serving emerging Latino populations composed of students and family members with varying citizenship statuses, the interpretation of language education policy (LEP) is inextricable from local beliefs about the meaning of “citizenship” that influence families’ participation in public schools. The paper contributes to our understanding of three aspects of LEP: the way that LEP is interpreted in formal and informal educational settings, the role of parents and educators in shaping policy implementation locally, and the way individual understandings of LEP are linked to beliefs about citizenship and immigration. These contributions seek to reverse the still-dominant trend in which immigrant families are “an afterthought to the politics of inclusion” (Arzubiaga, Noguerón & Sullivan, 2009, p. 248). Notably, by examining the ways in which one undocumented mother interprets LEP, the findings go beyond reductive assumptions that individual immigrant parents are disinterested in their children’s schooling in order to understand which factors support or constrain their involvement in school (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003).

Author

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Rutgers University