Examines the 1974 Supreme Court case in which a group of Chinese American parents sued the San Francisco School Board on behalf of their children for not providing a special learning environment for Chinese-speaking students.

This book employs a narrative policy portraiture approach to recenter the stories of the Chinese community involved in the Lau v. Nichols court case of 1974. This seminal Supreme Court case ruled that the failure to provide adequate and accessible instruction to approximately 1800 students of Chinese ancestry denied them the opportunity to participate in public education and constituted a discrimination on the basis of national origin. While much has been written on language education policy changes for emergent bilinguals in the US, the perspectives of the key actors involved in the case are rarely heard. This book brings Chinese and Chinese American voices to the forefront, placing the participants within the retrospective social context as they reach their own conclusions about the process and outcomes of the case. It draws upon research in language policy and Asian American studies and invites readers to imagine the social futures and possibilities for what Lau v. Nichols means for the 21st century and beyond. The volume fills a significant gap in narration, representation and retrospective research and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in Asian American studies, bilingual education, educational policy and leadership, as well as teachers, school administrators and policymakers.

In 1925 Adolfo ‘Babe’ Romo, a Mexican American rancher in Tempe, Arizona, filed suit against his school district on behalf of his four young children, who were forced to attend a markedly low-quality segregated school, and won. But Romo v. Laird was just the beginning. Some sources rank Mexican Americans as one of the most poorly educated ethnic groups in the United States. Chicano Students and the Courts is a comprehensive look at this community’s long-standing legal struggle for better schools and educational equality. Through the lens of critical race theory, Valencia details why and how Mexican American parents and their children have been forced to resort to legal action. Chicano Students and the Courts engages the many areas that have spurred Mexican Americans to legal battle, including school segregation, financing, special education, bilingual education, school closures, undocumented students, higher education financing, and high-stakes testing, ultimately situating these legal efforts in the broader scope of the Mexican American community’s overall struggle for the right to an equal education. Extensively researched, and written by an author with firsthand experience in the courtroom as an expert witness in Mexican American education cases, this volume is the first to provide an in-depth understanding of the intersection of litigation and education vis-à-vis Mexican Americans.

Examines, from various perspectives, the school failure and success of Chicano students. The contributors include specialists in cultural and educational anthropology, bilingual and special education, educational history, developmental psychology.

This book brings readers into classrooms and communities to explore critical curriculum issues in the United States throughout the twentieth century by focusing in on the voices of teachers, administrators, students, and families. Framed by an enduring question about curriculum, each chapter begins with an essay briefly reviewing the history of topics such as student resistance, sociopolitical and culturally-centered curricula, curriculum choice, the place and space of curriculum, linguistic policies for sustaining cultural heritages, and grading and assessment. Multiple archival sources follow each essay, which allow readers to directly engage with educators and others in the past. This promotes an in-depth historical analysis of contemporary issues on teaching for social justice in the fields of curriculum studies and curriculum history. As such, this book considers educators in the past—their struggles, successes, and daily work—to help current teachers develop more historically conscious practices in formal and informal education settings.

The book is arranged alphabetically from Academic English to Zelasko, Nancy.