Blanton, C. K. (2004). The Strange Career of Bilingual
Education in Texas, 1836-1981. College Station, TX: Texas
A&M University Press.
216 pp.
$29.95 ISBN 1-58544-310-7
Reviewed by Sherman Dorn
University of South Florida
November 9, 2005
There is a bit of chutzpah in titling any book after C. Vann
Woodward’s little 1955 classic, The Strange Career of
Jim Crow, especially one’s dissertation and first book.
In choosing the parallel title, Carlos Kevin Blanton is making
two claims. First, as with legal segregation, he says that the
history of bilingual education in Texas is more complicated than
the telescoped post-1965 version often portrayed. There were
periods when bilingual education was accepted as well as when the
official policy of Texas was to discourage not only bilingual
education but the speaking of any language other than English on
school grounds. The second claim that Blanton is implying is that
there is a clear and direct link between the status of bilingual
education and the status of equality within schools, including
segregation of students whose first language is Spanish. Given
the recent report issued by the Pew Hispanic Center on the
concentration of Hispanic students in very large high schools
with high student-teacher ratios and high concentrations of
students from poor families, the second claim may draw more
attention than the first in today’s climate (Fry, 2005).
Fortunately, Blanton succeeds in making the first claim and is
reasonably successful in the second.
Book summary
We learn much about the various twists of Texas education
policy in Blanton’s book, and as always, a reader comes
away from a book on Texas history wondering, Is this a
state, a culture, or a mini-nation? From Blanton, we learn
that the putatively anti-bilingual-education policy before the
Progressive Era was rarely followed. Not only was there a
relatively cosmopolitan language policy in the Mexican era, and
some interesting perspectives of Stephen Austin, but the politics
of Reconstruction and the Redeemers strongly encouraged localism.
While Redeemers may have wanted to have more clearly racist
policies, they were also anti-state, and by eviscerating the
powers of Austin, they let localism flower.
In that late 19th century localism, there was much variation
in language policy. Many local schools taught in the primary
language of the student majority. Where Tejanos were the
majority, this would be Spanish, but there were also significant
numbers of schools that catered to German and Czech immigrants.
Where local public schools refused to accommodate Spanish, they
sometimes found Tejano children in nearby Catholic or other
private schools that would teach in Spanish. And in the
first few years when the state tried to crack down on bilingual
education, they discovered that individual communities could
exempt themselves from the local system of education with an
annual local agreement—a system that required years before
state officials could stamp out that structure of localism.
The tolerance of local differences ended in the Progressive
Era, not only with the growing centralization of school
governance but also with a xenophobic approach to language policy
and Americanization. In Texas in the early 20th century,
especially in World War I, German was more of a symbolic
political threat than Spanish (p. 67). While those favoring
assimilation in the late 19th century could describe bilingual
education as a tool of assimilation, that was no longer the case
in the early 20th century. Officially, Texas policy in the first
half of the 20th century became English-only, immersion-only,
with the strong discouragement of anything other than
English.
Over the next few decades, Texas language policy became a tool
of segregation. By the 1940s and 1950s, educators had
rationalized primary-grade segregation by reference to language
skills—and because the vast majority of Spanish-speaking
public-school students were in primary grades (social promotion
was for whites only in Texas), that lower-grade policy became
de facto segregation for the vast majority of
Spanish-speaking students in Texas. In addition, Blanton argues,
the high-school language policy was different for English
speakers, creating a double standard. There, someone learning a
second language did not have to learn it without
assistance in English.
Blanton describes the post-World War II disintegration of
English-only in Texas as a slow process with frequent reversals
and missteps, requiring two generations of activists. In World
War II, activists used national concerns about foreign policy,
and the Good Neighbor Policy of FDR, as a leverage for federal
pressure on Texas to accommodate Spanish-speaking students in
Texas. We learn that the 1940s Mendez decision in Orange
County, California, which forbade segregation of
Mexican-Americans by administrative fiat in the county’s
schools, was also used as a lever to point out the shallow
justification of segregation based on language policy and the
lack of any consistent practice, even if one did agree that the
use of language was a rational basis for
segregation.
And, as happened elsewhere in the South, local officials had
two responses to pressure for change. One was an idiosyncratic,
local response. Some districts, as in Driscoll, Texas, simply
refused to budge. But the other response was systematic. The
state Department of Education quickly responded to various court
decisions and in-state legal opinions by promoting a test of
language use as putatively scientific grounds for existing
practice. These responses were part of what slowed the breakup of
English-only policies in Texas.
The final push in the 1960s and 1970s came with three
changes—different research evidence about the cognitive and
educational utility of bilingualism, the ascendance of a new
generation of Chicano activists, and both permission and pressure
from the federal government in the guise of the 1968 Bilingual
Education Act, a 1970 memorandum from the federal Office of Civil
Rights (OCR), and the Lau v. Nichols case in San
Francisco. What we learn from Blanton is the relatively hidden
role of OCR memoranda, in this case adding pressure on school
districts to serve students whose first language is not English
even before Lau.
Evaluation
This book has earned an award and at least one honorable
mention since publication, with good justification. In terms of
the primary claim about the changing nature of education policy
in Texas, Blanton clearly succeeds. Moreover, he does so with a
broad variety of sources that give a wonderful flavor to the
story of localism early in the book. My favorite quotation from
an archival source is the local system report of Fayette County
to the state at the turn of the century. “We have one
teacher—Miss Mina Stiehl—who has no certificate and
teaches German…. Is it against the law for her to teach
thus?” (p. 35) With very few exceptions, he handles the
primary material well. And except for a few colloquialisms, the
fine writing makes this a very engaging story.
Now, there’s a danger in a book that succeeds with
records of local activities and convinces me that we should not
take 19th-century anti-bilingual education statements at face
value. Blanton does so well in those areas that one expects him
to carry that sharpness and rigor everywhere. Specifically,
while his description of local activities is wonderful, the Texas
state legislature is in essence a black box in this book. Things
happen, but we don’t know why, and we don’t know how
bilingual education policy fits into the wild ride of Texas
politics. And that omission is a missed opportunity. Surely
there have to be good Texas political stories behind the
evisceration of bilingual education in the Progressive era, or
the loophole given Corpus Christi in the 1940s, the Gilmer-Aiken
law (whose details Blanton does not describe in the book), the
Congressional introduction of the Bilingual Education Act by
Senator Ralph Yarborough, or the 1981 act that ends the story.
Guadalupe San Miguel’s book on federal bilingual policy
since 1960 gives us a hint of the story in Congress, but if this
book is telling a Texas story, certainly there have to be Texas
political stories in there as well.
The second weakness in the book—and this is a minor one,
but a matter of inconsistency—is the evidentiary double
standard on anti-bilingual policies. In the 19th century, we
read that we should look beyond the official policy at local
activities. But in the early 20th century, we read that there is
an official English-only policy, and that’s it. There are
only bits and pieces of evidence on the English-only practices in
schools (on pp. 84, 86, 99, 117, 127, and 128), and one is a clue
that teachers in New York were not always obedient to its
English-only policy (p. 127). One cannot dispute the broader
story of hostility towards students whose first language is not
English, especially Mexican-Americans. But one should be as
skeptical of a monolith in the 20th century as Blanton is about
the 19th, and there should be some discussion of exceptions in
practice, if not in policy.
Given the title, there also could have been more explicit
discussion of the comparisons between the gradualism of postwar
Texas schools and the glacial pace of desegregation in the
postwar South. We know that there were very shrewd policymakers
across the South fighting desegregation through bureaucratic
maneuvering. Did God forget to distribute the smarter racists to
Driscoll? Here, the language of idiosyncratic responses such as
the Driscoll, Texas, board, on the one hand, after Delgado
and Hernandez, and the systematic bureaucratic maneuvers
documented in other Southern school systems, on the other, may be
helpful.
Contributions
This book succeeds in undercutting any myth that bilingual
education is a recent phenomenon. In that regard, it complements
rather than competes with San Miguel’s (2004) book on
federal bilingual policy since 1960. San Miguel’s larger
purpose is also myth busting, but on a different scale and period
scope.
In addition, the book’s description of wartime and
postwar events suggest a potentially interesting distinction
between idiosyncratic and systematic responses to top-down
pressures—a distinction that may also explain responses to
desegregation as well as English-only policies today.
Moreover, there is a subtle point made towards the end of the
book, about the growth in bilingual education at preschool ages.
There’s something important that could be explored about
the sensitivity about culture wars at different ages, a
distinction Cuban (1993) discusses with regard to teaching
practices, Hochschild (1984) with desegregation, and nobody yet
on inclusion practices in special education—but that also
appears relevant here. Bilingualism may be far more acceptable
for very young kids in a way that it is not, politically, in
elementary and secondary years.
Finally, there is something important and subtle about the
discussion of private schooling. When local public schools taught
in English, parents often turned to private schools. If this
isn’t both an advertisement and a caution to social
conservatives about privatization, I don’t know what is.
This book adds significantly to the literature on private-public
relationships, if not in any identifiable passage. In Texas,
there is a clear sense that private schools competed with public
schools, not only for legitimacy in the way that has been common
throughout the history of North American schooling, but very
clearly for students. But the private alternative undermined the
social goals of public policy, if it was to eliminate the
language of origin from the school lives of children.
Note
This review is revised from remarks delivered at the annual
meeting of the Social Science History Association (Portland, OR),
November 5, 2005.
References
Cuban, L. (1993). How teachers taught: Constancy and change
in American classrooms, 1880-1990 (2nd ed.). New York:
Teachers College Press.
Fry, R. (2005). The high schools Hispanics attend: Size
and other key characteristics. Washington: Pew Hispanic
Center. Retrieved November 9, 2005, from
http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=54.
Hochschild, J.L. (1984). The new American dilemma: Liberal
democracy and school desegregation. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
San Miguel, G., Jr. (2004). Contested policy: The rise and
fall of federal bilingual education in the United States,
1960-2001. Denton, TX: University of North Texas
Press.
Woodward, C. V. (1955). The strange career of Jim
Crow. New York: Oxford University Press.
About the Reviewer
Sherman Dorn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and
Social Foundations at the University of South Florida. His research interests include the
school experiences of historically marginalized populations, the evolution and
construction of education policy debates, academic freedom since 9/11, and the changing
construction of computer literacy. Dr. Dorn edits the Education Policy Analysis
Archives.
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author,
who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.