The Politics of Restrictive Language Policies: A Postcolonial Analysis of Language and Schooling

Abstract

Central to the history of colonization has been the use of restrictive language policies to ensure the exclusion of racialized populations from full participation within the economic and political landscape of the nation state. Hence, understanding the educational barriers of exclusion, along with the academic impact that such language policies produce, are the central questions that strike at the heart of this postcolonial analysis. More specifically, we examine the manner in which restrictive language policies were implemented over a four-year period within the public schools of Boston, Massachusetts, following the passage of Referendum Question 2 in 2002, a mandate to repeal the use of transitional bilingual education in favor of immersion programs. This story is particularly poignant in that Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to officially enact, in 1971, a transitional bilingual program to meet the needs of the state’s growing Spanish-speaking student population. But that was the era of civil rights, when a myriad of educational efforts to address the long-standing historical inequalities faced by children in communities of color were being moved forward by civil-rights activists everywhere. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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