students, the common language that will enable them to participate
fully in our political, economic, and social life.
(Bennett 1988)Maybe we would like to believe that current-day policies are more
enlightened, that things have improved over the past 20 years, but
evidence indicates that the opposite is true. Reading academic work on
issues of language rights in the schools, one established theme comes
repeatedly to the surface: separate but equal language policies are ugly, but
necessary.
Valencia and Solórzano provide a sobering overview of educational
policies founded on the idea of language deficit, and come to a simple
conclusion: “Whether its rationale is genetics, poverty, culture and
language, or home environment, the end result is that the deficit ideology
defrauds marginalized students” (2004: 125).
The debates around bilingual education seem to pose very simple
questions:
Should children be required to learn English, and learn in
English, regardless of their own home languages and the primary
languages of their communities?
Can one policy – based on allegedly common views of the
responsibilities of citizenship – be just for all students in all
schools, whether that child is a native speaker of Navajo, Arabic,
or Spanish?Despite many years of debate and experimentation no resolutions have
been found, but a different question might help clarify some of the issues:
If by magic it were possible to make every school-aged child in the nation
instantaneously bilingual, equally proficient in English and in their native
language, would the problem of discrimination in the schools go away?
Teacher talk
Formal expectations about teachers’ language skills are easy enough to
document. Each state has a complex administrative body which is
responsible for reviewing and licensing teachers, and each publishes those
guidelines openly. Guidelines for Michigan, New Mexico, California and