The Birth of Accountability: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of the Bilingual Education Act

• In Event: 81.013 - Genealogical Perspectives on Bilingual and Heritage Language Education as Sites for Regulating Racial Difference

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the ways that the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) reified the racialization of Latinxs while obscuring the structural barriers they confronted in overcoming this racialization. In particular, the accountability systems associated with the BEA served to reconfigure long-standing raciolinguistic ideologies that framed the language practices of racialized communities as inherently deficient (Rosa & Flores, 2017) through the institutionalization of linguistic categories that suggested that they were not fully proficient in either Spanish or English. The paper traces the continued legacy of these linguistic categories in contemporary educational debates.

Theoretical Framework
This paper is part of a broader raciolinguistic genealogy of bilingual education in the United States. There are three components to a raciolinguistic genealogy: (1) a genealogical stance that denaturalizes racial categories through examining the historical context that led to their emergence, (2) a materialist framing that situates the construction of racial categories within the political and economic relations of power they were created to maintain, and (3) a raciolinguistic perspective that attends to the role of language ideologies in the production of racial difference. Together these three components provide a coherent theoretical approach to the study of the co-construction of language and race in the production and continued maintenance of white supremacy.

Methods and Data Sources
There are three major sources of data that are focused on in this paper. The first are the BEA itself and the congressional hearings and circulating discourses utilized by proponents of the BEA to justify its passage. The second are accountability reports submitted by various programs that received BEA funding. The third are academic discussions of both the BEA and these accountability reports.

Results
The accountability requirement of the BEA produced two discursive formations. The first was the institutionalization of categories of linguistic deficiency. Particularly noteworthy was the rise of the so-called “semilingual” category of students deemed not fully proficient in either English or Spanish. While the term eventually went out of favor, its specter has remained entrenched within accountability systems to the present day. The specter of semilingualism is also at play in a second discursive formation that emerged from the BEA accountability system that took for granted the idea that standardized assessment data provided an accurate determination of the effectiveness of bilingual education programs. This emphasis on standardized assessments in evaluating bilingual education programs connects to a broader racial project that positions standardized assessments as the primary mechanism for ensuring racial equity in ways that obscure structural barriers confronting racialized communities.

Scholarly Significance
In contrast to traditional framings of bilingual education, which typically position bilingual education as inherently socially transformative, this paper points to the ways that the institutionalization of bilingual education failed to address the underlying racial position of racialized communities, and thereby inadvertently became a tool for the perpetuation of the white supremacist status quo. While scholars have begun to apply a raciolinguistic perspective to contemporary debates surrounding bilingual education, little research has utilized genealogical perspectives to examine the history of bilingual education in the US.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania