September 2024: Barriers to Equal Opportunity

As the school year gets underway, we are thrilled to have longtime CWC member and educator, Tobi Nielsen, serve as guest writer of this month’s newsletter.

Happy September! I’m excited to have a chance to write the CWC newsletter and give back to this community that has supported me in my journey towards antiracism over the past several years. For me, CWC has been a place to both learn about antiracism, and to share my own growing understanding. It’s also a place to practice compassionate listening and constructive dialogue on sometimes very difficult topics. I’ve really appreciated the support that this community provides me and the connections I’ve made with many of you!

During this years’ “back to school” season, we’d like to take this opportunity to examine barriers to equal opportunity through the lens of language in our school systems. I’ve been a middle school teacher for the past 8 years, and this past spring, I had the opportunity to look at some student data that led to a startling discovery. At the middle school where I taught, we had over 200 Multilingual Learners, meaning they or their families speak a language other than English in their home. Of these students, those who weren’t fluent in English when they started school usually continued to be classified as English Learners until Middle School or later. Despite receiving daily English language instruction, many of these Multilingual Learners only reach a basic or conversational level of English proficiency. By high school, these students are often tracked into remedial classes. Because they've moved up through the grades without fully mastering the academic content taught in English-only classes, Long Term English Learners often attend four years of high school, get decent grades, and still are not eligible to graduate or apply for college.

Seeing this data led me to think about how and why our current instruction system is affecting these children. I started thinking more deeply about how “English Only” instruction functions as a part of systemic racism to keep immigrants, especially migrants, as second class citizens by creating language barriers within our public education system. When I mentioned my musings to Jason, he got really excited about using this idea as the September CWC topic. So this month we will focus on how language and linguistic forms interact with the US public school system to perpetuate systemic racial inequalities.

To help us explore language as an aspect of systemic racism in public school education, we’ll use this quote from education researcher Lisa Delpit, Ed.M. ‘80, Ed.D. ‘84. It’s from the chapter “Language Diversity and Learning” in her 2006 book “Other People’s Children--Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.”

"... the linguistic form a student brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community, and personal identity. To suggest that this form is “wrong” or, even worse, ignorant, is to suggest that something is wrong with the student and his or her family. On the other hand, it is equally important to understand that students who do not have access to the politically popular dialect form in this country, that is, Standard English, are less likely to succeed economically than their peers who do.” (pg. 5)

Here are some questions to help focus our thoughts:

What questions come up as you read Lisa’s thoughts on linguistic forms at home vs. at school?
What were your experiences around language and schooling?
How were you socialized to think about people who spoke with an accent or in a dialect other than Standard English? How has that impacted your interactions with people in your community, if at all?
What languages and people come to mind when you hear the terms monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual? Are you aware of these terms being used in your community, and if so, how?
In what ways do language & dialect relate to status and privilege in our society? Have you experienced privilege or stigma related to your own use of language?

As is often true at CWC, language and dialect as tools of structural racism is a vast topic. This prompt is intended to spark thought and dialogue, rather than produce one “correct” answer. It’s meant as a jumping off point from which to practice having a conversation about systemic racism. If the prompt doesn’t inspire you, join us for a conversation anyway and talk about whatever is on your mind and heart.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

“Perhaps, instead of investing so much in accent reduction for non-native speakers, who are the majority of English speakers worldwide, we can educate native speakers about increasing their language, identity, and accent awareness.” - from the article Confronting Linguistic Racism by Nooshan Ashtari and Stephen Krashen