Exploring court-mandated bilingual programs in Denver: Successes, challenges, and warnings for future advocacy

• In Event: La Lucha Sigue: Linguistic Justice and Educational Transformation for Bi/Multilingual Learners

Abstract

"Purposes. Because of the advocacy of the Congress of Hispanic Educators, Denver Public Schools must comply with a Consent Decree (CD) that mandates bilingual programming in the form of Transitional Native Language Instruction (TNLI). This paper explores this court-mandated education reform in tension with district-led program implementation as two sets of divergent policies, asking the research question, “How does district-level program implementation policy support or constrain court-ordered bilingual education policy?”

Perspectives. Using Critical Policy Analysis (Ball, 1993), which interrogates the mechanisms by which (education) policy reflects and reproduces hegemonic social structures, this paper frames both the CD that mandates bilingual programming as well as the district’s practices to implement it as types of policy, each with divergent and at times conflicting aims that either perpetuate historical inequities in public education or interrupt them.

Methods. To do so, this paper analyzes large scale datasets to create descriptive statistics grounded in QuantCrit, a critical framework for conducting statistical social science research that draws on Critical Race Theory to ensure quantitative demographic data are used for explicitly antiracist purposes lest they provide misconstrued ideological justifications for the disparities they describe (Gillborn, Warmington & Demack, 2018).

Data Sources. This paper analyzes publicly available data describing school level (a) student demographics, program placement, and achievement; (b) staff characteristics per position type, longevity, salary, teacher qualifications, and language program designation; and (c) language program per the CD.

Results. Findings reveal the tension between bilingual education policy as mandated by the court and implemented by the district. A testament to the power of the CD as a policy, TNLIs are not only the most common bilingual option, making up 78% of all bilingual programs, but 94% of all TNLI programs are offered in the district-run schools under the full purview of the CD instead of charters despite charters having higher rates of English Learners and comprising 30% of the district. Beyond availability of bilingual programming, the CD achieved unique equity of opportunity, representing the only schools in the district that have a positive correlation between rates of students of color and accountability outcomes. However, district-level policy regarding TNLI implementation impedes this success. For example, 68%-87% of TNLIs have no mental health, physical health, technology, library, or community engagement staff, over double the rate (25%-41%) of English-medium programs that are denied these staff. Such policies of deprivation might reflect historical underinvestment in the unique student populations TNLIs serve, as 85% and 60% of TNLIs are segregated by poverty or students of color, respectively, far beyond the average proportion (25%) of segregated schools throughout the district.

Scholarly Significance. This work critically analyzes the power of court-ordered education policy to increase bilingual students’ access to quality bilingual programming while also exposing how district policy can effectively blunt those gains. By doing so, it highlights the role of advocacy in achieving educational improvements for bilingual students even while district policies undercut them, both of which point to the need for continued advocacy to protect and expand linguistic justice."

Author

• Kim Strong, University of Colorado Boulder