Policies restricting bilingual education have yielded to policy frameworks touting its benefits. This shift corresponds with evolving lines of debate, focusing now on "how" bilingual education can best support racialized bilingual learners. One element of this new debate is the perspective on language underlying curriculum in bilingual…

In this article, the authors review the antecedents, analyze the evolution, and draw recommendations for educational policies in the regions of California and Catalonia over the last 50 years, especially regarding bilingual education. This analysis is necessary due to the size, representativity, precociousness, and success of bilingual policies…

With the 2015 passage of the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA), the oversight of language policy in U.S. schools shifted from federal to state governance. Although the education of students officially designated as English learners (ELs) has historically been grounded in federal law, we argue that ELs' educational experiences are also…

Though California's English Learner (EL) policies were developed in response to civil rights struggles for language access and equal educational opportunity, they are also conditioned by the history of U.S. settler and overseas conquest. This article presents a Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) of the California EL classification policies and…

Although current and former English Learner (EL) or "ever-EL" students comprise one of the fastest-growing K-12 populations, we still know relatively little about the factors that influence their college-going. Using Perna's seminal college-going model as a launching point, we propose a policy-driven empirical approach to explore how…

Programs and policies related to the education of long-term English learners (LTELs) at the secondary level are often based on the belief that fluency in English is the primary, if not the sole, requirement for academic success and college and career readiness. This case study investigates whether LTEL students are accessing Linked…

This study examines physical aspects of place and how such visible aspects work to index a discourse of insecurity, including an insider-outsider binary, particularly through security signs in the linguistic landscape (LL). Our main focus is the relationship between policy and the uses of written language that appear in the LL in different census…

This article follows a bottom-up approach to language policy (Ramanathan, 2005; Wodak, 2006) in an analysis of citizenship in policy and practice. It compares representations of citizenship in and around a regional branch of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), with a focus on citizenship swearing-in ceremonies for…

I analyze two bills from the state legislatures of California (SB 1174) and Arizona (SB 1242) that propose to expand bilingual education where English-only education was previously the default. Using a critical discourse analysis lens to conduct a directed content analysis, I ask who bilingual education is for, why it is offered, and how the…

Drawing on institutional theory, this study describes how cognitive, normative, and regulative mechanisms shape bilingual teachers' language policy implementation in both English-only and bilingual contexts. Aligned with prior educational language policy research, findings indicate the important role that teachers' beliefs play in the policy…

The growing population of immigrant youth in the United States includes both documented and undocumented young people, as well as those who live in mixed status families in which some family members are authorized and at least one other family member is not (Suárez-Orozco, et al., 2011). These young people find themselves residing at the center of…

This book traces the recent socio-historical trajectory of educational language policy in Arizona, the state with the most restrictive English-only implementation in the United States. Chapters, each representing a case study of policy-making in the state, include: (1) SEI in Arizona: Bastion for States' Rights (Karen E. Lillie and Sarah Catherine…

San Lucas Quiavini is a community of Zapotec (Otomanguean) speakers in Oaxaca, Mexico. Since the 1970s, the community has seen large-scale migration to Los Angeles, California, where about half the community now resides. Participant observation and interviews conducted over nine years in both locales, with a focus on interactional patterns in the…

This article examines the unique contributions that bilingual and bilingually credentialed teachers make to the instruction of emergent bilinguals in the United States. This mixed methodological study involved 474 teachers in Arizona, California, and Texas, which represent distinct language policy contexts. Results revealed that, irrespective of…

Currently, restrictive-language policies seem to threaten bilingual education throughout the USA. Anti-bilingual education initiatives have passed easily in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, while one was closely defeated in Colorado, and federal education policy has re-invigorated the focus on English education for English language…