Raise a child, not a test score: Perspectives on bilingual education at Davis Bilingual Magnet School

Bilingual Research Journal, Spring 2002 by Smith, Patrick H, Arnot-Hopffer, Elizabeth, Carmichael, Catherine M, Murphy, Ellen, Et al

Abstract

This article describes a highly successful bilingual education program at Davis Bilingual Magnet School in Tucson, Arizona. After two decades of bilingual schooling in which children of all language backgrounds study content via both Spanish and English, Davis has developed strong community support through special attention to additive bilingualism/biliteracy and by creating a challenging and nurturing learning environment. By examining the school's long-term success from the perspectives of teachers, families, and dual language immersion students themselves, the study highlights successful bilingual schooling in a manner that acknowledges but goes beyond performance on standardized tests.

Introduction

Dual language immersion programs are increasing in number at a rate unseen in bilingual education since passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968.2 Unlike those early days, however, when research data were largely unavailable, there is presently a great deal of information about bilingual schooling in the U.S. context. Three important lessons learned in 30 years of research are that successful programs: (a) develop over time (August & Hakuta, 1997); (b) respond to local conditions and stakeholders (Brisk, 1998); and (c) are characterized by strong support for the status of and literacy in the minority language (Baker, 2001). As in other cases of successful bilingual schooling (e.g., Brisk, Minaya-Rowe, & Guzman, 2001; Christian, Montone, Lindholm, & Carranza, 1997; Freeman, 1998), these lessons are well attested in the case of Davis Bilingual Magnet School.

The purpose of this article is to tell the story of Davis. The primary aim is to detail the nature of the challenges faced and the conditions of the school's success, so that they may be understood by educators and researchers working in other contexts. Following the inclusionary philosophy and practices that have characterized Davis since its rebirth as a bilingual magnet school, the story is told here from the multiple perspectives of stakeholders who make up the Davis community: students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members.

We mean to highlight the fact, too often forgotten in the push for high test scores, that successful bilingual programs can only be fully understood from a variety of points of view beyond standardized testing. To paraphrase Rebecca Freeman (1998), the success of good bilingual programs is so much more than testing. In addition to the stakeholder perspectives listed above, we examine the case of Davis through discussion of language and literacy instruction, as well as the school's efforts to foster instruction grounded in students' emerging theories of bilingualism and biliteracy (Jimenez, 2000), and to create a research community. Finally, in this time of renewed threat to bilingual education, we also mean to celebrate the achievements of this remarkable and proudly bilingual school.

Context of the Study

Davis Bilingual Magnet School is located in Barrio Anita, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1901, Davis has served families of Barrio Anita and surrounding neighborhoods, most of whom have been speakers of minority languages: mainly Spanish, but also Chinese, Tohono O'odham, and Yaqui. Officially a monolingual English school for the first eight decades of its existence, Davis was also one of the poorest schools in Tucson. Not surprisingly, the dropout and failure rates exceeded those at wealthier, European American-dominated schools, in which children were allowed to study in their first language. In 1981, in response to a federal desegregation lawsuit, Davis became a Spanish-English bilingual magnet school, attended by children of neighborhood families and ethnic majority children from other parts of Tucson. The Dual Language Immersion (DLI) program at Davis is one in which all students, regardless of home language background, receive instruction exclusively through Spanish during their first two years (K-1). The use of English as language of instruction increases in subsequent years but does not exceed a ratio of 70% Spanish and 30% English, as shown in Table 1.

There are other cases of DLI programs increasing the use of the minority language for instruction (cf. Cloud, Genesee, & Hamayan, 2000; Christian et al., 1997). To our knowledge, Davis is unique among dual language programs because Spanish, the minority language, continues to be used for the majority of instruction through Grade 5.

Students from Barrio Anita continue to attend Davis, as do magnet students from other parts of the city. About half of the students qualify for free or reduced school lunch programs. Many barrio students (approximately 35% of the student population) are from Spanish-dominant homes, although almost all begin school with considerable knowledge of English and Spanish. Magnet students constitute approximately 65% of the student population, and most begin school as monolingual or dominant speakers of English. About 70% of the school's 250 students are of Latino heritage, approximately 20% are European-American, 6% are African-American, and 4% are of Native American heritage. The largest single group of students at Davis are third-- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans. Many such families have chosen the school's DLI program hoping their children will regain Spanish and revitalize their Latino heritage. Thus, the DLI program has been instrumental in transforming local perceptions of bilingual education as compensatory schooling (Brisk, 1998) for Mexican immigrants to "enriched education" (Cloud et al., 2000) for all children who wish to become bilingual.3