The Anglo Politics of Latino Education: The Role of Immigration Scripts

In the 41 states without a substantial historic Latino population, large-scale schooling of Latinos is a comparatively new issue and the nature of that schooling is fundamentally shaped by how the more established (usually Anglo) populations understand this task. This chapter describes the understandings that led to, but also limited, one particularly comprehensive attempt in Georgia to respond to Latino newcomers. In that sense, this is a study of the cosmologies that can undergird the politics of schooling of Latinos. This chapter utilizes the concept of the script, or broadly shared storylines about how things are or should be, to illustrate how two such competing scripts were employed in Dalton, Georgia

Systemic High School Reform in Two States: The Serendipity of State-Level Action

Maine and Vermont have been national leaders in state-level coordination of high school reform. Both recently developed almost interchangeable, new, voluntary, statewide frameworks that describe multiple ways high schools should change. Both frameworks— Promising Futures (Maine Commission on Secondary Education 1998) and High Schools on the Move (Vermont High School Task Force 2001)—were published in book form and include extensive bibliographies grounding their claims that they are research based. Both frameworks recommend principles and practices for improving high schools for all students. Both frameworks were drafted primarily by leading local educators with only modest support from experts based beyond the state’s boundaries. Despite these similarities, the strategies for implementing these frameworks in each state have varied and, because of this, the two frameworks’ prospects of having enduring favorable impact also appear to vary. Using historical and ethnographic methods to conduct two policy implementation case studies, this paper describes both framework’s development and then focuses on early implementation. Together the cases illustrate how more than an adequate whole-school reform framework is necessary to raise the prospect of enduring high school improvement. They also illustrate the potential of anthropological inquiry to the study of educational policy development and implementation

Trump, Immigration, and Children: Disrupted Schooling, Disrupted Lives

Many of us work with immigrant communities and are witnessing firsthand the fear, frustration, and heartache caused by Trump’s immigration policies. Yet despite our years of work with, and study of, immigrant communities, there are times when our academic expertise is not enough. What follows is a reflection by CAE member Ted Hamann on just such a situation he faced this spring when asked for help in assisting two US-born students that were about to accompany their soon-to-be deported parents to Mexico

Creating Bicultural Identities: The Role of School-based Bilingual Paraprofessionals in ontemporary Immigrant Accommodation (Two Kansas Case Studies)

This study locates the professional and informal practices of school-based bilingual paraprofessionals (paras) in the context of the larger social phenomenon of acculturation, cultural brokerage, and identity construction. It demonstrates how the paras in two Kansas communities transform an assimilationist mandate into something quite different, the promotion of bicultural identities, as part of a process called “additive biculturalism.” Additive biculturalism incorporates Weiss’s characterization of paras as cultural brokers (1994), but expands upon it significantly. As the first part of additive biculturalism, bilingual paras model and promote bicultural identities among the English-Learner students and parents they work with. As the second part of additive biculturalism, the paras struggle to remove the hierarchic inequality between Anglo and Latino identities so that being bicultural can be a stable and viable status, rather than a transitional, low-status one. The paras can only succeed in promoting two identities if they make both of those identities separately attractive. To support the assertion requires clarification of definitions of cultural brokerage and assimilation (within the context of acculturation) and a review of theories of multiple identity and cultural hierarchies

Nine Complementary Principles to Retain Adults in an ESOL/Literacy Program

The following list of principles is my attempt to share general recommendations to teachers of ESOL and/or limited literacy adults based on my specific practice running a bilingual family literacy program and confirmed by my more recent experience as a volunteer bilingual literacy teacher at the Asociación Latinoamericana (in Atlanta). Though I believe in bilingual classroom environments, I think the principles identified here are also pertinent to monolingual ESL environments

Book Review - \u3ci\u3eMoving Beyond Dichotomies to Outline Discourse Strategies in a Transnational Community\u3c/i\u3e

Intended both for ethnographers and for scholars of literacy and rhetorical studies, Juan C. Guerra’s Close to Home: Oral and Literate Practices in a Transnational Mexicano Community is at once groundbreaking and important, though because of the sophistication and detail of its reasoning, it may not be accessible to a broad audience. The book—the fortieth title in the Teachers College Press Language and Literacy Series—is pioneering in a number of ways. Most notable is Guerra’s refusal to fit the group he is focusing on—the multigenerational social network of an extended Mexican-origin family—into a single geographic frame of reference. Guerra explains that both rural Mexico and urban Chicago inform the way members of this social network read, understand, and interact with the world. He documents their overlapping uses of bilingual orality and literacy within three main “home fronts”—two ranchos in Mexico and a neighborhood in Chicago— and also in the “contact zones”—those places and formats in which members of the social network encounter the society outside of their network (e.g., at school, in the newspaper, and on television)

BOOK REVIEW - \u3ci\u3eThe Culture of Education Policy\u3c/i\u3e

The title of this book is a shorthand play on words. It is derived from the concept of “the culture of poverty,” which, as author Sandra Stein demonstrates, provided important discursive underpinnings for the original Title I Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the U.S. in the mid-1960s; it is essentially “the culture of policy arising from the culture of poverty.” The book describes how the work of social scientists such as Oscar Lewis was utilized by legislators in the U.S. Congress as a means of persuading their colleagues to agree to federal funding for schools. As picked up and interpreted through policy, the “culture of policy” premise begins with a notion that people in poverty have their own culture, which disadvantages them socially and economically; that this might be ameliorated through reculturation in schools; that race and immigrant status are conflated with poverty and that racial minority and immigrant children are therefore de facto “culturally deficient”; and, ultimately, that people in poverty, by virtue of their culture, are unable to make good use of educational opportunities offered to them. This chain of logic, Stein argues, emerged from a lack of knowledge and conceptual clarity among those who crafted the legislation. Further, she charges, by failing to identify the kinds of remediation that might truly compensate for educational disadvantage, by establishing compliance mechanisms that encouraged educational segregation, and by creating a situation where schools and school personnel became dependent on Title I funding, this logic resulted in practices that perpetuated inequality of opportunity for poor students, students of color, and students from immigrant families. Thus, Stein claims, Title I policy language set in motion compliance processes that have resulted in actual school practices that paradoxically run counter to its original intentions, essentially engendering a durable educational underclass rather than leveling the academic playing field

Delineating a Regional Education Research Agenda

If one wants to advance the argument that the Great Plains, as a region, matters— and the very existence of Great Plains Research and the Center for Great Plains Studies that publishes it suggest significant support for the idea— then one can ask, How did we learn that they matter? How do they matter? Can we live on them ethically, with a regard for each other and sense of stewardship and responsibility? Education research in, of, for, and with a region allows us to pursue each of these questions, plus more. Here we do so, informed by the two central notions that Greenwood (2011, 634) suggests are the core of place-based education: critical geography and bioregionalism. Critical geography asks us to view spaces as expressions of ideologically laden power relations— who counts as of a place? Who gets excluded? Whose acts of naming prevail? Whose eff orts get lost or rejected? And so on. Bioregionalism has a more explicit link to ecology, and bioregionalists “seek to revive, preserve, and develop cultural patterns in specific bioregions that are suited to the climate, life zones, landforms, and resources of those regions” (634). As one nod to bioregionalism, we “bound” the Great Plains the same way that Michael Forsberg (2009) did with his map in Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild as extending from the northern grasslands of Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada, and continuously south, until crossing the Rio Grande into the grasslands of Mexico’s Tamaulipas state. Like Forsberg, whose sandhill cranes (see Forsberg [2004]) are clearly of the Great Plains but not always in them, we note that those who study education in the Great Plains are not always in them, nor are those who attend formal education programs there. One’s ties to the Plains do not need to be constant, nor 100%, to be salient. This introductory article looks across four very different recently completed manuscripts that each broached the question “What does, or should, an education research agenda for the Great Plains entail?” Because of the diverse perspectives and circumstances of the authors, even though the number of compared manuscripts is relatively small (i.e., four), collectively they offer a comprehensive and sweeping take on what a region- based educational research agenda can entail, which this introduction proposes to synthesize or summarize. It is our contention that “region” is a crucial but often neglected conceptual category with which to think about education (as well as other issues). Region is larger than a village, school district, city, or state, but smaller than and not necessarily fully residing within the geopolitical boundaries of a nation- state. (Consider Anzaldua’s [1987] identification as the region on both sides of the US- Mexican border as “La Frontera.”) While both amorphous and heterogeneously populated, regions nonetheless have identifiable patterns of linguistic, historical, ecological, and economic coherence. They are viable as an object of inquiry, and that is the work here

The Local Framing of Latino Educational Policy

In many parts of the country, Latino newcomers are encountering educational policies that were framed by non-Latino local leaders. This study, an ethnography of educational policy, depicts an unorthodox assemblage of policy framers from both the United States and Mexico who shaped the local education policies aimed at Latino newcomers in Dalton, GA, in the 1990s. The study considers the evolving underlying understandings of these framers and the strategies that resulted, considering also why a temporary consensus that launched an impressive initiative—the Georgia Project—ultimatel

The Changing Challenges of Transformational Resistance. A Response to Building the Dream: Transformational Resistance, Community-Based Organizations, and the Civic Engagement of Latinos in the New South

A long-time researcher of education in the New Latino Diaspora considers how ephemeral the demographic and sociopolitical contexts were for the endeavors captured in Building the Dream but concurs with the aptness of considering the five focal students’ participation in a local Spanish radio program as acts of transformational resistance (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) with particular consequences for their sense of coming-of-age into a welcoming intergenerational Latino community