Choice and Ideological Gentrification: How Administrators See School Choice Policies Shaping Their Dual-Language Programs

• In Event: Gentrification 2.0 in Dual-Language Bilingual Education: New Ways of Peeling the Layers From Districts to Schools

Abstract

Purpose and Background
Although both school choice policies and dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs have proliferated across the US, little work has examined their intersection. Yet, both phenomena have been shown to draw on the logic of neoliberalism. Competition and commodification undergird market-based education policies, such as vouchers and open enrollment (“school choice”) (Ball, 2017; Mathis & Trujillo, 2016), and they underlie the marketing of DLBE as an enrichment program that helps students compete in an increasingly globalized world (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Flores & García, 2017; Valdez et al., 2016). This project examines the connection between these trends through the eyes of DLBE administrators, examining how school choice policies shape their policy-making for their DLBE programs.

Theoretical Framework
We draw on two lenses: 1) a language policy and planning perspective, which holds that policy (including language policy) is made not just by states, but by actors at all levels (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996; Spolsky, 2004,) and 2) neoliberalism, or the theoretical perspective that society and the people within it are best-served by policies of “strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2), a perspective that has led in the US to privatization, school choice, vouchers, and charter schools (e.g., Apple, 2006).

Methods
Through iterative qualitative coding and discourse analysis of interviews with DLBE administrators in Texas and Arizona, we analyzed how administrators (four district administrators and 16 school principals), understand the effects of market-based school policies on their DLBE programs.

Results
We found:
1) Choice and competition are a driving force behind many new DLBE programs, particularly top-down ones. Across contexts and roles, DLBE administrators said that school choice meant being compelled to compete with other schools for student enrollment (and therefore funding). DLBE was viewed by leaders as a way to give schools and districts a competitive edge, which sometimes was the reason for starting a new DLBE program at all.

2) Even in bottom-up, grassroots-initiated programs, school choice shapes decision-making at all levels. While not all of the DLBE schools in our study were founded for the purpose of competing, all DLBE administrators, even those with a focus on culturally-sustaining and equitable education for Latinx students, were forced to react to competition. Notable effects were: having to become marketers of DLBE; viewing DLBE parents as customers; and seeing other DLBE school leaders as the competition, thereby undermining professional collaboration and political alliances.

Scholarly Significance
In this presentation, we discuss the consequences of these effects for the equitable participation and education of Latinx and Spanish-speaking students. We argue that these effects amount to an ideological gentrification of bilingual programs (Valdez, et al., 2016), shifting the goals away from a radical reimagining of education and society that centers Latinx students and toward a reproduction of hegemonic Whiteness (Flores, 2016). With calls for the expansion of school choice as a path to closing achievement gaps for minoritized and emergent bilingual students, this work suggests that in DLBE programs, school choice might instead undermine those very aims.

Authors

• Katie Bernstein, Arizona State University

• Adriana Alvarez, University of Colorado - Denver

• Sofia Chaparro, University of Colorado - Denver

• Kathryn I. Henderson, The University of Texas - San Antonio