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The seminal Supreme Court language rights case, Lau v. Nichols (1974) found that the San Francisco Unified School District’s failed to provide adequate and appropriate instructional programming to 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry who did not speak English, which denied them a meaningful opportunity to participate in a public education. In the fields of bilingual education and language policy, Lau is regarded as the national case that changed the legal landscape for bilingual education as an allowable provision in schools for multiple ethnolinguistic groups, the Cantonese-Chinese included.
Lau passed just as mandatory busing for racial integration was being implemented city-wide. In this session, the stories of Cantonese-Chinese teachers, administrators, students, lawyers, and social activists’ illuminate how they intersected the aims of racial integration (busing) with their language rights. Using the framing of negative liberty, which claims that every child deserves the same education is juxtaposed with positive liberty, which asserts that the same education is never an equal education (Berlin, 1958; Thompson, 2013). Implications point to the need for historicizing Chinese language education and to build cross-racial and linguistic coalitions of curious solidarity to transform schools and communities for linguistic and racial equity. 

Contesting Tourism and Global Skills Discourse in Youth Workforce Development: Ethnographic Insights from the Dominican Republic’s Racialized Resort Economies

In this research talk, Assistant Professor Molly Hamm-Rodríguez will discuss findings from ethnographic and youth participatory action research in the Dominican Republic that reveals not only how youth workforce development programs may be tied to unequal labor markets but also how youth themselves negotiate strategic entanglements with tourism. Hamm-Rodríguez is an assistant professor at University of South Florida and CU Boulder 2023 School of Education Outstanding Dissertation Research Award recipient.

Education policy and practice focused on school-to-work transitions frequently link education systems to locally productive labor markets (Dougherty & Lombardi, 2016). As education and employment initiatives become designed to address purported gaps between skills possessed by youth and those demanded by employers, skill-building is positioned as a pathway toward desired outcomes both for individual young people and for social issues more broadly (D’Angelo, 2022). Yet the political economy of globally interconnected labor markets affects how newly acquired skills are differentially valued and remunerated (Brown & DeNeve, 2023). In the Caribbean, the restructuring of the plantation economy to the resort economy (Pantojas García, 2016) maintains dynamics of external dependency that facilitate foreign wealth accumulation through exploitative, racialized labor. This presentation, based on 12 months of ethnographic and youth participatory action research in the Dominican Republic (grounded in 13 years of collaboration), reveals not only how youth workforce development programs may be tied to unequal labor markets, but also how youth themselves negotiate strategic entanglements (Bonilla, 2015) with tourism. Youth actively reconstruct and reimagine the visions for their lives that are so often set forth by others, revealing the affordances of shifting away from employer-centered models that deepen inequality towards addressing experiences of harm that youth experience on the job.

Learn about Hamm-Rodríguez's research in an article in Anthropology News titled "Putting Language to Work in the Dominican Republic". 

When: Wednesday, May 1 at 2:45-3:45 p.m.

Exploring Ethnoracial & Gender Bias in Denver Public Schools' Teacher Evaluation System

In this research talk, Associate Professor Mimi Engel will discuss the analysis of Denver Public Schools’ multiple measure teacher evaluation system with a focus on ascertaining whether aspects of the system may be biased against teachers from marginalized groups. 

• When: Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 2:45-3:45 p.m.

Analyzing Denver Public Schools’ multiple measure teacher evaluation system, Leading Effective Academic Practice (LEAP), became a part of the Teacher Workforce Collaborative’s (TWC*) research agenda in 2021. In conversation with District leaders, we learned that both DPS and other key stakeholders including DPS’ teachers union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA), were interested in an evaluation of LEAP with a focus on ascertaining whether aspects of the system may be biased against teachers from marginalized groups. In collaboration with DPS, TWC members, and other DPS leaders and stakeholders, we developed a Scope of Work for evaluating the extent to which particular LEAP ratings vary systematically by teacher race/ethnicity and gender.

We focus on three aspects of LEAP identified by DPS as areas for analysis and evaluation. These include a “Professionalism” sub-measure, the observation of a teacher’s classroom “Learning Environment”, and the use of “Decision Bands and/or Boxes” to determine final rating outcomes when scores fall between two possible ratings.

The DPS teacher workforce—like most US urban school districts—has a substantial misalignment between the ethnoracial composition of its teacher workforce and the students it serves. For example, in 2018, 13% of DPS students were Black compared with 4% of teachers, and 55% of DPS students were Latine compared with 17% of teachers. This talk draws from a report that is currently under review by our DPS partners. Results and recommendations will be discussed.

*TWC, established in 2018, is a Research-Practice Partnership between DPS and researchers at CU Boulder’s School of Education and University of Virginia