Bilingual Education: The Hispanic Response to Unequal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

It is appropriate that a volume which is primarily about desegregation also includes an article on bilingual education. Hispanics, who are the nation's second-largest minority enrolled in public schools,' often perceive bilingual education as paramount in their quest for equal educational opportunity. A common sentiment among Hispanics2 in 1978 is that desegregation is a method of achieving equal educational opportunity for blacks, and that for Hispanics to overcome the effects of decades of discrimination, the primary focus should be on bilingual and bicultural education. In many Hispanic communities desegregation is seen as an impediment to equal educational opportunity rather than an aid. This is not to deny that many Hispanic communities have gone to court to break the patterns of de jure segregation that have afflicted them.3 Indeed, seven years before Brown I,4 Chicano plaintiffs successfully overturned a pol-