ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out the principal scholarly arguments and evidence produced suggesting that dual language bilingual education (DLBE) is undergoing various forms of gentrification, that is, that privileged families are increasingly occupying its physical and discursive spaces in ways that push out the original beneficiaries of this type of public education. First, the chapter reviews and categorizes research since 1996 on how DLBE is being mainstreamed and popularized with discourses and pedagogical choices that appeal to simplistic models of integration and the interests of stakeholders with racial, economic, linguistic, and migration-status privilege. These discourses and practices are often driven by economic and defense initiatives, and the increased normalization of educational “choice” programs. Second, the chapter fills a gap in the literature by clearly laying out historical evidence that prior to this recent shift, BE throughout U.S. history had overwhelmingly served proficient or “heritage” speakers of the partner language—the maintenance and heritage constituencies of DLBE—rather than the world language constituency, the English-dominant stakeholders without an ethnic connection to the partner language. Finally, the chapter makes an optimistic call for research and action on ways that DLBE can offer a truer form of racial and socioeconomic integration.
