Community Activism in Bilingual Education

     The history of bilingual education in Texas illustrates the marginalization of Hispanics in the state and their struggle to achieve educational equality. Evolving in the homes of Hispanic families and advocates, the move toward programs that would support Spanish-speaking students in their educational goals erupted on the floor of the state capitol. Almost thirty years after its inception, policymakers and educators are still going head-to-head in debates concerning the most effective, efficient and advantageous programs for language-minority students.
     Bilingualism has created tensions between Anglos and Mexican Americans in Texas dating back to early settlements in the state. Through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican Americans who chose to assimilate to the culture of Anglo settlers were promised land and freedom of religion. However, their right to maintain their native tongue was excluded from the treaty's final documents. Article X of the Treaty of Guadalupe was intended to guarantee linguistic, among other, rights but was stricken by the United States Senate prior to the treaty's adoption. These continued tensions were most evident in segregated schools and no-Spanish rules that punished students for violating a 1918 English-only law. Punishments included monetary fines or exclusion from classroom activities. Despite decades of suppression and discrimination, the 1960's marked the rise of Mexican Americans in their fight to reclaim rights lost decades before. At the center of that movement was a call for equal educational opportunities, including bilingual education.
     The bilingual movement of the Sixties illustrates a crucial element of education in its role as a social institution - the idea that education can serve as a vehicle for empowering minority communities. Hawaii, for example, has created the Hawaii Council on Language Planning and Policy with members including language rights advocates, representatives of the state and county agencies, teachers, Hawaiian language immersion advocates, translators, immigrant and refugee service providers and community organizations. Further discourse on community activism in education also champions the creation of teacher-community alliances that will promote mutually supportive projects. The literature reflects a dearth of study on the grass-roots perspective of bilingual education policy formation. Few studies touch on the role of the community in developing both state and national legislation that affects language-minority populations.

     While organized community groups were successful at providing those services not granted by the state, as in the case of escuelitas, other Mexican American communities began to rally around the political process and demand greater attention to the needs of the Mexican community in Texas. Dating back to the 1920's, many private citizens came together and operated escuelitas, or little schools, in their homes. Escuelitas would offer reading and writing instruction in Spanish to preschool children in order to prepare them for entry into the public education system. These schools also served as a medium for cultural transmission of values and goals and gave students the opportunity to learn in an environment that embraced their own culture.
     By 1956, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), along with the American G.I. Forum, established a network of schools, teaching children basic English vocabulary that many Hispanic leaders considered necessary for success in the formal school setting. More importantly, the schools were an effort to combat the numerous discriminatory practices in public schools, for example punishment for speaking Spanish. The community-based program, Escuelitas del Cuatrocientos, proved such a success that Texas' 56th legislature authorized the state education agency to initiate an escuelita summer program in 1959. As a state initiative, the program was able to reach more students in 79 counties across the state, and by 1964, it was serving over 20,000 children. Furthermore, the legislature provided for funding through the Minimum Foundation School Program in school districts and allowed two or more districts to come together to create a service area. In the first three years of the program, the state bore 90.9 percent of the cost of the program, leaving less than 10 percent of the financial responsibility to the local community.
     However, the state's variation of the Hispanic-community program did not mirror its original efforts. Now titled "The Preschool Instructional Program for Non-English Speaking Children," the summer program focused only on oral proficiency in English that would "prepare non-English speaking children for entry into the first grade with command of a vocabulary of essential English words needed for communicating and receiving instruction from the teacher." In exchange for funding and facilities, escuelitas gave up their pluralist approach to preparing students for public education. The success of the program was based on state evaluations that noted "lack of facility in use of English, lack of maturity, and poor attendance" as reasons for retaining non-English speaking students in the first grade who had not participated in the state summer program. Upon the authorization of Title I (Part A) federal funds for disadvantaged students and the authorization of Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, enrollment in the summer programs began to dwindle as school districts began to implement year long bilingual programs with the help of new federal dollars.
     What became known as the Chicano movement was a charge based on the preservation of "ethnic identity, militant rhetoric and territorial affiliation" (Trujillo, 1998). According to San Miguel (1987), Chicano communities believed that education was the vehicle for increasing the group's social mobility and ensuring equity in "mainstream" America. Trujillo (1998) further examines the Chicano movement and its focus on education and notes,
     Chicano leaders within the movement saw public schools as a primary institution requiring major restructuring. These leaders wanted to gain community control of grassroots institutions such as public schools in order to bring about effective change. Central to their thinking was gaining control of the schools so that the community could develop and implement the type of educational programs necessary to meet the needs of Chicano students as well as facilitate support for some of the Movimiento's goals (p.94).
     By 1973, Texas adopted a bilingual education policy for the state due much in part to the Mexican American community efforts. The movement for language equity in education created greater social mobility for its participants because it engendered in them the capacity to act and served as a source of empowerment (Trujillo, 1998). Today, the momentum appears to be slowing. While Texas has not abandoned its bilingual programs, an English-Only movement has swept California, Arizona and Massachusetts. Furthermore, the discourse concerning grassroots movements in bilingual education for Texas focuses primarily on the enactment of such programs. In the context of funding, however, the community has played a small role in dictating the amount of funding appropriated to bilingual programs as well as how that funding is used.

References

1. San Miguel, Guadalupe Jr. "Let them all take heed." Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.
2. Trujillo, Armando L. Chicano Empowerment and Bilingual Education: Movimiento Politics in Crystal City, Texas. New York & London: Garland, 1998.
3. Handbook of Texas Online: http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/han

Questions? Alma Perez asperez@mail.utexas.edu, Stacey Crawford staceycrawford@mail.utexas.edu , and Jessica Mejia jmejia@mail.utexas.edu