Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) is a unique form of bilingual education that has the potential to preserve and develop the heritage languages of emergent bilinguals, foster high levels of bilingualism, and address academic disparities, thereby changing emergent bilinguals’ educational conditions and learning outcomes. Yet, DLBE schools and programs are nested within a broader sociopolitical context which may attenuate the benefits of DLBE. To address the construction of DLBE as a panacea for equity, this study examines a cohort of emergent bilinguals’ academic achievement, middle school course placements, and course grades across 6 school years. The conceptual lens of equity traps is employed to demonstrate how equity is metaphorically trapped within the institutional constraints of schools, specifically master schedules that have courses that range from remedial to advanced. Findings demonstrate that emergent bilinguals in DLBE programs have higher achievement in English language arts (ELA) and math over emergent bilinguals in English as a second language programs. However, emergent bilinguals in DLBE programs also are shielded from advanced‐level electives, reducing future opportunities to learn math and science in high school, demonstrating a unique form of exclusionary tracking. The authors propose a structural matrix that stakeholders can use to examine the equity constraints of DLBE.

The vast majority of research to date on African American Vernacular English style shift has taken the form of qualitative analyses of individual case studies; however, despite its great success, in focusing on individual rather than group style and style shifting, such work by itself is unable to answer key questions about style and style shift at the level of social groups, communities of practice, and broader based communities. Recent quantitative analyses, such as Craig and Washington's (2006) Dialect Density Measure (DDM), have sought to capture stylistic variation at the group level by analyzing dozens of linguistic features meant to represent a dialect, but use of such large numbers of features severely restricts the types of statistical analyses that can be applied to a given data set and therefore limits the utility of the technique. To test whether a smaller subset of features can be used to quantify stylistic variation, we analyzed a sample of 108 sixth-grade students observed in two conditions that differed in formality. Three measures were used to track changes in style, two large-scale DDMs constructed from a set of more than 40 variables and a subset measure that used only 6 variables. Analyses indicate that the larger DDMs were highly correlated with the subset measure, thus indicating that a small number of features can be used to reliably reflect shifting styles.

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