Creating Fertile Grounds for a Two-Way Immersion Program: Gentrification, Immigration, and Neoliberal School Reforms

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

Abstract

Bilingual Two-Way Immersion (TWI) programs are becoming increasingly popular, and research indicates that this popularity is growing amongst white, non-Hispanic, middle class English speaking-parents (e.g., Valdez, Freire & Delavan, 2016). This paper examines how one two-way immersion program at a public school in Philadelphia came about, describing the conditions that came together for it to become a desirable and feasible option, and ultimately, a reality that gained the attention of the district, the city, and potential parents.
Through an 18-month discourse analytic ethnography, I sought to understand the larger social processes that contributed to the creation of this TWI program. This research is grounded in linguistic anthropological theory and methods that approach language and its use as meaningful social action–action that not only refers to, but also creates, re-creates and transforms social relations and ways of being in the world (Duranti, 2009; Wortham, 2008). I apply these ideas to understand educational phenomena–in this case, the creation and implementation of a TWI program. Data sources include interviews with key stakeholders in the creation of the program; field notes from participant-observation at meetings of a local community association; as well as documents and news media articles. Through the analysis of this data I traced the story of how the program was created and examined the larger dynamics at play that made it possible for it to come together.
The findings indicate that the funding crisis and market-based reform efforts in the School District of Philadelphia created a competitive environment where schools faced significant pressure to perform in the midst of the imminent possibility of being closed. Concomitant to this, middle class parents who had opted to “stay in the city” began demanding better options for schooling by forming local groups with the aim of supporting their neighborhood schools. These groups formed in parts of the city that are gentrifying, and as such, the schools that have benefited from their efforts are located in neighborhoods that have a growing number of new residents, that tend to be white, middle class, and highly educated.
Through the analysis of the efforts one such neighborhood group, I show how their work to support this new TWI bilingual program was driven by a genuine desire for equity in schooling opportunities and to improve conditions for all children, yet ironically, also reproduced the dynamics of race and class privilege. In other words, their initiatives and activities, which took hard work, time, and energy, were mostly geared at attracting more parents–middle class and in their majority white–to invest in the school by enrolling their children in it and joining the group's efforts to improve the school.
Because research has shown the problematic inequities and challenges that TWI programs face (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017), it behooves us to understand the ways in which these schooling options come about in the first place. Understanding larger social processes can shed light on the inequities that become evident in everyday classroom and school dynamics.

Author

• Sofia Chaparro, University of Colorado - Denver