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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Bryn Quick and I'm a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Nelson Flores. Nelson is a professor of Educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, Penn gse. His research examines the historical construction of race and language in the US and how these constructions continue to shape contemporary language education policy and practice. His scholarship has been central to developing what has become known as a racial linguistic perspective that interrogates how ideas about language are inseparable from histories of racialization. Today, Nelson and I will be discussing his 2024 book entitled Being Becoming the A Ratio Linguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post Civil Rights Era. In the book, Nelson examines the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post civil rights era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. Nelson, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thanks for having me.
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To start us off, I'd love for you to tell us a bit about yourself and how you became interested in studying the more broad category of race and language, as well as the specific history of bilingual education in the United States, particularly in regard to Puerto Rican and other Latinx immigrants.
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Yeah, great. So like many people, my research interests emerged from my personal identities and experiences. So I grew up in a bilingual home in Philadelphia. So my mom was from Puerto Rico and and my dad was from Ecuador. Now, they met in New York City and lived in a predominantly bilingual community in the Bronx. But before I was born, they moved to Philadelphia and they moved into a neighborhood that was mostly monolingual white working class. And so from a young age, I noticed that the languaging of my home was different than the languaging of most of my classmates and peers and teachers. And I also noticed that my parents spoke English differently. And I was told that they spoke English with an accent, which of course was just what I thought people spoke as as a kid until I went to school. Right. But I also was told that I spoke English with an accent. Now, anyone familiar with Philadelphia knows that Philadelphia does have kind of a very unique specific accent, but that wasn't what they were talking about when they were talking about my accent, because they also were from Philadelphia, but they heard or perceived some type of accent, I'm assuming, because they knew that my parents spoke with an accent and then thought that I must have had some type of accent as well. But I Actually felt much more comfortable using English than Spanish. I understood Spanish like many children of immigrants understand the home language, but I always responded in English. And so when I took Spanish class in high school, people were very confused by this. They were like, well, how can you be Spanish? Because in Philadelphia, they say Spanish when they mean, like, Puerto Rican or Latinx or. And be in Spanish class, right? And so I kind of was trying to make sense of really complex language ideologies and really kind of complex connections between these language ideologies and my own sense of my race and ethnic identity from a fairly young age. And so I then went to college and decided that I wanted to get into education, and I wanted to get into education, but because I wanted to be the educator for Latinx students, that I didn't necessarily have someone that I could see myself in, someone who I could relate to, someone who maybe understood my experiences better than others. And so I began to do research on what are best ways of supporting Latinx students. And I eventually did my thesis project on kind of thinking of those issues. But most of the research that I found was focused on issues of bilingual education. Now in the book, I kind of traced where that came to be, and I think we'll talk about that a little bit more as we have our conversation. But I kind of found myself kind of moving into bilingual education, not necessarily because it was my primary point of entry into understanding the experiences of Latinx students. Most of the Latinx students I grew up with feeling much more comfortable in English than in Spanish. But it was where the research was. It was where I could see that people were talking about the challenges facing Latinx students. And it was primarily framed around language. It was primarily framed around the supposed language challenges of Latinx students. Now, again, there was somewhat of a disconnect for me because I grew up speaking English, right? But that was what the research was telling me. And the research was telling me that one of the challenges of Latinx students was that they had mastered what was called basic interpersonal communication skills, but they had failed to master cognitive academic language proficiency in either English or Spanish. And so that was the framework that I had available to me when I went into the classroom as an ESL teacher. And I began working in the Bronx, at a high school in the Bronx, and was expecting that most of my students would have been recently arrived students in the United States who were in the process of learning English. To my surprise, most of my students had actually been born in the United States, and they were in my ESL class. And I was supposed to be teaching them English, and so I had to try to make sense of what was going on. And so I used what I learned through my research in undergraduate to make sense of that. My conclusion was that they must have bics in English and Spanish, because I saw them using English and Spanish every day, but they didn't have CALP in either of the two languages, and my job was to fix them. Now, as I worked with my students, I began to notice how really creative they were in the use of language, how really sophisticated they were, and kind of how they played with language and how critical they were in their analysis of society. And so I began to feel this disconnect between what I had learned in my undergraduate degree and what I was seeing from my students. And I began to kind of see that I was actually policing my students and marginalizing my students language practices in the same ways that I had felt. And so that was what kind of initially got me into thinking about, there's something else going on here. And that was what eventually moved me into my dissertation work, which in some ways was the foundations for what would become this book.
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I think so many ESL teachers, because I myself was one for a long time. Esl, eal, you know, efl, whatever. Whatever.
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Yeah, they're all different, but they all the same.
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Right? Exactly. But I think a lot of us see that, and a lot of us do receive kind of this training in the beginning to say that the BICs versus the CALP of students is going to be so big. Right. You know, and like, they don't have, quote, unquote, enough language in either language to really be academically proficient. And I love how in the book you really start us at the beginning of sort of the history of how this ideology came to be. And you start the book by situating us in post World War II Puerto Rico. And you begin this racial linguistic genealogy by mentioning something called Operation Bootstrap and how this initiative by the mainland United States government into Puerto Rico would affect Puerto Rican employment, education, and immigration to mainland US for decades to come. So first, can you tell us what a ratio linguistic genealogy is and then talk to us about Operation Bootstrap? Because I, as a white mainland American, had never ever learned about this. Not surprising. But, you know, what was Operation Bootstrap? What ramifications did it have, particularly for Puerto Rican immigration?
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Yeah. So erasing linguistic genealogy, which is the kind of the methodological approach I take in the book, which I lay out in the second chapter of the book. Right. Seems to Seeks to understand the interrelationship between race and language across time. So it's not a traditional history. There have been lots of histories of bilingual education in the United States, and they're great, right? So. But this is doing something a little different than that. This isn't trying to document the chronology of events across time that has shaped bilingual education. Instead, it's kind of what I would call a history of discourse. And it's a history of the continuities and discontinuities of discourse across time, meaning what has changed across time, but perhaps even more importantly, what has remained the same across time, which helps us to kind of see things that maybe we would now see as fundamentally racist are really not that different from how oftentimes our students are described today. Right? And the power of genealogies that can help us to see these links across time. And to see that oftentimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And there are three kind of theoretical components to a racial linguistic genealogy that I used to inform this study. And so one is a genealogical stance. And so I trace kind of the emergence of modern notions of race to the European modern and colonial project, and to kind of understand kind of modern notions of race as a specific way of understanding humanity that emerges within a specific social, historical context, within specific relations of power connected to European colonialism. And that I connect to a materialist frame where this kind of modern notion of race is developed as a way to benefit whiteness, right? As a way of literally turning populations into property that white people had the right to own and white people as having property rights over lands that they now were invading. And then the racial linguistic perspective is kind of my unique spin on all of it, where I'm thinking about the role of language and all of that. And I think the role of language is really interesting to think about in relation to all of that, because oftentimes the kind of layman's kind of discussion of language Tends to talk about it as something that's fundamentally human, right? As something that kind of unites us as humans. But whenever we look in context of racialization, There are always language ideologies connected to that, because what better way to call into question somebody's legitimate humanity than to call into question their language practices? And so a racial linguistic perspective is trying to understand the role of language in the perpetuation of all of these complex kind of social processes. And so that conceptual framing, then, I think, helps to understand why I begin with Operation Bootstrap, right? And so Operation Bootstrap, which, as you were alluding to, was what the US Called the economic modernization of Puerto Rico that Begins after the U.S. colonialization of Puerto Rico, was a process of trying to move the island from a primarily agrarian society, which is what it was to that point, to an industrial society. But this was designed in ways that were really meant to benefit U.S. corporations, because it was U.S. corporations that were getting all of these tax incentives to come to the island to have kind of low pay laborers who would be able to work in these factories. But what was happening is that they also were buying the land that used to be owned by peasants, by kind of small landowners. Right? And so landowner, these small landowners were being displaced from these lands in order to move to San Juan in order to work in factories. But there weren't enough jobs in San Juan in those factories. And so what this leads to is a massive displacement of people from the island. This is the beginning of the Puerto Rican diaspora from the island, where people begin to move primarily to New York City, which is what people know as kind of a primary hub for Puerto Ricans, but also to Philadelphia and other areas in the Northeast, including Hartford and a few other areas. And they're moving to these areas to find factory jobs there. But we're also in the context of deindustrialization, right? So the jobs that they're coming for in New York and Philadelphia and Hartford and other areas are also leaving. And because of racist public policies, they're also finding themselves in really intensely segregated, high poverty neighborhoods with jobs that are declining and leaving. And so that is kind of operation Bootstrap. And we can see how a racial linguistic genealogy can help us to make sense of that.
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Right.
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So there's the genealogical stance in understanding the emergence of this new racialized category of Puerto Rican that's emergent in conjunction with Mexican that are kind of the two main groups of what were kind of grouped together with Spanish surname populations at the time. Right. That were both part of US Colonial expansion. Right. And so these kind of racialized categories are emerging from within the context of US Colonial expansion. And we really can understand their emergence outside of that context. But we also see the materialist frame in that we have the systematic displacement of an entire people in order to benefit US Corporations that are of course run by white people, not by people from the island. But and then in the book, I think I'm also looking more at the racial linguistic perspective that looks at the role of language in framing these populations as inferior as part of kind of
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their racialization I think here, if, if what we were doing right now was like an academic paper, I would put an in text citation that was like, See also Bad Bunny's halftime show performance. See also west side Story. You know, because honest to goodness, after I read your book, I went back and rewatched Bad Bunny's halftime performance at the Super Bowl. And I kind of saw it even in a, in a whole other light than what I had already seen it in. And I absolutely adored the performance and I think a lot of people resonated with it. But I also went back and kind of re examined the musical west side Story and how, you know, that's kind of this take on Romeo and Juliet, but with these white New Yorkers versus these Puerto Rican New Yorkers and you know, this gang fight essentially. But it made so much more sense. I was like, oh, this is just around that same time of Operation Bootstrap, and this is why Puerto Ricans were having to leave, you know, the island to come into mainland usa. And I do think that it bears in mind stating here that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. You know, it's not like they have to get a visa or something, you know, or, or get new immigration status to come live in the US but as you said, you're able to see this racialization of Puerto Ricans as they come into the US during this time, and especially along with, with Mexican immigrants as well, which is going to have a knock on effect too. And so after Operation Bootstrap and the immigration of these many Puerto ricans to mainland U.S. you describe how Philadelphia became a place of Puerto Rican settlement. So tell us about what happened when Puerto Rican children began going to school in Philadelphia and why were they placed in these quote unquote, special English classes? And how did this eventually lead to the start of what we know as bilingual education?
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Yeah, so while I said I'm not doing a traditional history of bilingual education, I will say that Philadelphia is oftentimes ignored in traditional histories of bilingual education, but it actually was a really considered a pioneering city in kind of shaping bilingual education for Puerto Ricans alongside New York City. And that's also the traditional histories of bilingual education are oftentimes focused on New York City for Puerto Ricans, the American Southwest for Mexicans, and to a lesser extent, Cubans in Florida. But really haven't really thought about the specific unique kind of place of Philadelphia in that history. So while I wasn't talking about the history of Philadelphia per se, I was using the historical context of Philadelphia to try to understand Some of the broader processes that were at play within the kind of national scope of what was happening in relation to bilingual education. So the emergence of special English classes were happening within the context of. Of what was called compensatory education. And compensatory education was emerging within the discourses of the culture of poverty. And the culture of poverty argued that racialized communities, because of histories of poverty and racism, had inherited unique cultural and linguistic pathologies that needed to be remediated in school in order for them to be able to experience social mobility. And so compensatory education was designed to fix those cultural and linguistic deficiencies. Now, in the context of the school district of Philadelphia, most of the students that are part of this compensatory education are African American students. But now there's a growing Puerto Rican population that's emerging in Philadelphia that's now becoming incorporated into this compensatory education. And so while that's happening, you get the passage of the Bilingual Education act that signed into law in 1968. And this offers federal funding to an alternative to these special English classes for Puerto Rican students. Now, African American students are framed as having no other home language that could even be brought into their remediation. Right. Whereas Puerto Rican students are seen as linguistically deficient, but as having a legitimate language that could be further developed. Spanish.
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Right.
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And that bilingual education could be a way of doing that. But the. The Bilingual Education act funding was seized upon by Philadelphia school leaders, in particular Eleanor Sandstrom, who was a director of foreign languages. And she eventually used that funding to completely overhaul how Puerto Rican students were serviced in the district and kind of led to kind of what were considered at the time pioneering programs in bilingual education. The first was the ARIBA program, which was more kind of a strand model, which, within certain schools in North Philadelphia, which is where the majority of Puerto Rican students were. And the. But the one that really got the most attention was the Potter Thomas model. And the Potter Thomas model was a whole school model. And it was a whole school model, meaning that all students in the school were being instructed bilingually, what we might now call a dual language program. But that wasn't the terminology of the time. And that program really got a lot of attention in the research and kind of in media and. And people really saw this, along with the ARRIBA program, to a lesser extent, as a possible solution to the challenges that were confronting the Puerto Rican community. So I talk about Patter Thomas in the first chapter in order to both contextualize how language became seen as the primary challenge Puerto Rican students were facing. And we can only understand that within these broader discourses of the culture of poverty that produce compensatory education, as kind of the primary challenge of students was language, as opposed to segregation, as opposed to racism, as opposed to these other things. Right. And so I'm trying to understand how language becomes the primary mechanism for supporting students and by tracing the history of Plato Thomas across time, showing the limits of such a frame where the end of that chapter shows that the program is kind of unceremoniously ended in 2011, nobody seems to care about it anymore. Um, and so a program that started with such high hopes at perhaps solving all of the problems of Puerto rican students in 2011 kind of disappears as a footnote on history. And nobody even knows why it was there to begin with.
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And it's crazy to think that all of that was happening in the late 1960s, and to think how much hope and promise that this concept of, like, a dual language program had. And, like, if we look back on that now, it almost seems more progressive than what's happening in most of the US Now. My nephews are lucky enough that they get to go to a dual language school because they're. They're bilingual, they're being raised with English and Spanish, and so they get to go to school in that model, which is wonderful. But I know that my sister had a really hard time getting them into the school. You know, it's got huge wait lists. It's only one school like this in the area. So to think that this was something that was happening in sort of this burgeoning civil rights movement, which feels so long ago, and that. That then. That was sort of abandoned, you know, more recently in history, is pretty mind blowing to think about. And speaking of the civil rights movement, you talk in the book about how this beginning of bilingual education was largely situated within this time frame in the US and obviously there were other cultural revolutions happening throughout the world at the time. And many people, and largely white Americans, now hear the phrase civil rights movement and assign a positive connotation to that. And obviously, there was a lot good that came out of the civil rights movement. But in the book, you write, quote, rather than dismantling white supremacy, policies developed in response to the civil rights movement, ultimately reconfigured it in ways that ensured the maintenance of the racial status quo, end quote. So talk to us about that, because I think that's such an important thing that your book does, is to talk about this, maintaining the racial status quo. So talk to us about that, particularly in regard to the education of non white children and bilingual programs in schools.
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And so I wouldn't want to suggest that people shouldn't have a positive connotation of the US Civil rights movement. Right. It was a movement where people of all races were fighting hard for a true multiracial, multicultural society. And so the aspirations were great. And I think the aspirations still inspire many people today. Right. But the title of the book is Becoming this System. And so what I was trying to grapple with in the book, which again, is kind of connected to my own experience as someone who in some ways was produced through the history that I'm chronicling in the book, right. The question is like, what does it mean to become leaders within institutions that were never designed to serve you or the communities that you come from? And so in the book, I'm chasing the political incorporation of a cadre of racialized professionals into mainstream institutions only if they accept the premise that their communities were fundamentally broken and that the job was to fix them. Right? So that's the bargain that you have to make. You can become a leader of a school, or you could become a leader of a bureaucratic organization, or you could become a leader of a community organization that's funded through philanthropic funds if you accept that your primary job is to fix the community that you come from. Now, in the book, I'm not talking about strategy, right? I think that people probably felt very ambivalent about that positioning, but that gets lost in the archives, right. I'm looking at the broader processes, and I'm not trying to criticize any individual activists. I'm trying to understand the broader processes of political incorporation and how they work. And I'm doing that primarily through the case of bilingual education. And so as we get federal funding for bilingual education, we also get state funding in support of bilingual education, and we also get some local funding in support of bilingual education. There's a lot of resources now available to bilingual education, but all of the funding was coming from institutions and organizations that adopted a remedial framing of bilingual education and the remedial framing of the communities that bilingual education was supposed to be supporting. And so the assumption was that Puerto Rican and Mexican students had cultural and linguistic deficiencies that made them uniquely positioned to benefit from bilingual education. Kind of what you were referring to before, where the idea was that they didn't have a strong foundation in either language and bilingual education could fix that. But the remedial framing of bilingual education then led to certain policy effects, Right? So if the idea is that only certain types of students should be in bilingual education because they have sufficient limitations in language to be in bilingual education. The question becomes, how do we determine who has sufficient linguistic deficiency to justify being in these programs? Now, if the programs hadn't been framed remedially, right? If it was just like anyone who wants to be in these programs could be in these programs, and you wouldn't need to ask that question. But because of the discursive framing of the policies, that's the question that kind of undergirds modern bilingual education debates. And so people who wanted students to be in bilingual education then needed to make the case for as many students as possible, right? So they thought bilingual education would be good for all bilingual students. And so the way to make that case within the remedial model is, is to find deficiencies as much as you can in order to justify placement in bilingual education. And the way that this is done primarily in the 70s, is through discourses of semilingualism. The idea is that even though students may be able to speak in English and in Spanish, they actually don't have native, like, proficiency in either of the two languages, and so don't be fooled by their English, they actually would benefit from being in these bilingual education programs, right? And so, again, I want to emphasize, I'm not criticizing individuals making the argument. I'm trying to criticize the underlying logic that produces the policy to begin with. And this kind of framing of having to find deficiencies, having to find limitations in order to justify bilingual education and placement kind of has this ripple effect that then leads activists to ironically be the ones that are finding deficiencies in the communities that they see themselves as advocating for. Now, some people might argue, well, that was just being strategic, right? And again, I wasn't trying to make an argument about strategy, but what I do show in the book is that even that concession was not enough. And so in one of the chapters in the book, I look at how as Latinx and other kind of racialized people became part of the bureaucratic structures of education, including bilingual education, there began to be political assaults on these bureaucracies, right? Conservative forces began to argue that the government bureaucracies were no longer there to defend the, quote, unquote, public interests, but were there rather to protect, quote, unquote, special interests. So. So even accepting that framing wasn't enough to undermine the fundamental racialized status of the people who became part of these bureaucracies, democracies, which eventually led to their dismantling and the banning of bilingual education, in across several states and kind of within the federal policies themselves.
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And this is what I love in the book because honestly I hadn't really made all of these different connections before, but it makes so much sense, especially when you consider similar practices that happened in other communities. Right. So like for example, even with the technical end quote unquote of the, you know, Jim Crow era in the US you still had black Americans, African Americans who were redlined and who couldn't get housing in certain areas. Right. And so then that has a knock on effect too, that pushes them to certain areas that were, you know, non white areas and those areas were poorer deliberately. And that influenced this then cycle of poverty that many black Americans and African Americans then felt. It's kind of the same concept here, I feel, where it's like, okay, we are all coming at this from this more deficit lens. We have to think of these kids as having deficits in language without ever saying, but wait a minute, you know, it was again, go all the way back to like Operation Bootstrap. But mainland white America caused this poverty to happen in Puerto Rico, which then caused the emigration of Puerto Ricans, which that, you know. So it's like this whole knock on effect that then isn't acknowledged. And people like you say, have to kind of operate in this system that is only saying, well, it's your fault because you don't know English quote, unquote.
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Right, exactly. Rather than the structural barriers that have been put up.
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Exactly. And so you were just talking about sort of like the 1970s era. I'm going to zip us ahead to the early 2000s. So as an elder millennial who was raised in the US I very much remember the George Bush administration's no Child Left behind initiative. And this comes up in your book and I think it's important. So tell us what no Child Left behind was and how did it mark the official end of the Bilingual Education act and what did this mean in practice for children's education, especially in regard to how children's linguistic proficiencies were classified and conceptualized.
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Yeah. So no Child Left behind was the kind of Bush era reauthorization of the esea, which is the federal policies that fund and kind of various initiatives related to education and offer regulations that states are expected to adhere to in order to receive federal funding to support their educational initiatives. And in no Child Left behind, the Bilingual Education act, which was Title VII is eliminated and it's replaced with what's now called Title 3. At the time it was retitled Language Instruction for Limited English proficient and immigrant students. And now with essa, which was the even more recent reauthorization of the federal policies, it was rebranded language instruction for English Learners and immigrant students. And this is kind of part of a broader, systematic removal of bilingualism, or what some people in the field are called the B word, right. From any federal policy legislation that has had ripple effects into states and local districts where you oftentimes won't see the term bilingual anymore. And this also, at the time of no Child Left behind, you also get the banning of bilingual education across several states, as well as its kind of retrenchment from other areas. You kind of see a kind of move away from bilingual education as the answer. And I think part of the reason for that was because it was presented as a panacea, which it never should have been, and it didn't solve all of the problems of the world, and people began to move away from it. But the issue is that though we move away from bilingual education as even kind of centered in the debate, the limited and limited English proficient continues to be defined as broadly as possible. So even though it's not about trying to get kids into bilingual education anymore, it becomes increasingly, increasingly high a definition. Right. And so the way that things work in the US Is, and this was before no Child Left behind, but this is still the policy in place is that students are required to receive a home language survey when they arrive to school. And if a language other than English is spoken at home, they're required to be tested to see if they're what no Child Left behind would have called limited English Proficient, what Elsa. What Essa calls English learner. And the problem is that this limited label has become so broad that it's much more likely for students who come from multilingual homes to be classified as English learners. And it's much more difficult for them to be reclassified out of English learner status. And so there's a certain irony of like, that in the sense of, like, the original region, people wanted to define limited as broadly as possible was because it was going to provide access to bilingual education, which people thought was great. Now, defining as broadly as possible has the effect of actually keeping students in programs that really aren't designed to support their needs. And this kind of this perpetual remediation that they experience. Research also seems to indicate that they also have lack of access to college prep courses and other types of enrichment classes that other students have because they have to take all of these ESL credits that aren't really designed to support Them. And so I can't help but kind of think about, for example, the ways that segregation was oftentimes justified in the past for Mexican American students in the American Southwest. It was supposedly because of their supposed language deficiencies. And so they were segregated not because of race, but because of language deficiency. But it really was about race.
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Right.
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And. And they. And it was treated. And it was a racialized context. I'm not sure that kids being in remediation today just because they happen to be born in multilingual homes is really any different from that. Now, that may sound kind of, like, harsh, but I do think that we need to name that for what it is. We're continuing to segregate students because of supposed linguistic deficiencies in ways that are really preventing them from getting that type of, like, kind of whole kind of thumb education that we would want all of our students to get. And ironically, it's being done oftentimes by advocates supposedly to support them, but it really isn't. It's doing a disservice to them.
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B
I think that's what's so hard, is that I think that even sometimes people are coming at this from, like, a decent place, you know, And. And like you said, like. Like ESL teachers, EAL teachers, we often go into the field because we're doing it from a. From a place of wanting to be a teacher, wanting to help, wanting to educate, et cetera. But as you say in the book, you know, we get swept up in that, the system and within these language hierarchies that aren't really about language. I mean, this is something that I tell my undergrads all the time, is that, you know, any judgment about language is always a proxy for race. It's. It's never about language. Right. It's always about race. And when you understand that, you can really see it, especially in the history. And I want to kind of stay within that, like, early 2000s era for a second. So you also describe in the book how the 1990s and the early 2000s saw a boom in parents and their lawmakers being interested in the concept of charter schools, which for my Australian audience here, we don't necessarily have an equivalent of that here. So tell us, what are charter schools in America, and how did people think these schools would be different to public schools in terms of access to bilingual education.
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A
Well, so what's interesting and what I trace in the chapter one, looking at school choice, right, is that in the 1970s, within the context of community control of schools that I talk about, Kind of extensively in the early chapters of the book, school choice was actually the progressive position. It was actually people on the left who were advocating for school choice, and they saw that as a way of resisting what they characterized to be the entrenched racist, bureaucratic structure of kind of urban schooling systems that hadn't been designed to support racialized communities. And I don't think they were wrong in that analysis. So. But it's. So it's. So it's interesting to see that there are kind of progressive routes to school choice that I think isn't necessarily the way people talk about it in the US today. And then the 80s, you see the alternative schools movement where we see a lot of kind of innovative things happening in relation to bilingual education and other types of, kind of culturally, what we might now call culturally relevant, kind of more kind of open education type things. And so it's in that kind of context of at the time where school choice was seen as kind of connected to community control, that charter schools originally emerged in the 1990s. And so Charter schools, kind of just a brief definition, are independently managed, but they're publicly funded. Right. And so in contrast, the traditional kind of public schools that are government managed and publicly funded. Right. So they might be managed by a particular community organization, or they may be managed by a large charter management organization, which we don't have in the 90s, but we have lots of those now. Right. So, but the point that I'm trying to emphasize that some are kind of locally managed and some are maybe are. Are managed by these really bigger kind of corporate entities. But in the 90s, before any of that was happening, and they have to accept students via randomized lottery. So. But in the 90s when all of this was happening, they were originally supported by the national teachers union, which is interesting because the teachers union is very much not about charter schools in the US Anymore. And the reason that the teachers union were supporting it was because they were seen as kind of perhaps being a laboratory school where people could, where teachers and community members could try out innovative new approaches that could then inform the entire school system. That's not exactly how they ended up working, but that was the idea in the 90s. Now you will recall from before, as I was talking about, in the 90s also saw a decline in support for bilingual education nationally and at the state and local level. So activists for bilingual education were like, where can we continue to enact these programs that we think are good and, and important for our students? And so many saw charter schools as one way of continuing to make these programs available to those communities in a context where there wasn't a lot of government support for these initiatives anymore. And so in the chapter on school choice, I look at the case of Philadelphia again, not just because I was born in Philadelphia and because I think it oftentimes gets overlooked, even though I think there's a lot of, like, interesting, important things that happen, but it also, like with bilingual education in the early 70s, was also an early pioneer for charter schools in the 1990s and is now kind of still seen as some as a city that is very, very prominently still relies on charter schools to support students today. The estimate that I found was that 40% of students in the school district of Philadelphia are served by charter school. And that's higher than it was even a few years ago. So it's. Charter schools are a major kind of initiative that has been adopted in the school district of Philadelphia. And so within that context of kind of the embrace of charter schools in Philadelphia, I follow the case of Aspida of Pennsylvania, which is a local Latinx advocacy group that's connected to a national organization that's also called Espita. And they opened the first dual language charter school in Philadelphia. And that school still remains open today. And they also opened another brick and mortar brick and mortar charter school that also remains open today. And they also opened a dual language cyber school also remains open today. And so, but in the chapter, I look at how the various school district reforms that were focusing on school choice and trying to kind of use charter schools as a model for reforming the school district actually ended up, perhaps by design, perhaps inadvertently, who knows, pitting a Speeda of Pennsylvania against other Latinx community members. And so what happened in the mid 2000 teens was the kind of a reform initiative that was called the Renaissance Initiative. And in the Renaissance Initiative, certain schools were selected to either be managed as turnaround schools by the district or to be managed by a charter management organization. Aspita, which had had lots of experience running charter schools, had become a charter management organization, although it didn't expand beyond those those schools that I just mentioned, but was now interested in perhaps becoming a management organization of one of the schools that had traditionally been run by the district that also had a dual language program as part of its programming. It wasn't a dual language school, but. But it had a strand model. And this became a very politically divisive issue where people who, I think in many ways probably had the same priorities at heart of improving the education of Latinx students were fighting each other for scraps in a system that wasn't really designed to serve any of them well. And so in that chapter, like I did with the Potter Thomas chapter, I tried to make the case that just like with language choice is also not a panacea. Right. It doesn't get to the fundamental challenges that are confronting Puerto Rican Latinx communities in Philadelphia or racialized communities in the US More generally. And that both sides of the debate seem to argue that, though. So those who are pro school choice. Right. Think that just providing choice to parents is somehow going to magically transform educational experiences for students and somehow magically end poverty. And, but those who oppose school choice also seem to suggest that if we just eliminated charter schools, that somehow that also is going to solve the problem, as if before charter schools existed, the problems weren't there. And so I think, again, it's looking at the wrong intervention. Right. It's trying to focus on individual decision making instead of addressing the broader structural challenges that provide the primary challenge to these communities.
- [42:10]
B
Well, and speaking of those structures, you know, let's think about where we are now in 2026. Where do you see the future of bilingual education, especially Spanish English education, heading in the US Especially now in this era of renewed white nationalism, terrorism committed by ice, and systemic white supremacy from the federal government? You know, speaking of calling things out for what it is, we, we have to say, that's what's happening in the US Now.
- [42:38]
A
Yeah. So, so I end the book examining the emergence of neoliberal multiculturalism. Right. And the ways that it has led to the commodification of dual language education. And, and, and also kind of in, in ways that kind of completely divorce it from any inkling of supporting racialized communities. It's a hot commodity that is primarily catered to, kind of affluent mostly, but not all white families and communities. And, and I was asked kind of a question in a conversation I was having about this book maybe a few months ago that was, that was kind of like, well, now that we've seen, like, what's happening now, do you think that was better than what we're at, what's happening now? And I'm like, well, I don't think that was the question I was trying to get at. But what I will say is that I don't think that neoliberalism or neoliberal multiculturalism is the solution. I think it actually is part of what has led to, to a renewed rise of populism. Right. And this rise of populism against the inequities that have been exacerbated by neoliberalism. So if I were to write a new chapter, kind of an addendum, I think I would write a chapter that's looking at this renewed rise of populism as a reaction to the ways that neoliberalism actually continued to exacerbate long standing social class inequities, long standing racial inequities, longstanding gendered inequities, all of those inequities.
- [44:01]
B
Right.
- [44:01]
A
But oftentimes, because it shrouds it in seemingly progressive discourses, a lot of the populism that has emerged has emerged as a reaction from the right. And so it's kind of sees the problem as the multiculturalism as opposed to the neoliberalism, Right?
- [44:20]
B
And opposed to the structures and the systems that are in place, correct?
- [44:26]
A
Yes. And so at the same time, I do think, and I will, I will say that populism from the right does pose an existential threat to the very existence of any form of bilingual education. Right. And, and, and when, when ICE was kind of doing all of their things in Minnesota, there were stories that I saw of, like they were specifically targeted in dual language schools and trying to kind of threaten teachers that taught in those schools and perhaps some of the families that sent children to those schools. And so any sense of, like, multiculturalism or multilingualism is framed as an existential challenge to what populism from the right wants. At the same time, through all the resistance that I've also seen to that, I've also seen a renewed populism from the left, right. I've seen parents organizing to protect the teachers at the schools or to protect other students from the school to say, no, the problem isn't the multiculturalism. The problem is the neoliberalism. Or the problem is, are the entrenched inequities that are impacting all of us, that are oppressing all of us, that we really need to work together in solidarity to dismantle. Right? And so I think for me, the question becomes what role can bilingual education play in helping to ferment that populism from the left? And I don't have the answer to that, but I think that that needs to be the question. I don't think that we can continue to think that neoliberal multiculturalism is going to save us. I think we can never kind of commodify our way out of oppression, but especially in the context of a populism from the right that's offering a fundamental existential threat to multiculturalism. We really need to think about what does it look like from the left? How can we fight for multiculturalism while working to dismantle those broader inequities? And what role can bilingual education and multicultural education play in helping to shape that battle? Is kind of where I'm interested in moving in my thinking there.
- [46:29]
B
I love that. And I also think that that's why this book really is a must read, not just for people that are within the education sphere, but for anybody who's interested in dismantling these baked in, built in systems and structures that don't. I mean, they obviously very much exist in the US but they exist elsewhere as well. Obviously we need to know how those systems came to be. We need to know how this started. And I think that's how what your book does so well, especially in the beginning, is that it shows how all of this began, especially for people who have been privileged enough to not have to see that all the time, um, in their daily lives. We have to know about these systems in order to dismantle them and in order to understand, as we were talking about, that judgments about language are always judgments about race and racialization and who is considered, quote, human enough. So I have to say I recommend this book so highly to, to everyone to read. I found myself nodding along constantly as I was reading. It's just such a wonderful picture of how all of this came to be. So, Nelson, I really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today and, and for writing this book. Thank you.
- [47:47]
A
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.
- [47:49]
B
And thank you to everyone for listening. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast, leave a five star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues and friends. Until next time.