ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the ethnography of language policy can help to reimagine what Paris calls the "democratic project of schooling", and thereby contribute to pedagogies of justice, equity, and hope. As the four-hour English language development (ELD) block mandate unfolded, the University of California Los Angeles Civil Rights Project commissioned a series of studies to investigate the policy's implementation. Within the ELD block, students' language and culture backgrounds—their "funds of knowledge"—were also sequestered and policed. The chapter offers three ethnographic examples of "practiced language policy", each of which operates against a backdrop of coloniality and monolingualist, monoculturalist policy regimes. In contemporary times, Native American language education has similarly faced contradictory policy cross-currents. The creation of linguistically tracked programming affords an opportunity to critically examine what on the surface may appear to be a "new" form of school segregation.
