A significant number of community service-learning projects in higher education involve the teaching or tutoring of immigrants in English. As in related service-learning scholarship, these projects are commonly informed by perspectives on cultural difference, social justice, and power relations in U.S. society. Yet while faculty pair their students' work in immigrant literacy programs with the classroom examination of issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, very little of the scholarship suggests that these students are led to critique the role of language ideologies in U.S. society. In this article I urge that institutionalized notions of English in the U.S.--such as the putative role of English in social mobility and the widespread belief that English was always voluntarily adopted by immigrants--be considered closely in our community literacy projects. My argument calls upon sociolinguistic and historical studies of the Progressive period and examines most closely language ideologies in the settlement house movement, an important origin for historians of community service-learning. (Contains 9 notes.)