California’s Bilingual Education Ballot Initiative
It’s Super Tuesday today, which means that voters in 11 states are heading to the polls to set the media narrative for the next few weeks聽to assign delegates to the remaining Republican and Democratic presidential nominees. Presidential election season is fully on now, and won’t end until the country votes on November 8th.
This fall, California’s ballots will be a little more complicated. , I explain the state’s upcoming referendum on expanding access to multilingual education:
The rise of revanchist xenophobia on the campaign trail 鈥 currently embodied in聽Donald Trump鈥檚 campaign 鈥 isn鈥檛 new either. American concern over immigrant integration is an old, cyclical story. To a degree, November鈥檚 election will be a referendum on how the country should respond to its growing diversity: Are immigrant families best understood as problems, or in terms of their potential?
Fittingly, in California, the campaign season will include a subplot 鈥 and perhaps a denouement 鈥 from one of the last rounds of American immigration anxiety. In 1998, Californians anxious about a recent influx of immigrants passed Proposition 227, a ballot measure that mandated English immersion for nearly all of the states鈥 multilingual students. This year, as the country argues over , Californians will vote on the Multilingual Education Act, a new ballot initiative that would update and improve Prop. 227 by expanding the availability of bilingual education models (including popular ) for English language learners.
鈥This post is part of 麻豆果冻传媒鈥檚 Dual Language Learners National Work Group. . To subscribe to the biweekly newsletter, , enter your contact information, and select 鈥淓ducation Policy.鈥“