Nelson Flores looks back on decades of bilingual education

It concerned Nelson Floresthat "as a Latino who works in bilingual education," he had "encountered a range of different descriptions of communities that felt wrong." Years of research into the language used to describe Latinx students culminated in his book, "Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era."

In his book, Flores, a professor in Penn's Graduate School of Education, outlines the historical forces that "framed Latinx communities as deficient." He examined the language used by various stakeholders to describe Latinx students and their language. He also traced how Latinx educators adopted a deficit framework to "get a seat at the table."

Bilingual education was embraced during the 1960s by liberals and more leftist radicals. But, according to Flores, "there was never this moment in time where these deficit perspectives didn't exist." Radicals saw the deficits as the consequence of colonialism and white supremacy. Liberals attributed poorly developed language skills to a lack of linguistic resources in the home. Flores found little evidence that conservative leaders considered the problem at all. Bilingual education thus became what liberals and radicals agreed upon: a way to address Latinx students' perceived language deficits.

Flores explains in the book that two years later, students in New York City scoring below the 20th percentile on a standardized English test were given the same test in Spanish. If they did better in Spanish, they were deemed eligible for bilingual education. But if they did not do well in either language-and over 10,000 students were already identified who did not-then the fear was that these "semilingual" students could not function in any language.

When Flores taught ESL 30 years later in a Bronx high school, he encountered many "long-term English learners" who had spent their entire education segregated out of mainstream classes. The students could communicate well enough when given the chance to express themselves. So why were they being viewed as deficient?

When he first started working on his book, Flores thought that he could resurface 1960s radical thinking to get beyond deficiency models: "My original argument was going to be, 'Let's reclaim this radical tradition.'" But as he dug deeper into the linguistic "genealogy" of racism and the language deficit model, he realized he didn't "want to reclaim a tradition that was already premised on the same deficit framework."

Read more at Penn GSE News.