What Counts as Bilingual Education Policy? Developing a Materialist Antiracist Approach to Bilingual Education Activism

• In Event: "Imaginando los Futuros Educativos" of Latino Emergent Bilinguals: Toward Expansive Educational Discourse, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

Anyon (2005) asked the question “what counts as educational policy?” She pointed to the limits of traditional approaches to educational policy that focus on issues such as curriculum and pedagogy and leave larger political and economic inequities unaddressed. She called for a new educational policy paradigm where “policies to counter the devastating effects of macro-economic and regional mandates and practices should ‘count’ as policies we call on to create equity and quality in urban districts and schools” (p. 83). In particular, she argued for policies such as a living wage, fair housing and investment in urban communities to count as educational policy because they have a direct impact on the academic achievement and life outcomes of low-income students from racialized communities.
In this presentation I seek to extend this work to ask the question, what counts as bilingual education policy? Following Anyon’s lead I hope to broaden notions of what counts as bilingual education policy to include the larger macro-economic policies that impact the lives of Latinos and other racialized communities so as to position bilingual education as part of a larger social transformation that addresses the poverty, racism and xenophobia that are the root cause of their marginalization. In particular, I seek to conceptualize a materialist anti-racist approach to bilingual education activism that resists superficial embraces of cultural diversity in favor of a focus on improving the material conditions of Latinos and other racialized communities.
In this presentation I begin by offering a brief overview of what currently counts as bilingual education policy both to illustrate the important contributions made within this contemporary framework as well as to illuminate the limits of this framework in addressing the material conditions that lie at the root of the marginalization of Latinos and other racialized communities. I then provide an overview of materialist anti-racism and the implications of this approach for reconceptualizing bilingual education policy. In order to further exemplify the need for a materialist anti-racist framing of bilingual education policy I provide portraits of four schools in the School District of Philadelphia that offer bilingual education programs. I demonstrate the ways that larger societal inequities between the communities served by these various schools prevent these programs from serving the socially transformative function that advocates for these programs aspire toward. I end by calling for a new paradigm of bilingual education activism that connects the implementation of bilingual education programs with other movements that seek to address societal inequities caused by a myriad of factors including poverty, racism and xenophobia. I argue that while policies that address these larger political and economic factors may not explicitly focus on bilingual education, they should count as bilingual education policy because of the ways that they affect the efficacy of bilingual education programs in leading to improved academic achievement and life outcomes for Latinos and other racialized communities.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania