This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This is a very important piece on the vitality of the Spanish language in Texas. The rate of alleged "Spanish-language loss" is held up to scrutiny with not all agreeing whether this is reality or a measurement error. Another interpretation is compositional, meaning that it's not so much that Spanish is on the decline, but rather that places like San Antonio and perhaps Austin are increasingly comprised of third-generation Latinas/os that are less likely to speak Spanish. This maps on to the fact of growing cities that bring in increased numbers of non-Spanish speaking individuals.
Still, others don't believe the numbers, saying that they're sensing a high demand, for instance, in San Antonio ISD, for dual language programs. I sense the same here in Austin, as well. Of clear concern for all is the real possibility of any decline in the aggregate, especially considering the importance of Spanish as a state and world language.
Regardless of data and interpretation, this is a historic problem that connects not just to prior legal prohibitions toward the Speaking of Spanish in our state, but also to existing structural dynamics with education policy itself—outside of dual language programs—not sufficiently supportive of fully-vested bilingualism and biliteracy. In my own work (Valenzuela, 1999), I term this "subtractive schooling," where schools are more about taking away one's fluency and culture than they are about adding and expanding upon these from an asset-based perspective.
These concerns are felt personally, often accompanied with a great deal of anguish. It is a significant loss for children not to be able to communicate with their grandparents. It's also frequently humiliating when people expect you to speak Spanish simply because you're brown despite a long history of language oppression in our state and nation that continues into the present.
These concerns are what motivated us to start our Saturday school, Academia Cuauhtli here in Texas back in 2013. We are entering our tenth year of existence and know that we are making a dent in Austin, Texas, by encouraging a love of Spanish, beginning with a pedagogy anchored in children loving themselves and the multiple identities that they possess.
As a Mexican American/Latinx/o civil rights community, we have fought long and hard for our right to our bilingualism, and biculturalism. From our perspective, it's less about economic gain, and more about the wealth of our identities and pushing back against the self that so many of our schools reject. It's our God-given right.
In fact, we should be expanding this agenda to include, as well, Indigenous tongues, especially considering the more recent waves of immigration from the Americas comprised of individuals that speak their natal tongues, many of whom are trilingual but reduced to being "Mexican," "Central American," or "South American" in society with little to no sensitivity to the cultural and linguistic wealth that they bring. Incidentally, this is not just a Texas or U.S. problem, but a hemispheric and global one, as well.
While our work is far from over, the possibilities are plentiful. At least we all cohere on the idea that language and culture are what make us interesting and strong. Indeed, bilingualism, multilingualism, and multiculturalism are our superpowers!
Students at Washington Irving Dual Language Academy cheer for Principal Mayra Gutierrez-Ibarra on Dec. 14, thanking her for implementing a "pajamas day" for students. The school is part of San Antonio Independent School District, which is seeing increased demand for dual language programs that teach students core subjects like math and reading in both English and Spanish. Josie Norris, San Antonio Express-News
Like many bilingual children, Alicia Reyes-Barriéntez lived in two worlds.
At church and at home, she spoke Spanish, her Mexican mother’s native tongue. But the rest of her world in Texas demanded English.
“I knew that I needed to talk like the white kids to be respected by my white teachers,” said Reyes-Barriéntez, who grew up in Laredo. “It’s not that I didn’t want to be Mexican. I just wanted the privilege of being white, the privilege of being in the dominant group.”
But Reyes-Barriéntez always felt pride in being bilingual, saying it was second nature to her and her two siblings. Now raising two kids of her own in San Antonio, she wants them to learn both languages, too.
“One of the priorities in raising our children has been for them to also be fully bilingual and bicultural,” she said.
But it hasn’t been an easy journey for the political science professor and her husband, who speaks some Spanish but isn’t as fluent. When she speaks to her 10-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son in Spanish, they can understand her, but they have more trouble speaking it themselves, she said.
“I imagined that my children would be completely fluent by now,” she said. “They’re not, which is disheartening.”
Reyes-Barriéntez wants to make sure her children aren’t part of a trend in the San Antonio area: A dip in the percentage of residents who speak Spanish.
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that as the San Antonio metro area grows, the percentage of residents who speak Spanish is going down.
It’s a troubling trend for many in San Antonio, a place where Spanish language and Hispanic culture run deep, tracing back to the city’s roots as part of the Spanish empire, then part of Mexico, as well as its proximity to Latin America. Community leaders and academic experts say the shift raises questions about the region’s culture and future, and also has the potential to be a drag on the region’s economy.
“Not teaching Spanish is always a loss,” said Alfredo Avalos, coordinator for community and culture at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico’s San Antonio branch. “Opportunities can be lost, along with culture.”
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Spanish speakers in the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area is gradually falling, though it remains the highest among similar-sized cities.
Between 2018 and 2022, 30.8% of people in the metro area over the age of 5 spoke Spanish at home. That was down from just over 33% between 2013 and 2017. That’s according to the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the Census Bureau in five-year intervals. The data show the continuation of a decline that’s been observed for the past decade: in 2012, more than 35% of metro area residents spoke Spanish.
About 13% of people in the United States speak Spanish, while about 29% of Texans speak the language, according to the most recent Census Bureau data.
San Antonio’s 2.45 percentage pointdrop in the share of Spanish speakers was the largest among U.S. metro areas with 2.25 million to 2.85 million residents. The next-largest drop was Austin, which saw a 1.59 percentage point decline.
In the San Antonio area, the largest decline was among residents age 18 to 64, where the percentage of Spanish speakers fell from 35.6% in 2017 to 32.8% in 2022. Among children ages 5 to 17, the share that speaks Spanish fell from 23.3% in 2017 to 20.7% in 2022. In the 65 and older age group, the share of Spanish speakers fell by1.2 percentage points.
Not everyone trusts the data: Graciela Sánchez, executive director of San Antonio nonprofit Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, questions the census numbers. Spanish speakers might not have wanted to respond or identify themselves, she said, and she said she thinks the coronavirus pandemic had an effect on responses. The Hispanic or Latino population was undercounted by 4.99%, according to the Census Bureau.
“I’ve never spoken more Spanish in the community,” Sánchez said, especially compared with 20 years ago, when it seemed like fewer people, and young people in particular, were speaking it. She said she’s also seeing more people demand access to Spanish translators in places like San Antonio City Hall and hospitals, so they can communicate in the language they’re most comfortable in, she said.
The census data show the size of the decline has varied around the region. Within San Antonio city limits, the percentage of Spanish speakers fell by about 2.2 percentage points, and in New Braunfels, it declined by about 1.4 percentage points. In some parts of the metro area, however, the percentage increased: in Schertz, for example, the percentage of the population that speaks Spanish at home increased from about 11% in 2017 to more than 17% in 2022, and in Helotes, it increased from about 10% to about 14%.
So inspiring and encouraging! Finally, here we have a Texas university that realizes that it is in a state that shares a close to 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
It's fun to know all the people in this story. There is no reason why more of our universities cannot move in this direction. Long overdue. Congratulations, felicidades, my friends!
The Edinburg campus of UTRGV, where 90 percent of the student body is Hispanic.Brad Doherty
UT-Rio Grande Valley looks to become the first 'bilingual, bicultural, biliterate' campus in the country.
by Daniel Blue Tyx
“The question of the day is: Are you
smart?” professor José Saldívar announced at the start of class. “Don’t
just give me a yes-or-no answer. Tell me why.” Seated in a sparkling
new classroom at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Edinburg
campus, with rolling chairs in the school colors — blue, green and burnt
orange — students inched closer together to debate the value of innate
ability versus hard work. Their conversations might have occurred in any
first-year seminar, but for one key difference: They took place in both
English and Spanish, often at the same time.
The bilingual course I visited is a pilot for an initiative known
around campus as B3 — “bilingual, bicultural, biliterate” — that aims to
transform the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) into the
United States’ first comprehensively bilingual public university. The
project’s goals, proponents say, are far-reaching: to not only produce
the bilingual professionals in high demand along the Texas-Mexico
border, but also to begin to redress a historical legacy of what queer
Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, a Valley native, calls “linguistic
terrorism” against border Spanish speakers denied the legitimacy of
their native tongue. As the initiative moves from rhetoric to reality,
though, UTRGV finds itself grappling with questions of identity: What
does it mean to be a bilingual and bicultural university?
“It’s about being much more aware of the language that is being
spoken, and making sure that the space is safe for my students,”
Saldívar told me after class in his office, which is decorated with an
oversized pennant from Stanford, his alma mater. Saldívar, who in the
fall of 2016 taught the first of what is expected to be dozens of
bilingual or Spanish courses, has plenty of common ground with his
students. Now in his late 30s, he grew up in the rural South Texas
community of Edcouch-Elsa; his parents were punished in school for
speaking Spanish and encouraged him to speak only English at home.
Language could play a role in helping students feel a sense of comfort
and belonging at the university, Saldívar said, but he wanted to impress
on me that what the students were talking about was as noteworthy as
how they chose to say it. “I think the American ethos is you pull
yourself up by your bootstraps in order to be successful,” he said. “And
that’s great. But I want my students to recognize the challenges and
the disparities. And when faced with those challenges, ask: ‘What do we
do?’ Because I want them to be able to handle that.”
For the class I visited at UTRGV’s Edinburg campus, students had read
an article by Juan Carrillo called “I Always Knew I Was Gifted: Latino
Males and the Mestiz@ Theory of Intelligences.” It led with an epigraph
from Anzaldúa: “Theorists-of-color are in the process of trying to
formulate ‘marginal’ theories that are partially outside and partially
inside the Western frame of reference (if that’s possible), theories
that overlap many ‘worlds.’”
The critical theory made for challenging reading for first-year
students in what has often been taught as a remedial course. Before
class, I’d heard several students grumbling bilingually about the
article’s length. Still, as I listened in on their conversations, I
observed that for several students in particular, the topic seemed to
have struck a chord. “They would only pay attention to the smart ones,
to the APs,” Julissa Lopez said of her high school teachers. “With the
people who spoke Spanish, they were simple. They talk to you like you’re
stupid. Like a baby.”
“¿En-ti-en-des lo que es-toy di-ci-en-do?” Sara Nuño
interjected, mimicking a teacher’s condescending tone. Moving back and
forth between Spanish and English, she explained that in high school,
she and her mother would line up at 5 a.m. to walk across the
international bridge from their home in Rio Bravo so she wouldn’t be
late for class in Pharr. “Yo, todas las mañanas, I would cross the border, since sixth, seventh grade, till senior year. Todas las mañanas, 5 a.m. El sacrificio que haces por venir aquí.”
Professor José Saldívar at the UTRGV campus in Edinburg. Brad Doherty
After class, Saldívar said that Sara was a shy student at first, but
that the bilingual aspect of the class helped her find her voice. “I
remember the first time she spoke, she was really hesitant, and she
tried speaking in English,” he said. “Then she said, ‘No, no, bueno, en español,’ and she just took off. Now, I can always count on Sara to talk in class.”
Another student, Ethan Treviño, said a scheduling glitch had randomly
placed him in the bilingual pilot section, even though he doesn’t speak
Spanish. While initially apprehensive, he’d come to see the placement
as an opportunity. “Going through high school, there were a lot of
people in my classes who mainly spoke Spanish,” he said. “I never got a
chance to hang out with them because of the language barrier. This class
is allowing me to learn what I couldn’t in high school. It wasn’t the
type of Spanish that we talk here; they wanted us to learn ‘proper,’
like what they’re speaking in Spain. It didn’t allow me to lose that
barrier here where I live.”
The bilingual initiative was born out of a messy divorce and a
shotgun marriage. In 2011, Texas Southmost College, a community college,
and the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) severed ties in a
dispute over unpaid rent, precipitating a fiscal crisis. At the behest
of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, then-UTB President
Juliet Garcia convened a planning committee. The blueprint they created,
known as UTB 2.0, included the bilingual program’s principles.
“Universities are always trying to identify what they’re going to be
uniquely good at,” Garcia told me. “We felt that we should embrace our
geography, embrace our unique positioning with the issues of language
and culture, and produce historians, teachers, physicians and engineers
who could do this work in at least two languages.”
Then-UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa, a Laredo native, was
enthusiastic but skeptical of the economics. “I don’t care how
optimistic we are — at the end of the day, a vision isn’t going to
become reality without a realistic business plan,” he said. Cigarroa
proposed merging UTB with the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA),
70 miles west in Edinburg. The creation of a new university allowed both
campuses to draw on the Permanent University Fund, a $17.5-billion fund
historically built on oil and gas. Acting quickly, the regents adopted a
set of guiding principles that drew heavily on UTB 2.0. The bilingual
program was principle number five.
“I saw that, and I just about fell out of my seat,” said Francisco
Guajardo, the executive director of the newly formed B3 Institute at
UTRGV. “I said, ‘What, are you serious?’ You know the makeup of regents —
they’re all appointed by very conservative governors. They were
probably thinking folklórico and mariachis.” His booming laugh filled
the dining room of the historic Echo Hotel, a few miles south of UTRGV’s
Edinburg campus, where we discussed the origins of B3 over breakfast
tacos.
Guajardo’s roots in the Valley run deep, and his interest in
bilingual and bicultural education is as personal as it is academic. He
was born in Reynosa, where — according to family lore — his grandfather,
a bulega (bootlegger), fled after killing a rival who snitched
on him to the Texas Rangers. In December 1968, when Guajardo was 4
years old, his family moved to Edcouch-Elsa. A month earlier, 140
Edcouch-Elsa High School students had walked out to protest
discrimination against Mexican Americans. Three years later, as a
first-grader, Guajardo became part of a pilot bilingual education class,
the first of its kind in the Valley. “I’m from around here,” he said.
“I’ve experienced a lot of these kinds of things around language and
culture, and around the valuing or the devaluing of both.”
I met Guajardo after he gave a community talk at the Museum of South
Texas History called “From Taming a Wild Tongue to Building a Bilingual
University.” The title borrowed from a chapter in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera
in which she remembers that as a student at Pan American University —
now UTRGV’s Edinburg campus — she was required to take speech classes to
“correct” her accent in English. She argues that “ethnic identity is
twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take
pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”
After the talk, a UTRGV professor stood up to inquire if B3 was a
top-down initiative. “It is,” Guajardo allowed. Before he could
elaborate, a Mexican-American man in his 60s came to his defense. “It
may be top down,” the man said, “but this is the percolating of
sentiment in the community to say, ‘We need to right the wrongs. We need
to be about having permission, unfettered, to raise our children
differently.’”
In 2015, Guajardo traveled with four faculty members to the
University of Ottawa, the largest bilingual university in North America.
“It’s a 150-year-old institution that is sitting on a bilingual zone as
a matter of public policy,” Guajardo said. “We see that. We think to
ourselves: ‘This is so inspiring. Could we do it in a place that tamed a
wild tongue?’” In the spring, the university will expand the bilingual
pilot from one to five sections. A few programs, including an MFA in
creative writing and an MBA, are already offered in Spanish or
bilingually. Soon, Guajardo hopes, UTRGV will be able to offer the
entire core curriculum bilingually, with more complete degree plans to
follow.
But becoming the nation’s first bilingual university will mean more
than just offering classes in both languages. It will also require a
dramatic shift in the way that the university, and the Valley as a
whole, thinks about matters of history and identity, in a place where a
century of systemic language and ethnic discrimination has too often
gone unacknowledged, and where even today bilingual education is viewed
primarily through a remedial lens.
In addition to directing the B3 Institute, Guajardo is at work on a
book of oral histories documenting the history of bilingual education in
the Valley. “Invariably, each of the elders will tell the story of how
they were punished, spanked, chastised, for speaking Spanish in school,”
he said. “It is no accident that this region is much more conservative
in terms of bilingual education, because of a historical trauma that
people experienced.
“This,” Guajardo said, “is a social change experiment.”
Francisco Guajardo speaks with two UTRGV alumni at a meeting in Edinburg about the bilingual program. Brad DohortyUTRGV’s newly drafted vision statement begins, “To be the
nation’s premier Hispanic-serving institution and a highly engaged
bilingual university.” The admissions page on the university’s website —
soon to be fully bilingual — prominently features the program as a
selling point. “It is a priority,” Provost Havidán Rodríguez told me
when we met on the Brownsville campus, which, unlike Edinburg’s, is
right on the border. (On my way to campus, I passed under a sign warning
me not to take firearms into Mexico, before exiting onto University
Boulevard.)
“This is not a marketing scheme. We’re putting in place the
organizational structure, the staff, the funding and the faculty that we
need to make this happen. I think that speaks louder than words,
right?”
Overt opposition of the kind you might expect elsewhere —
“English-only” rhetoric and the like — has been largely nonexistent in
the Valley. All of the students I met, from freshmen to graduate
students, from monolingual English speakers to recent immigrants from
Mexico, expressed an interest in taking the bilingual classes.
“Honestly, I’m not really concerned,” Rodríguez responded when I
inquired about student interest. “Students know this is important.”
The most insistent criticism has come from students and faculty who
think the university is not going far enough. As the university
considers starting a football team and scrambles to deal with the
fallout from a December decision by its accreditor to put the university
on probation — UTRGV says the violations are related to the contentious
separation from Texas Southmost College — skeptics worry that the
university may lack sufficient commitment to follow through on its
ambitious agenda.
Stephanie Alvarez, the founding director of the Center for Mexican
American Studies at UTRGV, has been one of the most vocal critics. We
spoke on a lime-green couch at the center, which Alvarez had a hand in
designing, asking that the planned cubicles be eschewed in favor of an
open lounge. Behind us, a group of students sat talking while they cut
out materials for a Day of the Dead altar project the center was
facilitating at area elementary schools.
For Alvarez, who in 2015 became the first faculty member in the
history of the University of Texas System to receive a prestigious U.S.
Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation, the focus on
bilingualism obscures a lack of commitment to programs such as
Mexican-American studies that turn a critical eye on the history and
culture of the borderlands. “It’s easy to sell bilingual in some ways,”
Alvarez said. “Many, many people speak Spanish in the Valley. It’s not
threatening. Whereas [with] Mexican-American studies, you have to have
difficult conversations. You’re possibly producing new knowledge that
disrupts the dominant narrative, which for some people makes them very
uncomfortable.”
Growing up Cuban American in Miami during the Mariel boatlift, a time
of heightened anti-Cuban sentiment, “I really had no appreciation for
my culture,” Alvarez said. “I wanted to distance myself as much as
possible.” In high school, she didn’t read books. “Ever. The worst thing
you could ever tell me was that I would have to read.” She went to
college to play basketball and ended up a Spanish major by default,
since it required the fewest courses to graduate. Then, during her
senior year, she was required to take a Latin-American literature
course. The first entry in the anthology was a magical realist story by
Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré. For Alvarez, it was a moment of
academic awakening. “I realized that this was the first time I’d ever
read anything that I connected to,” she said.
When Alvarez came to teach at UTPA in 2006, the only ethnic studies
degree plan was called Mexican-American Heritage, and it had graduated
just three students in 30 years. Eighteen credit hours were in Spanish
grammar, “indicating much of what Anzaldúa says about ‘linguistic
terrorism,’ but on the Spanish side, which was to ‘correct’ the
students’ Spanish,” Alvarez said. She joined an informal group of Latina
junior faculty members that began developing a revised curriculum that
would become the basis for Mexican-American studies at UTRGV.
Alvarez is particularly outraged that no other degree plan at the
university requires a Mexican-American studies course. “If you get a
degree in English, you never have to take a class in Mexican-American
literature,” Alvarez said. “It is an option. But it cannot be an option
if we are going to be a bicultural university. If you are going to be an
English teacher, 90-something percent of your students are going to be
Mexican American. Those teachers have no access to the literature that
represents their students.”
Stephanie Alvarez outside her office on the Edinburg campus. Brad Dohorty
Hiring is another issue. Alvarez pointed out that the
Mexican-American studies department has only two faculty members;
previous efforts at joint hires with other departments have gone
nowhere. “People always think there’s an urgency for, I don’t know, ‘I
desperately need a medievalist.’ But at this moment, at this university,
we desperately need someone who can do bilingual and bicultural. This
is what will make UTRGV stand out from any other university.”
Guajardo is acutely sensitive to the critiques voiced by Alvarez and
others. “Without the infusion of culturally appropriate, culturally
relevant approaches, I think that we don’t touch the spirit of the
region,” he said. At one point, he was interrupted by a phone call;
someone from the MBA program was looking for a course taught in Spanish
to fulfill a breadth requirement. He pitched a Mexican- American studies
class. “Stephanie would be great for the MBA students,” he told the
person on the other line. “She would turn [the business students] upside
down with all kinds of Chicano studies stuff that they would do well to
know.”
As for hiring and resources, Guajardo told me, “If I have an issue,
and this is a personal critique, it’s that I hoped the investment would
have been so much greater. It’s not because people don’t want it. In
fairness to my immediate supervisors, they’re trying, they’re working
it. But you know, it’s never enough. A lot of this is the faith that we
have in certain people.”
On November 2, the Day of the Dead, I joined a group of 15 UTRGV
students, faculty and community members at Gloria Anzaldúa’s gravesite
in the Valle de la Paz Cemetery in Hargill, the one-conveniencestore-
town north of Edinburg where she grew up in a family of migrant
farmworkers. Organized by the Center for Mexican American Studies, the
annual pilgrimage symbolically “returns” Anzaldúa to the Valley and her
alma mater, where her work, in spite of widespread acclaim elsewhere,
was largely unrecognized at the time of her death in 2004. Now in its
10th year, the event and others like it have catalyzed local interest,
and Anzaldúa’s writing, which moves fluidly between English and Spanish
and poetry and prose, is foundational to the bilingual program.
“If we don’t want to reproduce the ‘linguistic terrorism’ that
Anzaldúa experienced at Pan American University, then we need to embrace
initiatives like B3,” Lupe Flores, a graduate student in anthropology
and Mexican-American studies, told me. Flores first encountered Anzaldúa
in one of Stephanie Alvarez’s classes and organized the pilgrimage this
year. “Outside the university, we have this national climate that is
very ‘English-only,’ anti-Spanish, anti-immigrant — they kind of go hand
in hand,” he said. “I think this initiative has a lot of potential to
undo the racism and oppression that earlier generations had to
experience, and that a lot of us are still experiencing.”
On the tombstone, emblazoned on either side by bilingual passages from Anzaldúa’s work, participants placed ofrendas of sugary pan de muerto and magenta bougainvillea leaves. One student had brought a bundle of cenizo
(sage), which she lit and passed around with a conch shell underneath
to catch the ashes. For 15 minutes or so, everyone stood in silence,
except for the sounds of birdsong, dogs barking and a rooster crowing in
the distance.
Then, one by one, those gathered began to offer testimonios
describing how Anzaldúa’s work embracing the linguistic and cultural
richness of the borderlands had shaped their own lives. Flores spoke
about his grandmother, a Pentecostal Christian whose family has lived on
the same riverfront rancho for almost two centuries. Estranged
first by a language barrier and later because of his homosexuality,
Flores said that reading Anzaldúa had helped him reconnect with his
grandmother and the culture of the border more broadly. “Seeing my
grandmother think through her positions, I could see that even though
she’s this very religious, God-fearing woman, she has her own
borderlands, her own ways of articulating and accepting things,” he
said.
Toward the end of the ceremony, members of a student poetry
collective offered a choral reading of an excerpt from Anzaldúa’s work.
At the text’s instruction, they invited those gathered to turn their
gaze to the east, south, west and north, then to the underworld, and
lastly to the sky, as they read:
We are ready for change.
Let us link hands and hearts
together find a path through the dark woods
step through the doorways between worlds
leaving huellas for others to follow,
build bridges, cross them with grace,
and claim these puentes our
“home”
si se puede, que asi sea, so be it,
estamos listas, vámonos. Now let us shift.
contigo,
gloria
This piece recently appeared in The Atlantic. There should be no clash between education and assimilation. Bilingual education in our country is more of an issue of politics than evidence. When well staffed, funded, and designed, it works in all the ways that we care about in terms of educational outcomes. If anything, this "debate" has more to do with the dominant group's loss of centrality and a lack of desire to relinquish privilege. Too bad. There is so much to gain from a bilingual and bicultural—indeed multilingual and multicultural—world.
Nearly one in
four U.S. public-school children speak a language other than English at
home. What’s the best way to accommodate ELL students in the classroom?
Stickers on the wall of Coral Way K-8, a bilingual school in Miami. Lynne Sladky / AP
With more than 20 languages
spoken in one eighth-grade classroom, Harlem Village Academy West in
New York City rivals the vibrant cultural and ethnic mix of the United
Nations headquarters, a short trip down the FDR Drive. Spanish,
Mandingo, Fulani, French, Arabic, and other languages come together to
form a tapestry of nationalities. Yet unlike the U.N., the premier
institution representing the peoples of the world, public schools have
not always encouraged children to embrace their heritages. Indeed, as
non-native English speakers, some of the Harlem Village’s
middle-schoolers relate feelings of isolation as younger children solely
based on their attainment of the English language.
Chelsea,
a 13-year-old Spanish-speaker who learned English in the third grade,
recalls her earliest years in school as especially difficult amid her
struggles to communicate with peers. “I used to get mad and aggravated
because I couldn’t speak English,” she says. “People were looking at me
as if I were another type of human being.” Her classmates share similar
frustrations. “I felt dumb and left out when we did advanced math
because my teacher wouldn’t let me do it even though I knew I could,”
says Yaye, a bright 14-year-old who speaks Wolof, the most widely spoken
language in Senegal, at home. Yaye says he languished in his K-2
English-as-a-second-language classes, “not progressing or learning.”
Melyanet, also 14, remembers feeling alienated and lonely when she was
in prekindergarten—an age when children often sharpen their social
skills through play. “I would try my best to learn English but it was
hard,” the teen recalls. “No one spoke [Spanish] so I wouldn’t make
friends. I would sit in the back.”
The
adolescents at Harlem Village are part of a rapidly growing population
of students in America’s public schools with diverse linguistic
backgrounds. Of the 50 million students currently enrolled in public K-12 schools, almost one in four
(12 million) schoolchildren ages 5 to 17 speak a language other than
English at home, according to an analysis of census figures. Their
numbers have inched up over the last decade, along with the percentage
of students participating in English-language-learners programs. Department of Education data
shows this segment of the public-school population is steadily
climbing. Some 4.4 million students—ranging from those who don’t speak
English to those transitioning into full proficiency—were classified as
English language learners in the 2012-13 school year, an increase of
more than 250,000 students over the previous decade.
Even as states struggle to reach a common definition
of what it means to be an English language learner, the proportion of
these students continues to rise—and with it, the temperature of debate
surrounding the purpose and goals of bilingual education. It remains an
unsettled issue that continues to challenge America’s self-image as
welcoming and inclusive: The value of linguistic assimilation is pitted
against the values of a culturally diverse nation of immigrants, leaving
education systems and its students caught in political crosshairs. The
divide is exacerbated by financially strapped schools with skyrocketing
numbers of English learners—meeting all of the mandates for their education can be expensive—and
the national discourse on immigration, which saw the 2016 presidential
contender Donald Trump advise his competitor Jeb Bush to “really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”
Many
trace today’s fraught bilingual-education politics back to the
Bilingual Education Act, which was adopted in 1968 to aid local school
districts in educating children with limited English. At the bill signing,
President Lyndon B. Johnson voiced his enthusiasm for a law that would
bring an unprecedented federal role and funds to the education of
children whose first language wasn’t English:
Thousands of children of Latin descent, young [Native
Americans], and others will get a better start—a better chance—in school
… What this law means is that we are now giving every child in America a
better chance to touch his outermost limits—to reach the farthest edge
of his talents and his dreams. We have begun a campaign to unlock the
full potential of every boy and girl—regardless of his race or his
region or his father's income.
-->
Yet bilingual education’s cultural, social, and historical dimensions date
back well over a century before Johnson signed his landmark education law. In
recounting the history of bilingual
education, Rethinking Schools chronicles the earliest efforts to teach
immigrant students. The first bilingual-education law, enacted in Ohio in 1839,
created a German-English language program and was followed by similar laws in
Louisiana and the New Mexico area geared around French-English and
Spanish-English instruction, respectively. As the trend accelerated, more
states and localities began dual instruction in an array of languages,
including Polish, Italian, Norwegian, and Cherokee. The onset of World War
I—and its accompanying era of xenophobia, discrimination against language
minorities, and English-only laws—quickly brought this trajectory to an end.
This pattern continued through the 1920s as the tension between forced assimilation
and educationally sound practices continued—and as the academic performance of
students with limited English skills began to suffer. The passage of the
Bilingual Education Act, part of a wave of civil-rights legislation pushed
through Congress by the Johnson administration, ushered in a major shift once
again and a return to bilingual instruction in many of the nation’s schools.
But as the Act was reauthorized in the 1980s and ‘90s and then subsumed under No Child
Left Behind in 2002, national policy seesawed between prioritizing
multilingual skills and an English-only focus.
Today, schools are still twisting in the wind of politics, with 31 states passing laws naming English the official language over the last two centuries and voters in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts
approving ballot measures in recent decades that replace bilingual
education with English-only policies. Meanwhile, a growing contingent of
educators are promoting the cultivation of bilingualism to support the
social and emotional needs of English language learners.
Olga
Kagan, a languages and cultures professor at UCLA and director of the
university’s National Heritage Language Resource Center, has studied the
implications of denying students the ability to communicate in their
parents’ native language. “Many of these students have no literacy in
the language they speak,” she wrote in a December 2014 Los Angeles Times op-ed. “And that is a problem.”
Rather
than ignoring English in the classroom, Kagan calls for capitalizing on
the language skills students already have and taking their background
knowledge into account. “I think the main roadblock is societal attitude
to bilingualism ... We lose much of the nation’s capacity in languages
by letting go of this resource,” she told me recently. And the various
benefits for students are evident. Kagan’s survey of California college students
found many “heritage speakers” wished to study their home language at
school to connect with their culture, build their literacy, and
strengthen their bonds with relatives.
Driving much of the decision-making in English-language instruction are myths that need debunking,
says Rusul Alrubail, an education consultant whose work focuses on
English-language learners and pedagogical practices in the classroom.
“Banning [a child’s] first language often creates a negative impact ... a
sense of divide for students between their first language, often used
at home, and English. We see students who refuse to be associated with
their first language, or refuse to speak it or acknowledge that they
know it, due to them feeling ashamed ... This impacts their cultural
identity.”
Among
the consequences, says Alrubail, are when students internalize the
notion that their first language is inferior—with English becoming the
language of assimilation—and when some immigrant families specifically
ask their kids not to speak in their first language at home in an effort
to ensure their children conform to Western culture. Interestingly, research finds mixing languages
has no impact on children’s vocabulary development. But the pressure
from teachers and schools, enshrined in policy and practices, can be
immense.
“Many
teachers believe that in order to learn English one must assimilate to
American culture and abandon one's own cultural practices,” Alrubail
said. “This is always a result of fear and anxiety; when students do not
meet their expectation of what it means to be ‘American,’ it becomes
imperative to speak English.”
The
upshot of this mindset is seen in Amadou, a 13-year-old at Harlem
Village who speaks Fulani, a Niger-Congo language spoken by 13 million
people in many parts of in West, Central, and North Africa. “Nobody
spoke my language except in my home [so] I would only try to speak
English so they wouldn’t look at me differently. I wanted to fit in with
everyone else and be the same,” he says. Will his native language, rich
in tradition and heritage, soon slip away as the middle-schooler slowly
simmers in America’s melting pot?
