Accountable to Semilingualism

• In Event: Raciolinguistic Perspectives on English Learner Classification and Reclassification

Abstract

While contemporary discussions of educational accountability are often traced to the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the first federal educational accountability system has its roots in the Bilingual Education Act (BEA). This paper offers a raciolinguistic genealogy of this BEA accountability. 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 (Foucault, 1984), (2) a materialist framing that situates the construction of racial categories within the political and economic relations of power they were created to maintain (Harris, 1993), and (3) a raciolinguistic perspective that attends to the role of language ideologies in the production of racial difference (Rosa & Flores, 2017). 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.

The major finding of this genealogical study is that at the core of the BEA was a remedially oriented accountability system that relied on a dichotomous framing of students into those deemed eligible for bilingual education and those deemed ineligible for the program. This remedial logic and dichotomous framing created an incentive for professional bilingual education advocates to define being “limited” enough to be eligible for the programs as broadly as possible to include the greatest number of students. This led professional bilingual education advocates to double down on the raciolinguistic ideologies that lied at the core of the BEA arguing that cultural and linguistic deficits of Latinxs and other racialized bilingual students—even though who were able to communicate in English—could be remedied through bilingual education and has shaped the framing of bilingual education in more contemporary contexts.

I use three different data sources to examine the impact of this dichotomous framing on conceptualizations of EL classification and reclassification. The first is the discourses produced as part of the Aspira Consent Decree, an agreement between the New York City Department of Education and Aspira that mandated transitional bilingual education for eligible Latinx students. The second is the broader national conversation emerging related to this search for “limited” students that shaped the Aspira Consent Decree that led to the emergence of discourses of semilingualism that posited that certain Latinx students were not proficient in either Spanish or English. The third is the contemporary categorization of many bilingual Latinxs as Long Term English Learner that reflects the same underlying logic of semilingualism. I argue that this specter of semilingualism has worked to further obscure the material basis of racial inequities by suggesting that the primary challenge confronting bilingual Latinxs is linguistic with the solution being to fix their linguistic deficits. This, in turn, has served to further entrench the logics of white settler colonialism and anti-Blackness that provided the foundation of this raciolinguistic ideology maintaining the complicity of bilingual education policy and practice in the continued maintenance of white supremacy (Sung & Allen-Hardy, 2019).

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania