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Dueling Discourses in Dual-Language Schools Designed to Serve Black Students

Sat, April 18, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Virtual Room

Abstract

Drawing from a longitudinal ethnography of the “Language Immersion Charter Schools” (LICS)—a network of one middle and three one-way elementary 90/10 immersion schools—this paper explores how relationships between language, race, and power become institutionalized in US dual language (DL) education. Unlike many DL schools (Wall, Greer, & Palmer, 2019), LICS was founded by a Black educator to serve primarily low-income, Black youth (50-60%). In this context, our objectives were: What discourses defined LICS’s goals over time? How were Black students positioned, as the schools competed to enroll children and remain open with declining test scores?

This study adopts a raciolinguistic framework. Rosa (2016) stresses that the ideologies of languagelessness and standardization intertwine to disrupt schooling for racialized students. In the U.S., there is an imagined, desired (white) English, such that language spoken by Black people is often stigmatized as non-standard and given as the reason for their lack of socioeconomic mobility (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016).

Using tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2011), we analyzed the most consequential public documents that defined LICS and documented its progress over nine years, including: the LICS charter, charter renewal, 8 year-end reports by LICS Directors, 5 annual reviews by the charter-school Sponsor, and 6 other promotional/explanatory materials. After initial open coding of the documents, analyses examined the “discourse” or way of representing social equity and standards in the documents, asking questions like: What data and standards were presented, valued? Related to languagelessness, we examined “style” or ways of being tied to students: How were Black students and their linguistic proficiencies described?

There were three main ideologies competing at LICS: (1) concern to provide language immersion education to all, especially Black, youth (social equity); (2) value on standard test scores and measurement (standardization); and (3) goal to address an achievement gap, most often named as low literacy and test scores of Black youth (languagelessness). These discourses drove the arguments for developing the schools (e.g., Black youth suffer a “word gap,” which multilingual education can alleviate) and for changing from a 90/10 to 50/50 model in LICS’s later years.

Although each ideology existed across time, the space dedicated to each discursive argument changed the schools’ development. While social equity was consistently referenced, discourses positioning Black youth as languageless and lacking success on standardized tests were more prominent in the later years, driving a reduction in the amount of time spent in the partner/immersion languages for Black youth who did not perform “proficiently” on standardized tests in English. Notably, arguments about changing LICS’s programming neglected to mention the material reality and operational challenges of the schools, despite their consistent documentation in annual reviews.

At LICS, the prevailing raciolinguistic discourses had the power to exclude Black students from participation in rich language education and dampen LICS’s efforts toward social equity. Schools, policymakers, and families must better attend to how DL leaders draw upon dueling discourses in their contexts in order to meet bilingual education’s long-time goal of equity (Other & Author, et al., 2017).

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