Fifty years after the Lau decision, dual-language programs face critical challenges, particularly a national teacher shortage, especially in bilingual programs representing less commonly taught languages like Mandarin Chinese. This study explores the workplace environments of 13 Mandarin Dual Language Bilingual Education (MDLBE) teachers in a…

This critical literature review employs a novel combination of theoretical perspectives to examine the ways teachers navigate restrictive language policy. Specifically, we examine the documented effects of California's Proposition 227 on pre-service and in-service teachers' language ideologies and classroom practices. In our investigation, we…

Five cohorts of students (N = 322) who completed a K-5 Spanish Dual Language Immersion (DLI) program in an urban school district were followed longitudinally through middle and high school completion. Academic and language achievement data included English Language Arts and Mathematics scores on the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) test…

While America is becoming increasingly diverse, educational stakeholders seek programs that address varied language and cultural needs, which is reflected by the growing popularity of dual language immersion (DLI) programs in recent decades. The problem is an extensively persistent academic achievement gap between students with native English and…

What started as a social media based movement, the viral hashtag #blackgirlmagic has transcended into a way of being, and seeing Black girls and women. The essence and prevalence of #blackgirlmagic continues to defy all odds and perceptions in sports, society, and other social spaces where Black girls have been rendered invisible, including in the…

Transnational flows in people and economy have shaped the need and desire for Mexicans to learn English and so many families enroll their children in cross-border schooling. These children, known as transfronterizos, live in Mexico and cross the border each day to attend U.S. schools. Through ethnography, this article explores the experiential…

While educational language policies have been shown to have a stronger influence on school-aged children's multilingual outcomes than Family Language Policy, California provides an example of how parental motivation and activism can also have a profound impact on educational language policies. This paper has two goals: first, it provides an…

Parent involvement is often cited as an essential component of effective dual language bilingual education (DLBE), yet we have limited understanding of the ways parents participate in DLBE or how parent experiences differ between Latinx and non-Latinx families, who often have different reasons for enrolling their children in bilingual programs.…

This paper describes the author's personal involvement with issues of policy and implementation that were sparked by the "Lau" decision. Topics included are student assessment, the bilingual education wars, the role of research, the paradigm shift with the advent of standards, and California state policy in the education of English…

The "Lau v. Nichols" ruling shows the importance of tailoring programs for local multilingual learners. We used longitudinal data from one school district in California to assess the relationship between attending a school with a language support program and English language arts (ELA) achievement. We found that students labeled an…

The relationship between reading comprehension and reading fluency for linguistically diverse learners continues to be a topic of education research. The problem is third and fourth-grade second-language learners possess adequate reading fluency skills but demonstrate distinct reading comprehension difficulties compared to native English-speaking…

Policies restricting bilingual education have yielded to policy frameworks touting its benefits. This shift corresponds with evolving lines of debate, focusing now on "how" bilingual education can best support racialized bilingual learners. One element of this new debate is the perspective on language underlying curriculum in bilingual…

California has one of the largest populations of multilingual learners (MLs) in the United States (California Department of Education [CDE], 2020; 2021). These MLs have unique strengths and needs, which require school psychologists to have specialized training (Gonzalez et al., 2022; Harris et al., 2021). However, few school psychology training…

This qualitative case study seeks to understand teacher residents' journeys as they develop culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies and grow a translanguaging stance in a bilingual teacher residency program in California, U.S. This study is situated within university coursework that prepares teacher residents to support their future…

In this article, the authors review the antecedents, analyze the evolution, and draw recommendations for educational policies in the regions of California and Catalonia over the last 50 years, especially regarding bilingual education. This analysis is necessary due to the size, representativity, precociousness, and success of bilingual policies…