English-Only to the Core
What the Common Core
means for emergent bilingual youth
BY
JEFF BALE
Children and their parents demonstrate against English-only
Proposition 227. Oakland, California, 1998.
Photo credit: David Bacon
Among bilingual
educators, there has been much debate about the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS). Some of the most respected scholars of bilingual education have
endorsed the Common Core and are working hard to make it relevant for English
learners. Others have been more suspicious. Not only do the standards focus on
English-only, critics note, but they were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation,
pushed on states in a way that amounts to bribery by the Obama administration,
and promise to worsen the impact of high-stakes standardized testing.
In fact, the genesis of the Common
Core stands in direct contrast to how bilingual education programs were won,
namely through grassroots, explicitly anti-racist organizing by students,
parents, teachers, and community allies. The standards thus raise a key
question: Given the history of bilingual education programs in the United
States, is it possible to expand social justice for emergent bilingual youth
through the Common Core?
Addressing that question has been
challenging, given the inconsistent responses of professional and civil rights
organizations to the standards. The National Association for Bilingual
Education (NABE) issued a position statement in January 2013 with mixed
messages. Although NABE’s membership passed a resolution opposing the Common
Core, the statement explains that the group is “working collaboratively with
policymakers, school administrators, and teachers” to ensure that implementing
the Common Core does not negatively impact English learners. The TESOL
(Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) International Association
issued a policy brief endorsing the standards.
Civil rights organizations—including
the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the National
Council of La Raza (NCLR), and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP)—have endorsed the standards while calling for equitable
implementation. The NCLR, for example, has used Gates Foundation money to apply
the standards to English-language education and to develop tool kits supporting
parent advocacy on behalf of the Common Core. The League of United Latin
American Citizens (LULAC) posted resources on its website to help parents make
sense of the Common Core.
However, the Common Core isn’t just
a set of standards. Instead, new standardized tests accompanying the standards
promise to deepen the impact of high-stakes accountability measures in place
since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) took effect in 2002. On this count, civil
rights organizations have wavered. In October 2014, MALDEF and LULAC joined
nine other civil rights organizations in issuing a letter to President Obama
protesting the negative impact of high-stakes testing, and calling for more
equitable resources and multiple measures (i.e., not just test scores) to
define accountability. This letter clearly fit the mood of growing resistance
by students, parents, and teachers to high-stakes testing. And yet, not three
months later, many of these same organizations issued a letter to Arne Duncan
endorsing the practice of annual, high-stakes standardized testing.
Their stance is significant, if
unfortunate: When NCLB was first proposed, support from leading civil rights
organizations gave enormous political cover to its high-stakes testing
policies. The main argument was that accountability measures would “shine a
light” on how poorly many schools were educating youth of color, including emergent
bilinguals, and thus lead to positive change. Fifteen years later, we know how
misguided that hope was. As Wayne Au has argued in Unequal by Design:
High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality, and as the many
contributors to More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes
Testing have documented, high-stakes testing has had a devastating
effect on many schools, but especially on schools that primarily serve Black
and Brown youth. And yet, mainstream civil rights organizations continue to
pursue this strategy for education reform.
If the response to the Common Core
by scholars, professional organizations, and civil rights groups has been
inconsistent, then it is no wonder that bilingual educators and teachers of
English learners have struggled to make sense of the standards. If the
standards can’t just be adopted, is there a way to adapt them
and make them relevant for English learners? Is it enough to create a bilingual
Common Core, that is, to translate the standards to guide bilingual instruction
of language arts and math? If not, then what is the alternative?
To help address these questions,
this article looks at CCSS in three ways: against the backdrop of the history
of bilingual education and anti-racist struggle, on their own terms, and in
light of the current status of bilingual education. Each perspective suggests
that the Common Core will further erode bilingual education and linguistic
justice in the United States.
A History of
Successful Community Organizing
Usually, when the story of bilingual
education in recent U.S. history is told, that story tends to focus on the
actions of Important People like President Lyndon Johnson and Senator Ralph
Yarborough. The narrative tracks formal policy, including the Bilingual
Education Act of 1968 and the Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court
case in 1974 as key plot points.
However, this approach to history
distorts as much as it reveals. Actually, it was the actions of Chicana/o,
Puerto Rican, Native American, and Asian American activists in the 1960s and
’70s that brought about bilingual education in the first place. As these
activists focused on schools, they combated segregation and a lack of
resources, and demanded bilingual and bicultural programming. They built strong
social movements from the ground up, which compelled policymakers to heed their
demands and either create or expand bilingual education. But the dominant
historical perspective takes our attention away from grassroots activism and
focuses instead on the actions of “key players” and/or policies.
It also reduces struggle to
“advocacy.” That is, it narrows the definition of political activism to
lobbying this or that politician, or testifying before this or that committee.
This sort of advocacy can matter, to be sure. But it takes place on terms set
by those with power. The politicians in their offices and the committees in
their hearing rooms are able to set the boundaries of the discussion and
debate, while advocates are left to adapt to it or be shut out of the
conversation altogether. What gives this sort of advocacy any real weight is
whether students, teachers, parents, and community allies have built movements
that are strong enough to change the terms of the conversation.
In fact, it was local
struggles—often school-by-school and district-by-district, led by students in
concert with parents, sometimes teachers and teacher organizations, and
radicals—that provided the necessary momentum to make advocacy effective.
Without the blowouts in East Los Angeles in 1968; without the student boycotts
in Crystal City, Texas, in 1969; without the Third World student strike in San
Francisco in 1968 (where the lawyers for the Lau family cut their political
teeth); it is difficult to imagine bilingual education becoming formal policy
at the district, state, or federal level.
Finally, the dominant approach to
bilingual education history completely misidentifies the source of hostility to
bilingualism and bilingual education from the 1980s on. It focuses, accurately,
on the election of Ronald Reagan as a turning point, a moment when all the
gains of the civil rights movements came under attack. The Reagan
administration backtracked on the Lau remedies, a series of
measures flowing from the 1974 Supreme Court case that strengthened bilingual
education. There was also a concerted campaign to declare English the official
language, federally and in several individual states. But when it comes to
explaining why this conservative shift happened, the story runs into trouble—it
lays the blame at the feet of the very civil rights activists who pushed for
bilingual education in the first place. Their activism is described as too
confrontational, the demands for meaningful bilingual education as too radical.
According to the terms of the
dominant view of the history, which ignores or denigrates community demands and
organizing, I guess it’s logical to rely on official channels and Important
People to reform schools. But the actual history of bilingual education in the
United States suggests something quite different. It was the conscious,
ambitious, and collective actions of anti-racist activists that brought real
change to schools for emergent bilingual youth. The CCSS are neither the
product of, nor will they contribute to, the creation of such movements.
Emergent Bilingual
Education and the Common Core
Bilingual education scholars who support
the Common Core, and even some who don’t, have acknowledged the significant
shift it represents in understanding the relationship between language and
content. How language and content are connected has been an enduring dilemma
for language educators.
One traditional, but prevalent,
model claims that English learners must first “master” the language (i.e., use
grammar and vocabulary accurately) before they can engage in meaningful, age-
and grade-appropriate content. The most extreme version of this model is
Structured English Immersion (SEI) in Arizona. In 2000, Arizona voters
overwhelmingly passed Proposition 203. This measure not only severely
restricted bilingual education, but also required the state to develop a new
model of English-only education. The state responded with SEI. English learners
are grouped by proficiency level—and segregated from their
English-proficient peers—for up to four hours per day in English-language
development classes. This model includes no content instruction or cultural
components. Contrary to what some 40 years of applied linguistic research have
taught us about language learning, SEI assumes that students can develop enough
language “skills” to be successful in mainstream classes within one year.
This approach to language education
is consistent with the twin logics of standardization and accountability that
have deformed our schools. Skills and facts are broken down into discrete
parts; it is assumed that these parts can be measured and that those
measurements reflect real learning. Students are then “prepped” on those parts
ad nauseum. Under the SEI model, student progress is tracked on what is called
the Discrete Skills Inventory. This stranger-than-fiction document contains a
series of tables that literally break down the English language into
grammatical units. Teachers are then expected to use the inventory as a
checklist to track student “mastery” of English: Student uses past tense of to
be accurately—check! Student uses past negative of to be
accurately—check! Student uses past simple negative accurately—check!
Other models have tried to unify
language development and content knowledge in so-called sheltered environments.
Here, academic language is scaffolded to facilitate student engagement with
content. Prominent examples of this model include the Sheltered Instruction
Observational Protocol, widely adopted by school districts across the country;
the Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English model, first developed
in California; and the Cognitive Academic Language Learning model. Although
there is much value in these models, it is an ongoing challenge to prevent
scaffolded or sheltered instruction from becoming watered-down instruction.
Part of the support for the Common
Core among bilingual educators and teachers of English language learners (ELLs)
is rooted in the potential they see in CCSS for moving away from these models
toward an academically robust environment for emergent bilinguals. Scholars and
practitioners working with the Understanding Language project at Stanford
University have made this case most clearly. For them, the Common Core assumes
that English learners can learn the language through rigorous content. The
standards focus literacy instruction simultaneously on text (processing individual
letters, words, etc.) and discourse (overall meaning). That is, it shifts
literacy instruction away from mere decoding skills and instead gives English
learners access to instruction using academic language for a variety of
complex, critical tasks. Emergent bilinguals don’t just learn about language
through explicit instruction on grammar items or isolated vocabulary. Rather,
they use language to engage academic content and to collaborate with others
(with native-speaker, English-only, and multilingual peers, and with teachers
who do and don’t share their home language) on academic tasks. The math
standards also support language development by focusing on the language of
math, namely, the language of explanation, reasoning, and argumentation associated
with mathematical functions. Finally, the standards reinforce the idea that
every teacher is a language teacher, not just the ELL or bilingual ed
specialist.
This shift in orientation to the
language-content connection reflects perspectives that many bilingual and
English-language educators have long held. It is certainly refreshing to see
these ideas taken up so broadly in policy briefs and curriculum guides. My
sense is that for this reason alone many bilingual educators (practitioners and
academics alike) have gotten on board with the Common Core.
However, the Common Core only makes
this connection between language and content in English. The CCSS make no
reference to linguistic diversity, to culture and its relationship to language,
or to the linguistic and cultural resources that emergent bilinguals bring with
them to the classroom. Worse still, the standards make no room for applying the
language-content model to any language other than English. The standards invoke
all the opportunity represented in sociocultural approaches to language
learning, only to foreclose on it by focusing on English only.
The authors of the Common Core do
explicitly address English learners in a brief addendum to the standards, but
the addendum is inconsistent in its perspective. On the one hand, it
acknowledges the linguistic, cultural, economic, and academic diversity of
emergent bilinguals and states clearly that these students are capable of
engaging rigorous content. However, it uses a medical model for defining effective
instruction as that which “diagnos[es] each student instructionally.” It also
labels students as English learners (i.e., defining them by
what they do not yet know) rather than as the emergent bilingual youth
they are. Moreover, the cultural knowledge that emergent bilingual students
possess, and how teachers might leverage that knowledge, is left entirely
unaddressed.
Most revealing, though, is how the
addendum talks about students’ home languages. In the very few instances where
they are mentioned at all, home languages serve merely as tools for learning
English and English language content. In the section on English language arts,
for example, “first languages” are mentioned only as a resource to learn a
second language more efficiently. In the section on mathematics, “all languages
and language varieties” are identified as resources for learning about
mathematical reasoning. But home languages are never described as worthy of
further academic development themselves. This stance continues the long tradition
in the United States, even within some bilingual education models, of using
home languages just long enough to learn English, and then leaving them behind.
On their own terms, then, the CCSS
amount to another English-only policy. This severely undermines whatever
curricular or pedagogical advances they might contain.
Bilingual Education
Under Attack
Of course, the Common Core does not
exist in isolation from other education reforms. In fact, the standards are
part of a doubling down on the test-and-punish approach to reform that has had
disastrous consequences for all students, but especially for schools serving
students of color and multilingual communities. In addition, the standards
appear at a moment in which bilingual education has long been in decline as a
legitimate model for emergent bilingual youth.
There are several factors that
account for this decline. One is an open political assault on bilingual
education that reached its highpoint at the turn of this century. Four
state-level ballot initiatives attempted to restrict bilingual education; three
of them (in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts) were successful. These
initiatives were part of a larger wave of anti-immigrant racism that had grown
significantly by the 1990s. At first, anti-immigrant activists focused on
denying undocumented immigrants access to public services, as with Proposition
187 in California in 1994. Although voters approved that measure, it was
overturned by a federal court. In some ways, measures like Prop. 187 were seen
at the time as too radical. Anti-immigrant forces quickly regrouped and focused
instead on attacking bilingual education. Here, they found greater success—and
greater legitimacy for their ideas. Bilingual education has long been
low-hanging political fruit for anti-immigrant racists (Bale).
Beyond these explicit attacks,
shifts in education policy have further undermined bilingual education. Most
significantly, NCLB abolished the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 and all
mentions of bilingual education and bilingualism were replaced with
English-only terminology. NCLB’s high-stakes accountability measures have had
direct and disastrous consequences for emergent bilingual youth. Kate Menken
has documented this trend in two important studies in New York City public
schools. Her work shows that the pressure exerted on schools to perform on
high-stakes literacy exams in English has led to a significant decline in
bilingual programs—even though both city and state policies still formally
support bilingual education (Menken, Menken and Solorza).
One glimmer of hope in this
otherwise dismal situation is the modest growth in dual-language programs.
Different from compensatory bilingual education models, in which all students
are English learners, dual-language programs have a more balanced mix of
students. Some students are proficient speakers of English, and some are
proficient speakers of the other language. This balance between speakers of
dominant and minoritized languages is designed to build equity into dual-language
programs: Each set of students acts as a linguistic and cultural resource for
the other. However, language educators have long raised concerns that
dual-language programs are often created either at the behest of or to attract
(upper-) middle-class, white families and they tend to function more to the
linguistic and academic benefit of English-speaking children. Language scholar
Nelson Flores recently referred to this dynamic as “columbusing”—the
“discovery” by white families of the benefits of bilingual education programs
that in fact were fought for and won through the activism of communities of
color.
Moreover, dual-language programs are
not necessarily more exempt from racism than bilingual programs. Consider the
experience of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, an Arabic-English
dual-language program that opened in Brooklyn in 2007. As Brooklyn is home to
the largest number of Arabic speakers in the United States, it is a logical
site for such a school. The Arabic language curriculum it initially adopted was
developed by researchers at Michigan State University and Arabic language
teachers in that state. Their work was funded by the Department of Defense,
which supports Arabic language learning in the name of national security.
Neither logic nor the shroud of national security protected the school from a
hateful campaign of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. Although the school
managed to weather the storm, its potential was severely undermined. Its
founding principal was forced to resign, and the school has changed locations
several times.
Given this political context,
whether the next generation of education standards sets bilingualism and
biliteracy as explicit goals for all students is not a neutral question. And
clearly, the Common Core has taken sides. By focusing on English-only, the
standards function as the culmination of more than a decade of attacks on
bilingual programs and emergent bilingual youth.
Politics, Not Evidence
From every perspective, then, it’s
clear that the CCSS promise to further erode bilingual education and linguistic
justice in the United States.
This conclusion underscores a point
that has long been acknowledged, even by bilingual educators who support Common
Core: Bilingual education is above all a question of politics, not
of evidence. We have no shortage of evidence about the cognitive,
personal, and social benefits of bilingualism. And, as difficult as it has been
to come by, given the ups and downs of research funding and changing models of
language education, we even have significant evidence of the benefits of
bilingual education models themselves (Baker, García, García and Baker).
To be clear, as linguistic diversity
in U.S. schools continues to increase, we need much more research on
educational models for multilingual as well as bilingual settings. Also, there
is much work to do in developing standards and curriculum that support and
sustain students’ home languages while they learn academic English. This is the
goal, for example, of the Bilingual Common Core Initiative in New York, a
welcome response to the English-only assumptions in Common Core. But even here,
“translating” the standards misses the point because the Common Core isn’t just
a set of standards, but part and parcel of the test-and-punish paradigm. A
bilingual version of Common Core may be pragmatic, but it does not move us away
from the high-stakes testing that has so disfigured public schools. In short,
adapting to the Common Core, rather than challenging it, does not help
progressive educators change the conversation about real school reform.
Although challenging the Common Core
may seem like a daunting task, the good news is that we already know a lot
about what makes for high-quality and equitable bilingual education. In their
book Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices
for English Language Learners, Ofelia García and Jo Anne Kleifgen describe
the most effective practices for emergent bilinguals organized around four key
strands: tailoring educational programs to the specific linguistic and academic
needs of English learners; implementing fair assessments, especially
assessments that decouple language from content proficiency; providing
equitable resources, especially age- and grade-appropriate curricular resources
in both home language(s) and English; and involving parents and communities at
school. An important advance in the ideas they describe is moving away from a
traditional approach to bilingual education that strictly separates the two
languages and privileges only academic/standard varieties of language, and
instead moving toward classroom practices that help students become conscious
and critical users of the full language repertoire they bring with them to
school, that is, both standard and non-standard varieties of English and home
language(s).
History also tells us that
challenges to the Common Core can’t come from just inside the classroom.
Although many teachers and language scholars were working on models of
bilingual education in the 1950s and early ’60s, it wasn’t until that work
connected with a radical and grassroots civil rights movement that those models
were widely implemented. The same holds for us today: If we are to transform
schools into more equitable places for emergent bilinguals, then we need to
rebuild social movements of students, parents, teachers, and community allies
to make that change happen. The coalition building of the Chicago Teachers
Union before their successful strike in 2012; the ongoing coalition work by
groups such as the Grassroots Education Movement or the biannual Free Minds,
Free People conference; the dramatic and rapid growth of opt-out and other
anti-standardized testing activism across the country; the potential of
deepening the #BlackLivesMatter movement to include education issues—all offer
compelling and promising models for what this work looks like moving forward.
Not only did the CCSS not emerge
from these educational and activist spaces, their vision of “reform” stands in
direct opposition to grassroots, anti-racist democracy. If we are to transform
schools into places that foster linguistic equity, the Common Core will not be
the vehicle of that change. The burden, then, is on us—as supporters of linguistic
and social equity for emergent bilingual youth—to organize against the Common
Core politically, and to be part of building social movements that force open
social space at school and beyond for bilingual education and practice.
References
1.
Au, Wayne. 2009. Unequal by
Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality. Routledge.
2.
Baker, Colin. 2006. Foundations
of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (4th ed.). Multilingual
Matters.
3.
Bale, Jeff. 2012. “Linguistic
Justice at School.” In Bale, Jeff and Sarah Knopp, eds. Education and
Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation. Haymarket Books.
4.
García, Ofelia. 2009. Bilingual
Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Wiley.
5.
García, Ofelia and Colin Baker.
2007. Bilingual Education: An Introductory Reader. Multilingual
Matters.
6.
García, Ofelia and Jo Anne Kleifgen.
2010. Educating Emergent Bilinguals: Policies, Programs, and Practices
for English Language Learners. Teachers College Press.
7.
Hagopian, Jesse, ed. 2014. More
Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. Haymarket
Books.
8.
Menken, Kate. 2008. English
Learners Left Behind: Standardized Testing as Language Policy. Multilingual
Matters.
9.
Menken, Kate and Cristian Solorza.
2014. “No Child Left Bilingual: Accountability and the Elimination of Bilingual
Education Programs in New York City Schools.” Educational Policy 28.1:
96-125.
Jeff Bale (jeff.bale@utoronto.ca) is associate professor of
language and literacies education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, University of Toronto. Previously, he taught English to newcomers in
urban secondary schools in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Phoenix for a decade.
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