Creating fertile grounds for two-way immersion: gentrification, immigration, & neoliberal school reforms

Abstract

Bilingual Two-Way Immersion (TWI) programs are becoming increasingly popular in the United States, especially amongst white, non-Hispanic, middle-class English speaking-parents (Valdez et al. in Urban Rev 44:601–627, 2016). While they are growing in numbers and popularity, researchers caution against the challenges and inequalities that they face (Cervantes-Soon et al. in Rev Res Educ 41:403–427, 2017) making it important to understand how and why these schooling options are coming about. Through the ethnographic study of one TWI program that was created within a Philadelphia public school in 2014, I show how it was neoliberal school reforms, a movement of gentrifying parents to improve schools, and a steady flow of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the area that created the fertile grounds for this TWI bilingual program to come about. I argue for the importance of understanding the processes that already create unequal positions for various social actors, and through this analysis problematize bottom-up language policy making when it is undertaken under the conditions of neoliberalism and competitiveness.