Separation, Inclusion, and Equity for Whom? The Contested Expansion of a Two-Way Bilingual Program

• In Event: A New Language for Segregation: Responding to and (Re)Producing the Isolation of English Learners

Abstract

Objective
Two-way bilingual education, in which English learners (ELs) with a shared language and native-English speakers learn two languages while sharing a classroom, is expanding rapidly in the US (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2016). The approach demonstrates rare promise to offer highly effective and inclusive education for ELs and native-English speakers (Lindholm-Leary, 2012). As such, the expansion of two-way bilingual in public education has the potential to “[bring] communities together to build an inclusive formation of ‘we the people’” (Ball, O’Connor, & Wilson, 2017, p.1). This paper examines the politics of expanding such programs through a study of diverse stakeholders’ advocacy around a plan to expand a Spanish-English two-way program in a “progressive” city with extreme “achievement gaps.”

Theoretical Framework
Research in multiple educational arenas suggests a “dilemma of difference” (Minow, 1990) that makes issues of separation and inclusion contested and susceptible to charges of inequity (Hochschild & Scovronick, 2003). This research along with studies on bilingual education highlight the role of power and semiotics in the politics of bilingual education. I use a socio-cultural policy framework which foregrounds policy as the negotiation of meanings and social relations within social contexts (e.g. Levinson, Sutton & Winstead, 2009; Yanow, 1999).

Methods & Data
Drawing on over two years of qualitative data (including interviews, documents and observational field notes), I analyze how stakeholders across lines of race, class, expertise, and language, make sense of, articulate, and contest their diverse understandings of separation (as well as “segregation”), inclusion, and educational (in)equity to open up and foreclose expansion of two-way bilingual education.

Results
I find that stakeholders defined separation and inclusion in multiple, contested ways. Professional Latinos/as and school district leaders argued that the programs raised achievement and integrated native-Spanish speakers into classrooms with English-dominant peers. Some Hmong and Latinx parents contended that bilingual education was not appropriate for native-born youth and that it segregated students, making it difficult for students to take the classes necessary for college. Some upper-middle class, predominantly white parents and a scattering of white teachers concerned about the expansion of these programs used arguments that coalesced around the segregating impacts of the program on African American youth. Rarely were African American voices present in these deliberations. I argue that race and class hierarchies contributed to the ways that separation and inclusion were discussed, by whom, and to what effect in two-way bilingual policymaking.

Significance
This study contributes to bilingual education research (e.g. Crawford, 2000; Schmidt, 2000) and particularly to how racial and class hierarchies shape bilingual education (e.g. Flores & Rosa, 2015; Palmer, 2010) by highlighting how race is implicated in the political and semiotic contestation of separation and inclusion in two-way bilingual education. While eradicating inequity is a widespread rally cry, the meanings and evidence of in/equity are deeply contested (McDermott, Frankenberg, & Williams, 2013; Turner & Spain, 2016); this study helps to understand those lines and reflect upon how they ensure or undermine educational equity and the promise of two-way bilingual education.

Author

• Erica Owyang Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison