CABE 2015

The presentation will look back at 40 years of struggle by members of CABE to challenge the devaluation of bilingual students’ identities in schools and society. This has been a struggle not only to bring rational evidence-based policies to debates about ‘educational effectiveness’ but also a struggle to reverse a centuries-old legacy of coercive relations of power between dominant and subordinated groups. Societal power relations play themselves out in the choices that every teacher in every classroom in every school makes on a daily basis. As teachers, we have the power to promote identities of competence among our students or to remain complicit with policies (e.g., evidence-free uses of standardized tests, scripted reading instruction, etc.) that devalue the identities of students and communities. We are currently at a tipping point where it is no longer possible to deny the efficacy of well-implemented bilingual programs and where multiple examples of truly inspirational pedagogy are abundant. The challenge of the next decade is to ramp up these school-based examples so that bilingual students in districts across California (and the U.S.) are enabled to use their languages for powerful social purposes.