Bilingualism as a Resource, Not an Obstacle: Reimagining the U.S. Curriculum

Around noon, the soundscape in practically every elementary school cafeteria in Houston, Queens, or East Los Angeles reveals the country. In the middle of a sentence, Spanish gives way to English. Across the room, a Vietnamese grandmother gives a child a wave.

Two girls alternate between a Texan drawl and Arabic as though they were from different worlds. These days, none of this is unusual. The curriculum rarely acts as if it is true, which is unusual.

The institutions are not keeping up with the numbers, which have changed more quickly. The percentage of multilingual students in American schools increased from 11% to almost 25% of all K–12 students in just the last ten years. That group isn’t specialized. That is more akin to a structural aspect of childhood in America. However, a child’s second language is still viewed as something to manage, phase out, or translate around in far too many classrooms. Every year, schools seem to be adapting to a population that they have theoretically known would arrive for twenty years.

Of course, the people in charge are the teachers. The majority inherited this gap rather than choosing it. It was once described to me, half-laughing, by a first-year teacher in a dual language program in Chicago as “designing the plane mid-flight while the FAA mails you the manual in pieces.”” Training isn’t consistent. Certifications are made on the spot.

Teachers on provisional or emergency credentials are statistically more likely to work in schools with the highest concentrations of multilingual students, which is exactly the wrong arrangement for students who require the most expert instruction. It’s difficult to ignore the irony.

Something quieter and more difficult to record in a spreadsheet is lost in the policy discussions. It has begun to be named by researchers who study classrooms in Norway, of all places. According to their research, which is based on the Nordic Unequal Childhood project, bilingualism is rarely evaluated solely on linguistic merit. It is filtered through teacher expectations, institutional practices, and the symbolic significance of a particular language that year. In a private school in Brooklyn, a child who speaks French is considered “advanced.” The same cognitive achievement is demonstrated by a child who speaks Mixtec at a public school two miles away and is “still developing English.” a different interpretation.

The aspect that American education hasn’t really addressed is that selective recognition. Twenty years ago, Tara Yosso coined the term “community cultural wealth,” which refers to the linguistic and navigational resources that schools routinely overlook when minority students arrive. The misrecognition is still the default setting twenty years later. The purported pinnacle of bilingual education, dual language programs, frequently reinforce the hierarchies they were intended to dismantle by giving preference to particular languages, accents, and body types.

However, there is a gradual change taking place. Curricula that view home languages as cognitive infrastructure rather than something to get rid of are being tested by districts in El Paso, Minneapolis, and some areas of New Jersey. Translanguaging is becoming more common among educators. Some are doing away with the previous evaluations completely. It is genuinely unclear if these experiments will succeed or if they will be quietly defunded the next time a school board flips.

The demographic gravity is more difficult to contest. There is already bilingualism in the classroom. The thing that is falling behind is the curriculum. Rethinking it is an admission that the nation’s educational system was designed for a student body that no longer exists, not an act of kindness toward immigrant families. As this develops, there’s a sense that the schools that were willing to take the lead will appear to have seen something clear in twenty years. Reports explaining why they didn’t will be written by the others.