Bilingual Education

About 3 pages (881 words)

Bilingual education Summary

Know this topic well? Help others and get FREE products!

Bilingual Education

Bilingual education developed into a particularly contentious topic for defining American identity in the twentieth century. While federal legislation since the 1960s has recognized the United States as a multilingual nation, the professed long-range goal of institutionalized bilingual education was not that students should achievebilingualism but proficiency in English. The vast majority of bilingual education programs were considered "transitional," functioning to introduce younger students with limited English-speaking ability into the general education curriculum where English served historically as the language of instruction. Many bilingual programs were taught principally either in English or in the primary language of the student. However, by the end of the twentieth century, federally funded programs had begun to favor instruction in both English and the primary language, an apparent departure from the goal of achieving proficiency in a single language.

The country's continued difficulty through the late twentieth century in educating immigrant children, mostly from Spanish-speaking countries, forced the federal legislature to institutionalize bilingual education. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964), Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act (1968), providing the first federal funds for bilingual education. The federal government elaborated its guidelines in the amended Bilingual Education Act of 1974, the same year the Supreme Court rendered its landmark Lau vs. Nichols decision, ruling that instructing students in a language they do not understand violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

"Bilingual" was often interpreted as "bicultural," suggesting that the question of bilingual education belonged to a broader debate over the efficacy of a polyglot society. The discussion in the United States focused on the progress of social mobility and the development of a unique American culture. For many, proficiency in English appeared to facilitate social advancement and incorporation into a mainstream culture despite that culture's multifaceted character. The letters of J. Hector St. Jean de Crévecoeur in the late eighteenth century and Alexis de Tocqueville's published travels Democracy in America in 1835 contributed to an understanding of American culture as a "melting pot" of ethnicity. This identity became increasingly complex with the country's continued expansion through the nineteenth century and increasingly vexed with the rise of nationalism in the post bellum era. The nationalist urgency to homogenize the nation after the Civil War, accompanied by notions of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the advent of eugenics, forced further eruptions of nationalist sentiment, including loud, jingoist cries for a single national language after the first World War. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, efforts to empower underrepresented communities contributed to an increased public interest in multiculturalism and ethnocentric agendas. A dramatic increase in immigration from Spanish-speaking countries during the second half of the twentieth century finally motivated the United States to institutionalize bilingual education.

But the strong opposition to the bilingual education legislation of the early 1970s, expressed in the influential editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times between 1975 and 1976, suggested that bilingual programs never enjoyed overwhelming public support. The articulate arguments of Richard Rodriguez, an editor at the Pacific News Service and author of Hunger for Memory (1982), contributed to this opposition by distinguishing between private (primary language) and public (English) language while influential figures like Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., author of The Disuniting of America (1992), documented an increased national disenchantment with multiculturalism and bilingual education.

Discussions of bilingual education more often centered on Latino communities in metropolitan areas such as Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. But the debate was not exclusively Latino. The Lau vs. Nichols verdict, which involved a Chinese-speaking student, along with the advent of post-Vietnam War Asian immigration, suggested that the debate was relevant to other communities in the country. Similar interests were present in localized but nationally observed efforts to incorporate the language of a surrounding community into a school's curriculum. A particularly contentious and widely publicized debate arose over "Ebonics" in Oakland, California, in the early 1990s. Due in part to increasing black nationalism among African American intellectuals, prominent national political figures such as Reverend Jesse Jackson endorsed the incorporation of the local dialect and vernacular variations of language into the curriculum, while figures such as Harvard sociologist Cornel West and Harvard literary and social critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggested that such programs lead to black ghettoization.

California showcased a national concern about bilingual education at the end of the twentieth century. Bilingual education became increasingly contentious in the state in the late 1990s with the passage of a proposition eliminating bilingual instruction. Approval of the initiative occurred in the shadow of two earlier state propositions and a vote by the regents of University of California to effectively terminate Affirmative Action, acts widely perceived in some underrepresented communities as attacks directed at Latino and immigrant communities. Bilingual programs enjoyed public support in cities with wide and long established minority political bases, such as Miami, where they where viewed as beneficial to developing international economies, but California continued to focus the debate primarily on social and cultural concerns.