Equal Educational Opportunity for Language Minority Students: From Policy to Practice at Oyster Bilingual School

Abstract

Based on a two year ethnographic and discourse analytic study of Oyster Bilingual School in Washington, DC, this article illustrates what equal educational opportunity means for the linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse student population who participate in this "successful" two-way Spanish-English bilingual program. The article begins by summarizing the Oyster educators' perspective on equal educational opportunity, and emphasizes their opposition to the notion of equal educational opportunity implicit in mainstream U.S. programs and practices. The majority of the article then provides a comparative discourse analysis of the "same" kindergarten speech event in Spanish and English to illustrate how the Oyster educators translate their ideological assumptions and expectations into actual classroom practices. The micro-level classroom analysis demonstrates how the team-teachers work together to distribute and evaluate Spanish and English equally so that all students acquire a second language, develop academic skills in both languages, and use each other as resources in their learning. The analysis also reveals systematic discrepancies between ideal plan and actual implementation which are explained by consideration of Oyster's sociolinguistic context.