State School Systems and Language Rights

This paper discusses the issue of language rights, examining the struggle for power between state school systems and parents over children’s education, specifically language rights. An examination of state statutes regarding bilingual education, and state department of education web pages for the lower 48 states revealed that all states provide bilingual education for limited-English proficient students, or LEP students. The indicator of language rights the paper uses is parental approval, the extent of the authority that parents have over their child’s presence in bilingual education classes as stated in state statutes. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we attempt to explain the absence of parent approval in particular states