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.Republished in Kent A.Ono, ed.A Companion toAsian American Studies.(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 254 275.8.Kenyon S.Chan, Rethinking the Asian American Studies Project: Bridging theDivide between Campus and Community, Journal of Asian American Studies 3(2000): 17 36.9.Sylvia Yanagisako, Asian Exclusion Acts, in Learning Places: The Afterlives ofArea Studies, eds.Masao Miyoshi and H.D.Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress., 2002), 175 189.10.Lingyan Yang, Theorizing Asian America: On Asian American and PostcolonialAsian Diasporic Women Intellectuals, Journal of Asian American Studies 5 (2002):139 178. This page intentionally left blank BILINGUAL EDUCATIONHyeyoung Kwon and Eunai ShrakeContrary to the stereotypical image of Asian Americans as a single entity, theAsian American population is extremely heterogeneous.Members of the AsianAmerican population speak more than 300 languages and dialects.1 Languagediversity is one of the most critical issues for many Asian Americans because ithas been a highly influential factor in their transition into American society,which in turn affects their socioeconomic mobility.The issue of language isparticularly relevant to the Asian American educational experience, specificallyin relation to bilingual education for the children of Asian immigrants.With the significant increase of Asian immigrants and refugee school-agedchildren each year, bilingual education has been an issue of extensive debateand controversy within and outside the Asian American community.Though themost basic definition of bilingual education involves teaching school subjects inboth English and a child s native language, there are various models of bilin-gual education in the United States.For example, the transitional bilingualeducation model is designed to help nonnative English-speaking students acquireproficiency in English as quickly as possible (subtractive bilingualism), whileothers, such as the two-way bilingual education and developmental bilingual edu-cation models, aim to develop bilingualism and biliteracy in both languages(additive bilingualism).Asian Americans constitute 12 percent of the English Language Learner(ELL) student population nationwide, even though they amount to only 5 percentof the total student population.They account for more than 10 percent of theELL population in 28 different states, including some states with the largestELL populations such as California, New York, and New Jersey.2 In other 192 Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Todaywords, nearly a quarter of all Asian American students in K 12 schools areELL students.3 While more than half of Asian American children come fromhomes where English is not the primary language, not all ELL students areimmigrants themselves.The increase in ELL students has been most visible inCalifornia.For example, the California Department of Education reports thatthere are approximately 1.6 million ELL students in California alone, andbesides Latinos, Asian Americans are the second largest ELL student popula-tion.4 While Asian Americans are not the majority of English Language Learn-ers, the issues concerning language minorities and bilingual education remainrelevant because of the linguistic and cultural diversity within Asian Americanpopulations.HISTORYEnglish-Only Movement and Ethnic Language SchoolsBilingual education in the United States reflects the political climate relatedto various immigrant populations over time.In the 1840s, the first bilingualeducation laws were passed to ensure equal educational rights for German chil-dren.As the population of Latino immigrants increased in later decades, stateslike California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas quickly enacted their ownbilingual education programs; however, as a result of the growing English-OnlyMovement and 100 percent Americanization campaigns in the early 1900s,English-only instruction was mandated in 37 states.5The English-Only Movement had a significant effect on Asian Americanparents, who struggled to pass their culture and language onto their children byopening up ethnic language schools.These schools were met with much resist-ance from mainstream society.For example, in Hawai i, local white leaderscriticized the Japanese-language schools for preventing Japanese Americanchildren from being Americans. During the early twentieth century, the col-lective efforts to ban ethnic language schools resulted in legislation thatrequired ethnic language school teachers to have American teaching credentialsand demonstrate knowledge of the English language and American history.6Nevertheless, many ethnic language schools survived and functioned to fosterfamily and community ties by improving the communication between immi-grant parents and their children, facilitating ethnic identity development, creat-ing employment for immigrants, and serving the community as social supportand network systems.Legislation, Lawsuits, and the Struggle for EqualEducational OpportunitiesBilingual education eventually regained support during the Civil RightsMovement.In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Bilingual EducationAct, and three years later, California passed the state s Bilingual Education Act.This act allowed native language instruction in California s public schools. Education 193Despite the passage of the Bilingual Education Act at both the federal and statelevel, the majority of ELL students did not receive special assistance in theirnative languages.For example, in the San Francisco Unified School District,more than 62 percent of Chinese ELL students did not receive any specialinstruction in 1970, while the remaining Chinese ELL students were removedfrom their regular classes to receive once-a-day 40-minute Pull-Out English asa Second Language (ESL) instruction.7In this context of the virtual absence of bilingual education, the U.S.Supreme Court reached a landmark decision for bilingual education in the Lauv.Nichols case in 1974
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