Olivia Obeso, M.A.
TESOL
Guest Education Blogger
“I refuse to entertain the question of whether
bilingualism has positive effects. I am convinced that to continue to except
this framing of the debate is to continue to be complicit in white supremacy.
Bilingualism is not good or bad. It just is.”
-Dr. Nelson Flores[1]
Bilingual education is reemerging in
the state of California, heralded by the same white, monolingual communities
who have long marginalized multilingual practices and who pushed for the ban of
bilingual programs over twenty years ago. The model of bilingual education that
these communities have embraced, however, is one which aligns its value with a
neoliberal framework. Harvey defines neoliberalism as a “theory of political
economic practices” in which freedom and agency of individuals are inextricable
from their economic outcomes.[2] I
argue that by centering economic value, the bilingual programs that are being
touted and spread across California will fail to serve multilingual students –
the very population for which they are purported to be the most important.
Rescued from Multilingualism
The discursive formation of
bilingual education as other, or contrary to a hegemonic norm,[3] allowed
dominant communities to argue against such programs as fundamentally
incompatible with the goals of mainstream schooling. The “English Only” campaigns
of the 90’s and 2000’s built upon the otherization of language practices by
positioning dominant monolingual communities as saviors who would rescue
multilingual students from a life undominated by English.[4] These
campaigns sowed fear in minoritized, multilingual communities, claiming that
bilingual programs were failing students by perpetually holding them back from
learning English and thus, from finding future academic and economic success.
Their result in California was an effective ban on bilingual programs in public
schools through California Proposition 227. The ban forced proponents of bilingual
programs to search for mechanisms for restoring the political and legal right
for students to learn in languages other than English. However, in order to
counter the othering discourse of bilingualism, proponents turned to a strategy
of interest convergence[5], relying
heavily on moves to neoliberalism which is “to some degree associated with the
restoration of reconstruction of the power of economic elites.”[6] In this
way, the reframing of bilingualism as an economic resource has allowed for
linguistic elites to maintain their power, even as it appears they’ve
surrendered to the de-centering of monolingualism.
California’s Neoliberal Bilingual Education
Though I do not wish to minimize the
success of the overturning of Proposition 227 in 2016, it is important to
understand how bilingualism is now being articulated within a neoliberal
framework where resources in “the reservoirs of intelligence and personality”[7] (i.e.
language and culture) have been commodified, in order to identify the ways that
this interest convergence will do more to serve dominant communities than
multilingual students.[8] Former State
Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson, released his Global
California 2030 initiative statement in 2018, shortly after the legal
barriers to bilingual education were removed. The principle mission of this
initiative is to greatly increase the number of students in dual-language
programs[9] in order
to “equip students with world language skills to better appreciate and more
fully engage with the rich and diverse mixture of cultures, heritages, and
languages found in California and the world, while also preparing them to succeed in a global economy” (emphasis
added).[10]
Though there is reference to the linguistic, social, and cultural merits of
bilingualism in this mission statement and throughout the document, consistent
parallel references to economic value reveal a logic of neoliberalism, where economic
advancement of individuals and society as a whole is what validates a push for
more bilingual programs. Other documents such as the English Learner Master
Plans of various districts are similarly replete with calls for language as
capital.[11]
Neoliberal Bilingual Education for Whom?
One of the many results of elevating
neoliberal globalism as a central program goal means that bilingual programs
adopt standardized measures of success – a key component of neoliberal projects.[12] Existing
standardized tests of language are monolingual in nature, thereby making them
more accurate measures for monolingual students who are becoming bilingual than
students who develop their bilingualism outside of school; by this, I mean that
monolingual individuals conceptualize and practice bilingualism as if it were
the sum of two, distinct languages, whereas multilingual individuals tend to
use their full linguistic repertoire as if it were a language in and of itself
(think Spanglish).[13] What’s
worse, in the English-Spanish bilingual programs of the largest school district
in California, the English proficiency test provides educators with significantly
more information than the test of Spanish proficiency.[14]
This both reflects and reinforces a valuing of English as the most important
language in bilingual development. This communicates the message that although
students need to be prepared for a global economy, English is, after all, still
the language of international business, and a second language can therefore be
relegated to a peripheral resource.
Where do We Go from Here?
Though solutions to the
neoliberalization of bilingual education and marginalization of multilingual
students in these programs cannot be solved in a three-page blog post,[15] I
wish to leave us here with important questions and considerations for educators
who wish to push against these developments. Does bilingual education face a
return to the English Only era if we argue for recognizing the inherent value
of bilingualism as a normalized practice and part of a liberatory educational
experience for marginalized students? And, given a school system which is
steeped in neoliberal frameworks in almost every aspect, is it even possible to
develop spaces free from the reaches of capital and the commodification of
linguistic and cultural practices?
A
loving reminder that it is not your fault that a language you've ached to speak
was long ago taken from you. Whether or not you learn that language, you are
already worthy and magnificent.
Dra.
Megan Figueroa[16]
[4]
Carlos J. Ovando, “Bilingual Education in the
United States: Historical Development and Current Issues,” Bilingual
Research Journal 27, no. 1 (April 2003): 1–24,
https://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2003.10162589.
[5]
Derrick Bell, “White Superiority in America:
Its Legal Legacy, Its Economic Costs,” in The Derrick Bell Reader,
Critical America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 73–90.
[7]
Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith, “The
Library as ‘Stuck Place’: Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University,” in Critical
Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, ed. Maria T. Accardi, Emily
Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier, 2009, 2–3.
[9]
A type of bilingual education which is realized in various forms, but which
generally consists of students learning language and content in two languages.
[10]
California Department of Education, “Global
California 2030, An Initiative of State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Tom Torlakson” (Sacramento, CA, 2018), https://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/documents/globalca2030report.pdf.
[11]
For example, Multilingual and Multicultural Education
Department, “2018 Master Plan for English Learners and Standard English
Learners” (Los Angeles Unified School District Division of Instruction, 2018);
“2018-2019 Centinela Valley Union High School District Master Plan for English
Language Learners” (CVUHSD, 2018).
[12]
Wayne Au, “Meritocracy 2.0: High-Stakes,
Standardized Testing as a Racial Project of Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Educational
Policy 30, no. 1 (January 2016): 39–62, https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904815614916;
Karen P. Nicholson, “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries and the Values
of Transformational Change,” College & Research Libraries 76, no. 3
(March 1, 2015): 328–38, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.76.3.328.
[13]
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, “Translanguaging and
Responsive Assessment Adaptations: Emergent Bilingual Readers through the Lens
of Possibility,” Language Arts 95, no. 6 (July 2018): 355–69; Ramón
Antonio Martínez, “Beyond the English Learner Label: Recognizing the
Richness of Bi/Multilingual Students’ Linguistic Repertoires,” The Reading
Teacher 71, no. 5 (March 2018): 515–22, https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1679.
[15]
A frequent, comforting refrain of Dr. Caswell, reminding us that exposing and
discussing problems which we hope to address can be just as important as
finding solutions to those problems.
