Although U.S. schools that provide bilingual education typically must negotiate English-only policies and pressures to sustain their programming over time, little is known about what this entails at the individual school level. Our research examines in detail how the leaders of an elementary school in New York City with a Spanish-English…

This paper reports on a writing programme I started at Bronx Community College to improve academic success among recently immigrated Spanish-speaking students by linking ESL courses to Spanish academic literacy courses within the framework of a learning community. My reflection begins by articulating the pedagogical rationale for looking beyond…

Enrollment in bilingual education has declined significantly in New York City in recent years, in spite of state and city policies that support it. To better understand this alarming trend, we interviewed school leaders, particularly principals, who have dismantled their school's bilingual education programs in recent years. We also interviewed…

This article traces the ways in which New York City schools have responded to the multilingualism of its children in the last forty years. I review here the past to construct the future--the future of the past. I argue that in the predominantly Puerto Rican community of the 1960s and 1970s a simple approach toward languages and bilingualism in…

In 1986-87, the New York State Education Department's Bureau of Bilingual Education provided incentive grants to three New York City Board of Education's Office of Bilingual Education projects whose common goal was to improve instructional quality in schools that the state Comprehensive Assessment Report (CAR) had identified as having low student…