Bilingual-Bicultural Education Rejected: English-Only Despite Lau

• In Event: Reconciling Erasure Within Lau: Asian and Asian American Reparations in Multilingual Education

Abstract

Objectives
To commemorate Lau v. Nichols, this paper reports on findings from archival data revealing its micro- and macro-level genesis, successive activities, and that despite its historic role in language policy development and critical importance for codifying language rights, the vision for educational equity by the Cantonese-speaking, Chinese-origin activists at its center was never realized and remains elusive (Wang, 1975/1995).

Theoretical Framework
We situate our study in the field of Language Policy and Planning (LPP) by framing the findings within broader scholarship that utilizes historical-structural (Tollefson, 1991) and Critical Language Policy (Tollefson, 2006) perspectives as a way of challenging the social, political, and economic factors that may otherwise appear to be positive outcomes resulting from Lau.

Methods
Methods employed utilize Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) (Authors, 2015; Yanow, 1996, 2000) to identify five key policy artifacts, which serve as our data materials and evidence, and three central interpretive communities. Our driving research questions recenter the positionality of the Cantonese-speaking, Chinese-origin activists, community members, and students, whose rights to equal education were the basis of the case. Similarly, they intend to highlight that although legally the case involved equitable schooling, for advocates who fought for Lau, it was fundamentally about pursuit of: 1) language rights; 2) through bilingual education; and 3) only enabled by prioritizing provision of Cantonese bilingual educators. Research addresses the questions: What were Cantonese-speaking, Chinese-origin activists’ goals in Lau v. Nichols? And relatedly: To what extent were the Cantonese-speaking, Chinese-origin and other immigrant background communities’ quest for equal educational access rejected or fulfilled in the aftermath of the ruling?

Findings
A critical historical oversight is that in the aftermath of Lau, district leadership refused to create the bilingual programs delineated in The Master Plan for Bilingual Bicultural Education in SFUSD (1975). Although contemporaneously considered a victory for multilingual students, the real-world consequences in San Francisco for Chinese-origin students—predominantly Cantonese-speaking—reflected the majoritarian maintenance of English-only dominant power structures facilitated at the meso-level by SFUSD. Our findings show that, despite its pioneering premise, Lau’s legacy—both for SFUSD Cantonese-speaking students historically and multilingual students on a national scale today—undermines language rights in schools and society.

Scholarly Significance
The oft-cited pledge in Lau v. Nichols for language rights, particularly of the local Cantonese-speaking students, originated from a fight for social, linguistic, and educational justice; its origins are inextricably tied to activism and the demands revisited and reprinted in this paper. On this 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision, we are reminded that, rather than spaces for Bilingual-Bicultural Education by and for language communities, today’s U.S. schools are instead overwhelmingly English-only. By definition therefore—as was contended in the initial 1970 case brought by Cantonese-speaking mothers—U.S. schools remain profoundly unequal, and as a result, persist as sites of linguistic oppression today.

Authors

• John Chi, University of Maryland

• Sarah C.K. Moore, University of Maryland