Understanding the Gentrification of Bilingual Education Through the Lens of Urban Gentrification

• In Event: 15.032 - Democratizing Evidence by Documenting the Gentrification of Dual-Language Education: Language Allocation, Metaphors, Images, and Teachers' Perspectives

Abstract

Valdez, Freire, and Delavan (2016) coined the term “gentrification of dual-language” (p. 604) education to describe the process by which primarily White, heritage English speakers have mainstreamed and occupied dual-language education narratives, spaces, and funds. This paper takes that metaphor literally, comparing inequitable trends in multilingual education to gentrification processes of urban spaces. Thus, the guiding questions throughout this paper are: (1) In what ways does the process of gentrification in bilingual education programs mirror gentrification taking place in urban spaces across the United States (U.S.)? and, (2) How can urban gentrification scholarship inform collectivism and resistance against neoliberal actors in education?
This analysis draws on critical race theory in education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and LatCrit (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) frameworks to capture the racial dimensions framing the implementation, power relations, and conditions leading to the gentrification of bilingual education (Cervantes-Soon, 2014). These frameworks highlight the lingering histories of racialization as white-centric narratives, policies, and bodies have occupied spaces within bilingual education. First, this paper offers a literature review of scholarship on the gentrification of American cities. Next, it offers a critical content analysis (Fairclough, 2013) of publicly available policy documents and media to explore the ways public discourses were framed regarding bilingual education in the U.S. from the 1990s-2010s. Documents that informed the two research questions were identified through web searches, educational research databases, online news sources, and social media.
Initial findings suggest striking parallels between the gentrification of U.S. cities and gentrification of bilingual education over the last three decades. Similar to city development models, the gentrification of bilingual education follows a pattern of three processes: divestment, dispossession/occupation, and profit-driven policy expropriation (Smith & Stovall, 2008; Stovall 2013). For example, similar to the divestment process in U.S. cities, voters in California dismantled bilingual education through Proposition 227 (1998) in favor of a one-year, all-English approach (Crawford, 2004). Soon thereafter, many other states followed. A parallel to dispossession and occupation is the “Utah model,” which is shaped by hegemonic discourses centering the education of mainly white, wealthy, English-privileged students as the beneficiaries of these programs, while silencing and displacing Latinx students (Freire, Valdez, & Delavan, 2017). As the Utah model has been emulated in other states, profit-driven media and private educational interests have propagated narratives distancing dual-language education from previous equity-focused formulations of bilingual education and toward corporate interests of global human capital (Author, 2017). The paper will conclude with ways in which activism against neoliberal actors in U.S. cities can inform pathways for resisting the occupation of bilingual education by whitestream narratives, voices, and bodies. These stories of resistance may inform grassroots efforts by families and communities of multilingual students; efforts to influence bilingual educational policy at the local, state, or national level; as well as efforts to prepare educators who work with bilingual/bicultural students.

Author

• James Arthur Gambrell, Kennesaw State University