Can Bilingual Education Generate Meaningful School Integration?

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, urban schools in the United States are increasingly segregated by race, income, and language, with low-income students concentrated in under-resourced schools. The recent expansion of vouchers, charter schools, and homeschooling threatens decades of integration efforts. Bilingual Education, or “Dual-language immersion (DLI) programs” as they are known in the United States present a potential solution by providing instruction in English and a target language while promoting academic rigor, bilingualism/biculturalism, and cross-cultural competence. DLI is the fastest-growing educational offering in many states across the U.S. Because language, race, and economic status are closely related, by targeting families with distinct home languages, DLI schools bring together students from vastly different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. This lecture will discuss a recently completed research program studying DLI in the city of Los Angeles -- the nation's second-largest public school district. Lucrecia Santibañez will discuss how and where DLI programs emerge, their impact on segregation and learning/linguistic outcomes and practices to recruit diverse families. Findings reveal tensions between using DLI to attract resources through more affluent families versus ensuring equitable access for low-income and linguistic minority students.

Discussion with Lidia Panico, Professor, Centre for Research on Social Inequalities, Sciences Po

Event hosted by the Laboratory for the Psychology of Child Development and Education, Université Paris Cité