Bilingual education rejected: English-only despite Lau

To commemorate Lau v. Nichols, this paper reports on findings from archival data revealing its micro- and macro-level genesis, successive activities, and that despite its historic role in language policy development and critical importance for codifying language rights, the vision for educational equity by the Cantonese-speaking, Chinese-origin activists at its center was never realized and remains elusive (Wang, 1975/1995). Our research is conceptually informed by a Critical Language Policy theoretical approach (Tollefson, 1991, 2006) that highlights the roles of power in language policymaking. Methods employed utilized Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) (Moore & Wiley, 2015; Yanow, 1996, 2000) to identify five key policy artifacts and three central interpretive communities. These approaches to prior scholarship regarding Language Policy and Planning (LPP), led to findings that document the hegemonic nature of language policymaking. A critical historical oversight is that in the aftermath of Lau, district leadership refused to create the bilingual programs delineated in The Master Plan for Bilingual Bicultural Education in SFUSD (1975). Although contemporaneously considered a victory for multilingual students, the real-world consequences in San Francisco for Chinese-origin students—predominantly Cantonese-speaking—reflected the majoritarian maintenance of English-only dominant power structures facilitated at the meso-level by SFUSD. We argue that despite its success in recognizing language as a qualifier for educational discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because the Court in Lau v. Nichols did not specify a priority program model and remedy for instruction of multilingual students, its true legacy is the historical and contemporary rejection of bilingual education and maintenance of schools as English-only, and therefore linguistically oppressive sites.