To Teach a Child in a Language not his Own: The Development of Bilingual/Bicultural Education in New Jersey Public Schools, 1960s – 1990s

Abstract

This thesis explores the development of bilingual/bicultural educational programming and policy in New Jersey from the 1960s to the 1990s. Over the latter half of the twentieth century, community organizers, educators, and policymakers leveraged this issue of bilingualism in New Jersey public schools using distinct group mobilization strategies to advance their own pedagogical, ideological, and political objectives to varying degrees of success. Recurring in these negotiations was the question of the appropriate inclusion, if any, of biculturalism in bilingual education. Their enduring clashes were often carried out at the expense of the social, cultural, linguistic, and academic needs of the limited English proficient student, many of which came from Caribbean, Central, South American, and/or Spanish-speaking backgrounds. This statewide struggle over the development and implementation of bilingual/bicultural educational programs asserted the threat culturally-embedded native language use in schools posed to English language hegemony in the United States. It contributed to the intensification of the national 1990s English-Only movement and its long cultivation of permeating institutional objectives towards Americanization within the state. Concurrently, however, it affirmed the power of the native language to preserve a strong sense of self, to reinforce connections to family and community, and to foster a sense of cultural pride in resistance to pressures of assimilation for the high concentration of limited English proficient students living in New Jersey. Collectively, this work critically assesses conflicting conceptions of the appropriate components to and objectives of bilingual education, enhances the understanding of native language use as a not only culturally, but also politically rich issue, and presents an ongoing, nationally pertinent contest over bilingualism and biculturalism from a novel, New Jersey-specific perspective.