The racial and linguistic diversity of U.S. classrooms has drawn attention to the intersecting dynamics of race, racism, and language learning in teacher education. While most studies in this vein focus on teachers, almost no research has focused on teacher educators themselves. Therefore, this study draws on interviews with teacher educators to document how they addressed—or more often, evaded—the topics of race and racism. Participants ( n = 33) were instructors for state-mandated courses on teaching emergent bilinguals for general educators across the state of Massachusetts. Through the lens of poststructural discourse analysis, the findings of this study demonstrate that race-evasiveness is not a byproduct of passive omission, but instead involves active, discursive effort. These findings underscore the importance of individual and collective efforts to disrupt race-evasiveness, but also illustrate the limits of surface-level race-intentionality for advancing antiracism in teacher education.

Research has suggested that U.S. K–12 dual‐language and Seal of Biliteracy programs do not benefit all students equally in their recognition of students’ multilingual competencies. The authors explored the perspectives of high school Seal of Biliteracy graduates: how they conceptualized the seal and the benefits that they had or had not derived from attaining it. Through a framework of critical biliteracies, the authors drew on interview data with Seal of Biliteracy graduates to highlight the dynamics of culture, race, and power inherent to both biliteracy and bilingualism. Attention was given to how biliteracy was defined, curricular framing, and who benefited from having received the seal. Findings revealed that Seal of Biliteracy benefits were often unevenly distributed across Latinx and white participants, yet also demonstrated community building among dual‐language graduates and beyond. The authors provide recommendations for engaging a critical biliteracies approach across district, program, and classroom levels.

With U.S. classrooms increasingly characterized by linguistic diversity, policies mandating teacher training around English learning have proliferated. Recent federal oversight prompted Massachusetts to implement an initiative to endorse its 70,000+ teachers in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI). While policy research has productively emphasized teachers as policy interpreters within such initiatives, almost no research exists on the role teacher educators play in the policy interpretive process. Therefore, this study documents how teacher educators across Massachusetts interpreted and operationalized the SEI endorsement policy. Drawing on document and interview analysis, findings highlight key experiences, contextual factors, and ideological dispositions that informed participants’ policy interpretations. Instructors navigated tensions between their own goals to affirm linguistic diversity and the monolingual orientations produced through the state’s recently overturned English-only policy. These findings demonstrate the affordances of examining the role of language ideologies in policy interpretation, with implications for large-scale language policy initiatives and educational policy interpretation more broadly.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schooling worldwide, compelling educators, researchers, and policymakers to grapple with the implications of these interruptions. However, while the scale of these disruptions may be unprecedented, for many students, interrupted schooling is not a new phenomenon. In this article, I draw insights from the field of Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE) for supporting students who experience schooling interruption. In addition, I argue that the extensive accommodations offered to students in the midst of the pandemic must be preserved for future generations of SIFE students—a population for whom similar accommodations have been historically denied. Through this analysis, I demonstrate the need to interrogate traditional notions of interrupted schooling and the students who experience it. This article offers implications for rethinking interrupted schooling, as well as formal education writ large, toward more equitable and socially just ends.

Recent scholarship reveals how English can be disproportionately privileged in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programming (Cervantes‐Soon et al., 2017; Valdés, 1997). Through a program designed to serve Brazilian (im)migrant populations, this study expands the scope of DLBE research. This study took place in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, which has just emerged from a 15‐year period of English‐only legislation. It explores language status in a context of Portuguese Brazilian (im)migrant experience that has been largely unexplored in the TESOL literature. The researchers argue that there are three main dynamics of equity and language practices that need examination. While dual language teachers highly valued instruction in Portuguese, not all community stakeholders viewed Portuguese as a valuable language, accentuating inequalities in the experiences of children in the classroom. Brazilian immigrant children actively positioned themselves as experts during Portuguese instruction, however, often, they did not enjoy the attention and support that their English‐dominant peers experienced. Finally, Brazilian immigrant students' participation in the Portuguese‐led portions of the day was not conducive to further development of their advanced Portuguese knowledge. Through the combination of these dynamics, Brazilian immigrant children elevated the status of the language in their formal instructional environment, but were not themselves afforded a similarly high status.

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Background/Context After decades of restrictive U.S. language policies geared toward English-only education, recent years have seen a proliferation of dual-language programs, Seal of Biliteracy awards, and bilingual education programming more broadly. The demand for such programming ostensibly suggests growing consensus around the benefits of linguistic diversity—dubbed “The New Bilingualism” by The Atlantic in 2016. However, recent research suggests that the pivot to this New Bilingualism is largely taking place in contexts of privilege, disproportionately benefiting English-dominant, middle- and upper-class communities as compared with multilingual communities where demand for bilingual programming is not “new” at all. Focus of Study This piece explores how recent, well-intentioned expansions in bilingual education programming may actually reinforce historical inequities. Putting forth a framework of idealized language ideologies, the article documents how bilingualism has historically been encouraged for some and denied to others in U.S. education and policy contexts. Research Design Through historical analysis, this article documents how language ideologies overlap with racism and nationalism in educational and policy contexts across key periods of U.S. history and into the present day. Conclusions/Recommendations A framework of idealized language ideologies foregrounds (1) idealized language practices, (2) idealized speakers, and (3) institutional interests, highlighting how these dynamics function to maintain educational and broader social inequities. Applying such a lens makes it possible to simultaneously acknowledge positive expansions of bilingual programming, while also questioning the framing of such programming as “new” or as a panacea for educational inequality. In a time of rapid expansion for bilingual educational programming, this piece demonstrates that even bilingualism can be normatively framed as an idealized language ideology to reinforce problematic language hierarchies. Thus, it is imperative that teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers reckon with these historical dynamics to ensure that educational models designed to ameliorate linguistic inequities do not end up reproducing them instead.