Educational Language Policy: An Examination of Race and Language in Policy Discourse

Linguistic diversity is an integral thread in the tapestry of America. As such researchers how linguistic differences across ethnoracial groups can be understood as resources rather than problems. The aim of this study was to examine ideologies concerning race/ethnicity and language in the discourse of educational language policies that guide multilingual approaches to education. The design of this study was critical discourse policy analysis, and the framework was a combination of Critical Language and Race Theory, also known as LangCrit (Crump, 2014), and Raciolinguistics (Alim, 2016; Flores and Rosa, 2015). The research questions were: (1) How are ideologies about the intersections of race/ethnicity and language reflected in educational language policy discourse? (2) How does discourse related to race/ethnicity and language compare across federal, state, and local policies? I analyzed federal, state, and local policy documents from the federal government, the state department of education, and a local school district. The primary finding was that (1) educational language policy discourse sustains deficit, hegemonic ideologies instead of hegemonic whiteness and English through the categorization of ethnoraciolinguistically diverse students using (1a) linguistic codes and (1b) co-naturalizing race and language. The secondary finding was that (2) educational language policy discourse illuminates the differences between the intentions and outcomes of policies deficit ideologies about ethnoraciolinguistically diverse students are tacitly reproduced via (2a) discursive structures (2b) curricular/instructional requirements. These findings have implications for the field of educational leadership and therefore recommendations for leadership preparation and future research are discussed