Wanting the Unwanted Again: Safeguarding Against Normalizing Dehumanization and Discardability of Marginalized, “Unruly” English-Learning Latinos in Our Schools

Abstract

Our current high-stakes accountability system for too long has allowed officials in positions of power and oversight to discard students viewed as too much of a liability as a practice of policy and pedagogy. This practice especially has altered how English learners are taught and the lens through which they are viewed. The authors present how a scandal in a large, urban borderland district in which “unruly” and English-language learning Latinas/os were systematically eliminated from test-taking and pushed-out illustrates how the consequences of No Child Left Behind have brought us to a tipping point in the education of the marginalized. Our education system has evolved into one in which the dehumanization of vulnerable students, their parents, and their communities has now dangerously become commonplace. In the pursuit of praxis, this essay argues that we must consider actions at the individual and local level, to bring about localized, incremental change that can result in larger cumulative movements of counter-narratives and counter-pedagogies in response to this trend of dehumanization in our schooling of ethnic, racial, and linguistic minorities.