Contested policy : the rise and fall of federal bilingual education in the United States, 1960-2001 /

This concise volume documents the 40-year history of bilingual education in the US and provides an extended bibliographic essay of materials pertinent to this history. San Miguel (history, Univ. of Houston) takes the reader through the rise and fall of bilingual education from the promising years of the Johnson administration and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 through the 1970s into the cost-cutting and assimilationist years of the Reagan administration. These are even leaner times, and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCBL) has imposed assimilation and cultural conformity on attempts at bilingual education. Title III of NCLB represents a major overhaul of federal programs for bilingual education, repealing earlier legislation and replacing it with an English-only piece of legislation. San Miguel traces the history of bilingual education through the courts (Lau v. Nichols, 1974), federal agencies, and legislature. He makes the case that the implementation of bilingual education led to increased political empowerment for historically excluded minority groups. Bilingual education, like special education, led to increased involvement of the federal government in local education. This latter circumstance may have come back to haunt the US in the form of federal mandates that now litter the educational landscape. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. J. Reynolds Eastern Connecticut State University