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Educational and political dimensions of bilingual education 41 minority students and teachers. It is these, he argues, that most immediately determine how students’ identities are negotiated and hence how well they perform in school. The solution proposed (Cummins 1996, 2000) is a ‘transformative pedagogy’ in which teachers and administrators seek to change the nature of their microinteractions with students, support the incorporation of subordinated languages and cultures into school life and encourage students to critically interrogate their life experiences in relation to existing power relations. In short, teachers are urged to adopt an explicitly political orientation and challenge the structures that impede educational progress for minorities. One can only sympathise with Cummins’s call for a ‘transformative pedagogy’, but there is less cause for optimism regarding its efficacy in bringing about the transformation desired – given the degree to which schooling processes are embedded in, and influenced by, the wider social context. Two general points may be made by way of conclusion to this section. The first is to reiterate the significance of the wider out-of-school socio-political context, which, while it may be backgrounded as the discussion moves on to details of educational provision for minorities, should be kept in mind as a fundamental dimension of the bilingual education debate and as a critical influence on educational outcomes for language minority students. The second is that we have identified two salient features of contemporary US society: changing demographics wrought by large-scale recent immigration, and persisting ethnolinguistic stratification and inequality. It is the confluence of these two factors, argue some commentators (e.g. Schmidt 2000) that have fuelled recent US language policy conflict. On one hand, increased immigration from Latin America and Asia and the consequent rise in LEP enrolments have fed white Euro-American anxieties that English is losing ground, threatening national unity and identity. The growth of assimilationist lobby groups such as US English (see section 3.3), which currently claims 1.7 million members nationwide (US English 2003), is symptomatic here. On the other, the social injustices flowing from ethnolinguistic inequalities have given impetus to pluralist claims for their redress through policies that affirm and support minority languages and cultures. We shall return later to the pluralist-assimilationist debate. For the present, we turn to the history of bilingual education and the types of educational program serving LEP students. 3.1.3 The legislative history of bilingual education in the United States since 1968 There is a wealth of high quality publications on the history of bilingual education in the United States, covering both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and documenting fluctuations in policies and attitudes towards immigrants and their languages (e.g. Baker 2001; Crawford 1999, 2000; Lyons 1995; Ricento 1996, 1998; Arias and Casanova 1993; Schmid 2001; Fishman 1981; Ovando 2003, Gonzalez and Melis 2000). It would be inefficient, then, to narrate that history once more. All
42 Language Planning and Education we shall do here, therefore, cutting a long story short, is single out a few key dates for brief comment, starting with the Bilingual Education Act of 1968. The 1968 Bilingual Education Act (BEA) Introduced by Senator Yarborough (D-Texas) as an amendment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 through the addition of Title VII, the BEA bill was originally conceived as a compensatory measure addressing the needs of poor pupils disadvantaged by weak English language skills. Initial funding ($7.5 million) was in fact very modest, so retrospectively the BEA is seen as having a primarily symbolic importance, legitimating – though not requiring – the use of home languages in the education of linguistic minority children. 1974 Lau v. Nichols This famous case, a landmark in the modern history of US bilingual education, arose from a class action suit brought by Chinese-speaking parents against the San Francisco Unified School Board, alleging a breach of pupils’ civil rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for not providing instruction in a language the children could understand. The Supreme Court found in favour of the plaintiffs ruling that: There is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education. (Cited in Lyons 1995: 4) Subsequent to this decision, the Federal Department of Education drew up guidelines (known as the ‘Lau Remedies’) to assist school districts in receipt of federal funding to move into compliance with Title VI. Under these guidelines, schools were required to provide identified LEP pupils with ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching and academic subject instruction in the home language (L1) until they had attained sufficient English language proficiency to move to mainstream classes. The wider historical significance of the Lau case and the ensuing Remedies, however, is that they established that ‘sink or swim’ submersion approaches (see section 3.1.4) to the education of LEP children constituted a breach of their civil rights. 1974–1994 Reauthorisations of the BEA, Title VII of ESEA Between 1974 and 1994 there were five reauthorisations of the BEA. In the early reauthorisations of the 1970s (1974, 1978) the legislative tendency was towards increasing Title VII funding and extending the scope of bilingual programs through removal of eligibility restrictions, while at the same time defining bilingual education more restrictively in transitional terms. The native language (e.g. Spanish), for example, should only be used ‘to the extent necessary to allow a child to achieve competence in English’ Lyons 1995: 2). By the 1980s and early 1990s, however, scepticism regarding bilingual education
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