Expanding Promise, Debating Means: Separate and Integrated Schooling for Immigrants, English-language Learners, Girls, and Boys,

Abstract

Spurred by the social and legal struggles surrounding Brown, parents and advocates during the twentieth century and into the present have pursued equal schooling along other dimensions of exclusion and inequality by working through court challenges, legislation, and other initiatives. Brown enshrined equality as the entitlement for all students, even as the work leading to and following Brown identified avenues for advocates concerned for students learning English, immigrants, girls, boys, and others left out or mistreated by public schooling. American public schools have grown preoccupied with the aspiration of equality and the language of inclusion. Yet no less pervasive is the struggle over whether equality is to be realized through integrated or separate settings. The debates involve politics, prejudices, and social science studies. Shifting political tides and cultural attitudes, as well as legal debates, reflect and also aggravate uncertainties about what kinds of instruction actually promote equal opportunities for all children. Often called “a nation of immigrants” (with the elision, then, of Native Americans and slaves), the United States has offered opportunities but also presided over mistreatment of newcomers on the basis of language, accent, derogatory ideas about their country of origin, or general negative attitudes toward foreigners. Such attitudes include the conflation of “foreign” with “illegal,” the confusion of immigrant with noncitizen, and the equation of being a speaker of Spanish (and other native tongues) with being “non-American.” The tradition of forced assimilation starts first not with immigrants but with the Native Americans, beginning with the Civilization Act of 1819, under which the government removed Indian children from their family cultures and placed them in federally funded missionary schools, not to further integrate them with other students but to “civilize” them. In addition, as the United States displaced Mexico in parts of the Southwest, families who never moved gradually found themselves dealing with a contest over language, race, and culture.