Schools are required by the U.S. Constitution, federal and state legislation, and court rulings to ensure equity and excellent education for emergent bilingual students. This literature reviews those policies, related funding and the history of poor quality of instruction provided to these learners. It also describes the research on bilingual…

At the core of contemporary U.S. language education policy is the dichotomous dividing of bilingual students into English learners, who are entitled to extra support, and non-English learners, who are not entitled to this support. In this article, we genealogically trace the normative assumptions that have gone into this framing of the issue. We…

Language education policy has been a controversial and ongoing issue throughout the U.S., particularly in the state of Texas. This paper reports on a frame analysis of the five bills that amended the Texas Education Code to implement or expand bilingual education and English as a second language programs. Analysis focused on problems and solutions…

Texas requires a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of limited English proficient (LEP) students in a particular elementary grade and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data, we find a significant increase in the probability that a district offers bilingual education above this 20-student cutoff. Using…

This case study focuses on one primarily Latino public primary school in New Jersey that waived the state's bilingual education requirement and implemented a curricular alternative, comprised of bilingual and monolingual English classrooms. A corpus was generated from one-to-one interviews (N = 8) with administrators and teachers, as well as…

Improving the education of a growing sector of the school population--English language learners (ELLs)--is a pressing unmet need in the nation's current public education system (Gándara 1994; Genesee et al. 2006; Hood 2003). Another urgent educational need is to prepare students to live and work in an increasingly globally connected world.…

The federal Bilingual Education Act (BEA; 1968) augured a new era in the national politics of diversity, schooling, and state, and California became symbolic of the problems and promise of bilingual pedagogy. This article explores how the BEA was pivotal not only in conceiving a federal commitment to the educational achievement of…

The large number of limited English proficient (LEP) children in U.S. schools and the uncertainty about the impact of bilingual education versus English immersion on their achievement warrant rigorous investigation of the effects of "English immersion laws." We estimated the impact of "Question 2", the Massachusetts English…

Supporters of bilingual education are hoping that the election of Barack Obama as president will lead to a thaw in attitudes toward what they consider a proven educational method that has been ignored--or worse--by the Bush administration. Advocates are encouraged by the endorsement of bilingual education by President-elect Obama in the recent…

Staff development is too often inadequate or overlooked in bilingual education. Rather, bilingual educators are forced to seek outside resources and strategies because of inconsistencies in school district bilingual programs. These authors offer a "crash" course for other teachers who may be looking for solid information about bilingual…

This is a research brief of a longer report, also published as "Bilingual Education and English as a Second Language Summary Report, 2009-2010". Twenty-nine percent of students enrolled in Austin Independent School District were English language learners in 2009-2010. The majority of them (62%) continued to make progress in English…

This article is a summary of a longer report, completed under the direction of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society and the doctoral program in Urban Education at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York (CUNY) with funding provided by the New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (NYSIEB). It…

The purpose of this study was to predict the third grade English reading TAKS scores while considering the same students' native language, Spanish, reading level as assessed by a state-approved reading assessment, the Evaluacion del desarrollo de la lectura (EDL), from the end of the second grade year. In addition, this study was been designed to…

Pulling together the most up-to-date research on the effects of restrictive language policies, this timely volume focuses on what we know about the actual outcomes for students and teachers in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts--states where these policies have been adopted. Prominent legal experts in bilingual education analyze these policies…

This study examines the self-esteem, acculturation, and ethnic identity of 150 Latino adolescents enrolled in either a bilingual or traditional education program. Bilingual education programs were established to ensure that academic failure was not the product of limited English proficiency. Grade point average (GPA), acculturation, and ethnic…