Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

40 Language Planning and Education
from 1992 on high school graduation rates shows that whereas 91 per cent of Euro-
Americans and 92 per cent of Asian Americans graduated from high school, the
corresponding figure for Latinos was 60 per cent. 8 LEP students, the majority of
whom are Spanish-speaking, receive on average lower grades and score lower on
standardised reading and maths tests than their native English-speaking peers (Moss
and Puma 1995).
Of note here is the relatively favourable educational performance of Asian
Americans, a full explanation for which is beyond the scope of this chapter. All one
can say here is that it seems plausible that part of the explanation lies in some
combination of (a) cultural attitudes and practices within the home, which are
relatively advantageous in socialising children toward academic achievement, and (b)
a different history of incorporation into US society which, in turn, has influenced
the degree of subordination and discrimination experienced by this group.
The implications of these differences between minority groups, however, are easier
to discern. Most important is that they indicate the complexity of factors underlying
minority pupils’ school achievement, suggesting in particular that the language of
instruction (the proportions of English and L1 used in instruction) cannot be the
sole, or even the main, causal variable affecting educational outcomes. What needs
to be taken into account additionally is the wider social context of schooling,
including Mexican Americans’ long experience of subordination and denigration,
the influence of which on child development is widely acknowledged. Cummins
(2000), for example, a leading figure in bilingual education research, now gives more
emphasis to societal power relations, alongside more narrowly educational factors, as
a significant determinant of minority students’ academic outcomes:
linguistic and psychological research provides few answers to questions regarding
why some culturally diverse groups tend to experience persistent long-term
underachievement, nor does it give us clear directions regarding the kind of
educational interventions that will be effective in reversing this underachievement.
For answers to these questions we need to shift to a sociological and sociopolitical
orientation. (Cummins 2000: 34)
The social context of schooling for Mexican Americans, then, is one of inferior,
truncated education, of disparagement of their languages and cultures and of
exposure to an ‘assimilationist’ curriculum (Schmidt 2000: 109). August and Hakuta
(1997) and Crawford (1997) note, meanwhile, that poverty, low social status and
relative segregation9 in underfunded urban schools staffed by inexperienced teachers
are among the contemporary contextual features of many LEP students’ schooling.
It is difficult, then, to be unsympathetic to Cummins’s (2000: 44) argument
that ‘coercive relations of power’, obliging minority students to ‘acquiesce in the
subordination of their identities’, are an important contributor to their relative
educational underperformance. For Cummins, these power relations operate on
schooling by influencing educational structures (e.g. the level of parental involvement
in schooling, the degree of recognition given to pupils’ L1 in school) and the
mindsets of educators, which, in turn, shape the micro-interactions between