Title VII ESEA: The Ambivalence of Language Policy in the United States Raymond V. Padilla, Guest Editor The Bilingual Education Act (Title VII of the amended Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in January of 1968. The day after he signed the law the Washington Post editorialized that, unbeknownst to the vast majority of the citizenry, a quiet revolution had been foisted on the American people through the passage of the Bilingual Education Act (Schneider, 1976). The tone of the editorial was somber; it was meant to be a warning, perhaps even a call to arms. How could a law that was intended to alleviate the well documented low educational achievement of U.S. Hispanics (due in large measure to historic exclusionary policies and practices in schools and colleges), elicit such a quick and snarling response from the media? Clearly, something fundamental to the prevalent image of American society was pinched by the passage of Title VII. But what was it exactly that so threatened and irritated the American body politic? And how did this irritation subsequently manifest itself in contested educational policies and practices toward U.S. Hispanics and other groups with different language characteristics, such as American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asian Americans, and numerous immigrant groups of European and Middle Eastern origin? These and similar questions deserve a thoughtful response as Title VII enters its fourth decade. Three decades of experience with Title VII should provide plenty of opportunity and motivation to begin a thorough consideration of what Title VII was meant to accomplish and how it has fared in the first thirty years of its existence. Clearly, the capacity of a special issue of the BRJ is insufficient to include all of the relevant considerations pertinent to a comprehensive retrospective of Title VII, especially one that spans three decades of research, policy, and practice involving the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, from the federal and state to the local levels, and also involving all segments of the educational system from preschool to graduate school. However, our goal is not to provide a definitive retrospective in this special issue, but to instigate one. We want to challenge all who are involved with bilingual education, proponents and critics alike, to take careful stock of the contemporary history of bilingual education and to learn from its successes and failures thus far. Otherwise, we will continue to grope along, guided mostly by the rhetoric of bilingual education emitted as sound bites from the mouths of opponents and proponents alike and disseminated by an overly amplified mass media which have more interest in visceral responses than critical analysis. So let the articles included in this special issue serve as the appetizers to what we hope will turn into a banquet of research, reflection, and critical discussion on the influences of Title VII in the educational arena. In assembling this special issue we cast a wide net to encourage submissions from strikingly different perspectives. We wanted to hear from researchers who base their work on empirical data, but also from practitioners and policy makers who possess a wealth of knowledge based on lived experience. We encouraged parents, teachers, administrators, professors, and students to share their wisdom and insights. We wanted to hear from the number crunchers and from the word mongers, more professionally known as quantitative and qualitative researchers. In short, we wanted to sample what was "out there" that could be relevant to a thirty-year Title VII retrospective. What resulted from this exercise are the articles contained in this volume.They reflect a range of foci, from the meta analysis of the research literature, to the examination of federal policy in bilingual education, to the experience of a school in starting and maintaining bilingual instruction, to an exploration of the moral imperatives related to bilingual education, and then to the personal narratives of individuals whose personal and professional lives have been influenced and shaped by Title VII. However, by focusing the topic narrowly on Title VII, we also missed a great deal. We do not examine the mutual impact between litigation and legislation, as exemplified in the case of Lau v. Nichols. Nor do we include the connection between bilingual education and desegregation. Similarly, there are no discussions connecting the domestic experience with valuable lessons that can be drawn from the international experience with bilingual education. And finally, there is not a focused discussion on the linkages between federal and state policies and practices in bilingual education, a glaring omission given the central role of the states in the educational arena. These and related topics are all important to a comprehensive retrospective on bilingual education as a whole, rather than just Title VII. In spite of these omissions, the articles included in this special issue do succeed in pointing the way to a more robust and comprehensive analysis of Title VII, and in some particular areas do make an important contribution. In reviewing all the manuscripts that were submitted for this special issue, I have tried to identify a common theme that might characterize all or most of the discussions. Given the complexity of the field, this is not an easy task to accomplish. After some thought, I concluded that "ambivalence" may be an appropriate one-word description of bilingual education in the United States, including Title VII. I understand "ambivalence" as explained in its dictionary definition: "the existence of mutually conflicting feelings or thoughts about . . . an idea", and "uncertainty or indecisiveness as to what course to follow" (American Heritage Dictionary, 1991). But I also relate to the etymological origin of the word, namely ambi, meaning "both" and valence which relates to "value" or "worth", hence two sets of ideas or practices either coexisting (as in "ambidextrous") or vying with each other (as in "ambivalent"). The ambivalence of Title VII, and bilingual education more generally, is not restricted to any one group. Rather, it seems to manifest itself across quite different groups. Just about everyone knows that Linda Chávez and Richard Rodríguez do not support bilingual education, but neither do the many other U.S. Hispanics who have voted for English-only initiatives. When we look at policy makers, it is amply clear that the original Title VII supported mother tongue instruction only as a vehicle to transition the limited English proficient (LEP) students into English language instruction. As another example, the U.S. Supreme Court in its Lau v. Nichols (1974) decision did not mandate mother tongue instruction, rather it mandated an equal educational opportunity for LEP students, which could include bilingual instruction. Additionally, the ambivalence toward bilingual education can be discerned easily from a mere glance at a durable and lasting prototype for bilingual education programming: transitional bilingual education (TBE). It has always struck me as noteworthy that one of the most influential and long lasting "models" of bilingual education came not from Texas or California, let alone Florida, New York, New Mexico, or Arizona, but from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Clearly, TBE is premised on transitioning the LEP student from the mother tongue into English as quickly as possible. So the West may be the "best" but the East still has the most influence in national thinking about what America is or ought to be. One of the most ironic displays of ambivalence toward bilingual education was shown by the wicked way in which the educational research establishment set itself up as the arbiters of whether or not bilingual education "works". Demanding the most elegant of academic research designs in a field (education) which manifests itself as a trench warfare phenomenon, the Johnnies-come-lately to the field of bilingual education chose to become the trolls that would exact a high toll for legitimizing bilingual education as an appropriate educational tool. For the purist researchers it was all or nothing (Fishman, 1978). Either bilingual education worked or it didn't, and if it didn't then it could not be justified. But where were all these purist researchers when LEP students were being subjected to "sink or swim" pedagogies? Were they asking about the efficacy of those pedagogies and delegitimizing them if they did not prove themselves through elegant scientific experiments? As I recall, they were nowhere to be found in this role. George Sánchez was indeed a lone and exceptional voice. What is particularly ironic about the hard hearted role the educational research establishment took toward bilingual education, especially during the seventies and eighties, is that bilingual education had its contemporary origin within the ethnocommunities of the United States, not within the educational establishment. It was parents and teachers from ethnocommunities who said "Ya basta!" to the schools which were shredding up their children. The symbolic message sent to the ineffectual mainstream teachers and schools by the parents through advocacy for bilingual education was: "Try a little love and care with our kids". So eventually it was payback time from the educational research establishment: What they didn't or could not get— viable solutions, such as bilingual education, to the educational needs of ethnocommunities—they might subvert. Their legacy can be seen today in the guise of know-nothing pronouncements by some opponents of bilingual education who proclaim that bilingual education "doesn't work" with only the vaguest idea of what the research literature shows, namely that bilingual education is a complex technology which can be applied well or misapplied by teachers and schools, as well as by state and federal appointed and elected officials (Valencia, 1991). The ambiguity toward bilingual education also was demonstrated in the nation's colleges and universities. The fact of the matter is that there can be no effective bilingual education in the schools unless someone prepares well trained and competent bilingual teachers. This job historically has been assigned to colleges and universities. But who is going to train the trainers? The answer to this question will point to a possible explanation for the many dilemmas in bilingual education. The truth is that thirty years ago most colleges and universities did not have the competence or capacity to produce the thousands of bilingual teachers needed in the nation's classrooms, and to produce them in a hurry to boot. The efforts by Title VII since its earliest years to prod and entice colleges and universities to rise to the occasion have produced quite mixed results. After thirty years of Title VII, the United States still can not produce the quantity or quality of bilingual teachers that are urgently needed in the nation's schools. The ambivalence of the colleges and universities rests on their willingness to accept federal grants for bilingual teacher training and for other related training programs, but there is precious little evidence that many of them have used these seed monies to restructure comprehensively their teacher education programs so that they can routinely produce the bilingual and monolingual teachers who are competent to tend to the educational needs of LEP students. The moral of the story seems to be that you can't teach what you don't know, and that you will never know what doesn't interest you. For years now, many have considered that higher education is in "crisis". To the extent that ethnocommunities have a role in this crisis, they may simply be asking of the nation's colleges and universities: What do you know that is of importance and consequence for our children? And how can it be applied to improve the education which they receive in school? The national ambiguity toward bilingual education also can be expressed in stark bipolar terms. What was once "English-only" has been transformed by opponents of bilingual education into "English for the children", a wicked expression which hides, deceives, and colludes as it obfuscates, deprives, and punishes. Has anyone every heard a parent with a child in a U.S. school say "I don't want my child to learn English"? Has anyone ever heard any advocate of bilingual education in the United States claim that learning English is unnecessary for students? Then what is the source of the perverse claim that children in bilingual education necessarily are being deprived of the opportunity to learn English and that therefore there is urgent need to proscribe bilingual education and proffer only English instruction to these students? It is said that a monkey in silk is still a monkey. "English for the children" is the same old English-only monkey dressed up in the silken rhetoric of child protection. The cruelty in the ruse is that it exploits the parent's natural ambivalence about, on the one hand, having their children succeed by learning a new language, and on the other hand, having a desire also to propagate at least some aspects of the cultural and language heritage which they carry in their bosoms. The English for the children proponents plunge a dagger into the bosoms of the parents in order to yank their children into a brave new world that has no relevant history or memory, all in the service of a misguided goal of homogeneity for a society which since its founding can be characterized as "ethnomorphic", i.e., composed of multiple ethnicities. In the case of English for the children, ambiguity in language policy has given way to false certainty by the simple expedient of lopping off all the logical educational alternatives and insisting on monoculturalism and English monolingualism for the nation even as it enters the brave new world of globalization. Some years back I encountered the distinction between "bilinguality" and "bilingualism". Bilinguality is a characteristic of the individual while bilingualism is a societal phenomenon. I believe that this is a useful distinction because, among other things, it sheds some light on the ambiguity that is characteristic of U.S. language policy. Take bilinguality, for instance. Even some of the staunchest opponents of bilingual education would agree that there is some good to bilinguality. After all, most colleges and universities have "foreign languages" departments, and many liberal arts colleges require foreign language study as part of the requirements for graduation. Most of the nation's high schools offer foreign language instruction. In the state where I live, universities now require foreign language study as an admission requirement for undergraduate study. So bilinguality can not possibly be seen as a bad thing for the individual. The negative reaction is toward bilingualism. Those who oppose bilingualism would have us believe that what is good for the individual is not good for society. What enlightens the individual darkens the society; what is an asset for the person becomes a liability for the collectivity. This negative perspective leads to odd paradoxes. For example, following this line of reasoning, the schools should wipe out skills in the non English mother tongue that students might bring with them to the first grade, only to insist later on foreign language study in high school as a college entrance requirement and for graduation from college. So, the people who turn out to be bilingual in the end of the educational pipeline are not those who seemingly would start school with the advantage of a non English language. Rather, the bilinguals are those students who have the opportunity to study abroad and who are encouraged to learn a "foreign" language. Those for whom a foreign language is not foreign are forbidden from mastering it. In short, what is a great education for the well to do is forbidden learning for the poor and the immigrants. The ambivalence between bilinguality and bilingualism has led to misguided educational practices, poor training of teachers, and generally the tongue-tying of the population at a time when "globalization" seems to be the inevitable trend of commerce and industry. These are just some thoughts by way of introduction to this special issue of the BRJ devoted to Title VII. Hopefully, this special issue will stimulate all of us to reconsider the role and impact of Title VII as the nation struggles to reconstruct its schools to fit the needs of the twenty-first century. Bilinguality, bilingualism, bilingual education, equal educational opportunity, diversity, globalization, and so forth, are all ideas that will not simply go away in the dawn of the new millennium. On the contrary, we can expect them to become ever more salient and contested. References American Heritage Dictionary. (1991). New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Bilingual Education Act. (1968). Public Law 90-247. Fishman, J. (1978). A gathering of vultures, the "Legion of Decency" and bilingual education in the U.S.A. Journal of the National Association for Bilingual Education II(2), 13-16. Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563; 39 L. Ed2d 1, 94 S. Ct. 786 (1974). Schneider, S. G. (1976). Revolution, reaction or reform: The 1974 Bilingual Education Act. New York: Las Americas. Valencia, R. R. (1991). Chicano school failure and success. Research and policy agendas for the 1990s. New York: The Falmer Press.