Nichols to NCLB: Local and Global Perspectives on U.S. Language Education Policy
Nancy H. Hornberger
University of Pennsylvania
Comments by Jane Zuengler
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of English
Tuesday, March 8, 2005, 4:00 pm
1418 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
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Abstract
In this anniversary year of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the right to equal educational opportunity for all children irrespective of race or language origin, it behooves us to take a look at how well we are fulfilling those mandates. 2004 marks 50 years since the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against racial segregation of students in public schools and 30 years since the Lau v. Nichols decision rejected the notion that equal provision necessarily equates to equal educational opportunity for English speaking and non-English speaking students alike. Asserting that “there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals,” the Court required that affirmative steps be taken to provide non-English speaking students the education they are entitled to. This paper takes a historical and comparative look at U.S. language education policy at the federal level, from that 1974 Lau v. Nichols decision up to the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, with particular attention to the degree to which federal policy leaves ideological and implementational space for imagining multilingual schools. Drawing on ethnographic work locally in one urban school district and globally in a range of multilingual contexts, I attempt to understand both what is happening and what could happen to promote and build on the multilingual resources present in U.S. schools.
This series is free and open to the public. It is made possible with generous support from the Anonymous Fund and the Schoenleber Foundation. |
