Bilingual education is usually framed as a tool of antiracism. This book challenges that framing by pointing to the ways that the foundations of modern approaches to bilingual education have their roots deficit perspectives of Latinx communities. It connects these deficit perspectives with a broader shift in discussions of race that framed racial inequities as a product of cultural and linguistic deficiencies of racialized communities as opposed to structural barriers produced by centuries of racist policies. It then examines the ways that Latinx professionals who entered the field of bilingual education were expected to adopt this deficit perspective in ways that served to maintain racial oppression.

Nelson Flores is an associate professor in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the intersection of language, race, and the political economy in shaping U.S. educational policies and practices. He has been the recipient of many academic awards including a 2017 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, the 2019 James Alatis Prize for Research on Language Planning and Policy in Educational Contexts and the 2022 AERA Early Career Award.

Chapter 1: One School's Journey through the Post-Civil Rights Era
Chapter 2: Raciolinguistic Genealogy as Method
Chapter 3: From Community Control to Neoliberalism
Chapter 4: Producing Deficiency and Erasing Colonialism in the Bilingual Education Act
Chapter 5: Accountable to Semilingualism
Chapter 6: The Bilingual Revolution Will Not Be Funded
Chapter 7: Becoming an Entrenched Bureaucracy
Chapter 8: Demanding Bilingual Choices, Receiving Bilingual Scraps
Chapter 9: Selling Bilingual Education, Inheriting Racial Inequality
Chapter 10: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of the Self
Notes