This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

The focus of this chapter is on conflicts between federal, state, and city language education policies and how these are navigated in New York City schools. US language education policies at the federal government level have been largely restrictive of languages other than English in school, particularly due to required high-stakes testing in English, which directly caused the elimination of bilingual education programs in New York City schools. In an effort to redress this loss in bilingual programs, New York State has in recent years adopted policies that actively promote bilingual education, while neither contesting nor significantly changing competing policies that actively assert English dominance. Research in one of these new bilingual education programs in New York City highlights these tensions, showing how current policies are mismatched to the needs of local communities. Our qualitative research investigates the expansion of dual language bilingual education (DLBE) in New York City public schools through a focus on a newly-opened Hebrew DLBE program in a public middle school. In this chapter, we share findings from classroom observations, interviews with school administrators, teachers, students and their families, as well as state, city, and school policy documents.