Can Bilingual Education Generate Meaningful School Integration? A Case-Study of Los Angeles
CRIS & LIEPP Seminar with Lucrecia Santibañez (UCLA) on November 14th, 2025
Seventy years after
[translate:Brown v. Board of Education], urban schools in the United States remain segregated by race, income, and language, with many low-income students attending under-resourced schools. The growth of vouchers, charter schools, and homeschooling threatens long-standing integration efforts.
Bilingual Education, known as Dual-language immersion (DLI) programs in the U.S., offers a potential solution by instructing students in both English and a target language. These programs promote academic rigor, bilingualism, biculturalism, and cross-cultural competence. DLI is the fastest-growing educational model in many states.
Because language, race, and economic status are connected, DLI schools attract families from diverse home languages, bringing together students from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
Research on DLI in Los Angeles
This lecture covers recent research on DLI programs in Los Angeles, the second-largest public school district in the country. It examines where and how these programs develop, their effects on segregation, learning outcomes, linguistic development, and strategies for recruiting diverse families.
“I will discuss how and where DLI programs emerge, their impact on segregation and learning/linguistic outcomes and practices to recruit diverse families.”
Author's summary: Bilingual dual-language immersion programs show promise in reducing school segregation by uniting students of varied linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds, fostering integration and academic success.
Would you like the summary to be more formal or accessible?