Language and Ethnic Classification of Language Minorities: Chicano and Latino Students in the 1990s

Abstract

The relationship between ethnicity and language in educational statistics can be stronger for policy and research purposes. Over the last two decades there have been improvements in the specification and collection of language and ethnic data, and yet the constructs based on these data have fallen prey to bureaucratic and policy battles, or gone unnoticed. Two of the concepts developed to estimate the need for bilingual education: "non-English language background" and "limited-English proficient" persons, are useful as a framework for educational language demography as well as language studies in otherareas. These two constructs have been used, differentiated and elaborated by different agencies within the federal government. At the same time, they have loosened the traditional relationships between ethnicity and language. Comparing the datafrom the 1980 and 1990 Census and California school enrollments, this article illustrates the utility of these two constructs, discusses the new CensusBureau constructs of "English difficulty" and "linguistic isolation, " and the implications for educational data, monitoring Latino student progress in the 1990s, and educational language policies.

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