Immigrant Children And The Politics Of English-only: Views From The Classroom

Stritikus examines the effect of California's anti-bilingual initiative, Proposition 227, on the education of Latinos. He highlights the teachers' role in enacting the policy, studying two schools which developed their own Proposition 227 implementation plans. One ended its bilingual program and began a program of English immersion, and a second maintained its bilingual program through obtaining parental waivers. Using sociocultural analysis of classroom observation data, Stritikus shows how Proposition 227 implementation legitimized questionable educational practice and made effective teaching more difficult. His research documents how teachers' actions under the policy were closely connected to their political and pedagogical ideologies.