The role of bilingual education in Arizona has been the topic of litigation this year, as state schools Superintendent Tom Horne sued school districts that use dual-language models to teach English to students for whom it’s not their native language.
Horne argued the models violate a 2000 voter-approved measure which required those students to be taught in English immersion programs. Even though a judge dismissed that suit, a new one has been filed, which is still pending.
The issue of — and controversy surrounding — how best to teach English to students who don’t already speak it is a long-standing one in Arizona. And it’s something Laura Muñoz has studied in depth.
Muñoz is an assistant professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; her debut book is called "Desert Dreams: Mexican Arizona and the Politics of Educational Equality." The Show spoke with her earlier about her research, and asked how far back she was able to trace the question of how best to teach English to this population of students.
Full conversation
LAURA MUÑOZ: This question goes all the way back to the 1860s. In 1871, Arizona's territorial Legislature created a public school system. It was co-sponsored by Estevan Ochoa, who was the territorial legislator from Tucson, and Gov. Safford, Anson P.K. Safford, was known as the Stafford Ochoa Act and that particular public school act required English language training.
So it was understood that there were schools already in existence in Tucson in the vicinity and in other areas of what we now consider the state of Arizona where folks were already operating small community or day schools. And oftentimes that education in those schools was taking place in Spanish. So when the, when the territorial Legislature endorsed this territory-wide schooling act, it required English to be taught.
MARK BRODIE: What was the thinking behind making that requirement?
MUÑOZ: The thinking had to do with this new, this new population. As Anglo Americans moved into the territory and became part of established Mexican communities. There was this question of language and how do they communicate with one another? What should be the official language of the territory?
English was an important language for American politics, but Spanish was the predominant language of the citizenry. Anglos spoke Spanish. Most people in the region were multilingual, speaking Indigenous languages. Traveling literally across the entire South, not, not only from Mexico up north, all the way to St. Louis, Missouri, but also far West into California. There were so many different languages spoken, Spanish and English became the two predominant languages because those were the languages of the two colonial nations, Mexico and the United States.
BRODIE: So at what point did this really become a controversy? I guess in the, in the sense that maybe English speakers wanted all students to be mostly taught in English and if they weren't going to be, then they maybe had to go to different schools.
MUÑOZ: Well, in the 1870s, the territorial county superintendents of education are reporting back to the territorial governors and the territorial governors reporting back to the federal government in Washington, D.C. And in those reports, they're talking about the need to teach English to the population. So this is an issue from the creation of a U.S. government within the region.
They don't let go of this issue. It becomes a consistent issue that's, that's reiterated with, you know, each new governor, each new set of territorial legislators. They're always discussing this question of the English language. In fact, they called it a Mexican problem and that's the term that teachers and superintendents were using when they would talk about the Spanish-speaking student population.
Now, one of the ways that this, this issue of language became negotiated is that Mexican or Arizona families, as I call them, decided particularly in Tucson to invest in the creation of private schools and also Catholic schools and in those schools, which had a much higher attendance, than for example, the Tucson public schools. I wanna say something like 500 to 1,000 children of Spanish-speaking heritage were attending the Catholic diocese schools in Tucson, whereas only a couple hundred were attending the public school in Tucson in the 1870s and 1880s. And that's because Mexican American parents were sending their children to schools where bilingual education would be valued and would be taught.
BRODIE: It sounds like you can really make an argument that the origin of Arizona school choice is based on bilingualism.
MUÑOZ: I would say yes. And what's interesting, too, is that, that this idea that, that parents would have control, local control of schools was actually written into the original school laws.
Initially, parents who lived within a 2-mile radius could create their own school district. And so the teacher that would get hired in that public school, whether it was a ranch school or a school near a mining community or a school in a, in what we think of as major metropolitan areas like, like Phoenix nowadays. The parents would form the school board and then they would hire their own teacher and then they would negotiate with the teacher how school would be taught.
BRODIE: It seems as though there was a difference of maybe strategy in Tucson versus other places, maybe in the Phoenix area, Tempe, other, other places in the central part of the state when it comes to bilingual education. First off, is that a fair assessment and if so any sense of why that might have been?
MUÑOZ: Well, I think in Tucson, because it's an established community in the 1860s and ‘70s, and it has a fairly wealthy Arizona population, that Estevan Ochoa, for example, represents. It has the financial, economic and political capacity to put together and argue for private educational institutions.
In other parts of the state, communities are still in the process of being made. And so places like Phoenix do not have established communities, do not have established religious institutions. They will not have established religious schools or colleges until much later. So folks in Phoenix, folks in St. Johns, folks in Flagstaff, folks in Wickenburg are approaching the question of bilingual education and operating within the state regulations.
There's no formal bilingual education program per se, but a teacher who's hired in the local community specifically to teach Spanish-speaking children is going to adapt or adopt some kind of bilingual education training program. How are you gonna teach children who can't communicate with you and with whom you cannot communicate if you're not using more than one language.
BRODIE: It sounds though that there wasn't necessarily a consensus as to how best to do this, right? Like how best to teach non-native English speakers, how best to speak English and study the rest of their subjects, even at that time.
MUÑOZ: No, there was no consensus on how to actually go through the process of teaching a child, another language. There is consensus on the on the ideologies of the time period that children should be taught to speak English because this is an, this is Arizona territory, and Arizona territory is part of the United States.
