Now in the fourth and final semester of my Master’s program at Penn GSE, I have had plenty of opportunity to reflect on how my formative educational experiences contributed to the academic success that brought me here.

Previous reflective essays have praised my parents for taking me to the library, critiqued my engagement with high school Spanish, and generally focused on the balance between socio-linguistic privilege and stuntedness that characterizes a monolingual English upbringing. I am understandably the main character in my autobiographies, but context is what gives meaning to any story. For this exercise, I sought to reckon with an aspect of my educational context that I felt had been underexplored: discriminatory practices across my school district that worked in my favor. This is the lens through which I will re-analyze experiences - beginning in upper-elementary school, and continuing into secondary school - that taught me precisely the wrong lessons about myself and my peers. Un-learning those lessons has been my educational project since college, though it wasn’t until researching this paper that I understood just how much I was oblivious to in my adolescence. I will begin by describing what I believed at the time, and then probe the underlying context, ending with a reflection on the tension therein, which my current understanding of language and literacy compels attention to.

By the third grade, I had grown bored with school. Unchallenged, I acted out, and gave my teacher more headaches than I had any right to. Counterintuitively, this earned me reward rather than punishment the following year, in the form of admission into my district’s accelerated program called SWAS. The acronym stands for “School Within a School,” and it accurately describes my schooling experience from fourth grade through high school - the majority of my K-12 public education. We students called ourselves SWASies, and together formed the Nerd Herd; SWAS was sometimes called the Gifted and Talented program, and was actually rebranded as the Gifted and Talented Academy at the high school level. I note these naming conventions to illustrate that mine was an uncommonly explicit tracking system. Not only were my friends and I aware that we had been assembled into a classroom that was just for us - we believed our class was for inherently better students, to such an extent that it might as well constitute a different school than the one attended by students just across the hall. It was hard not to internalize those messages as a child, develop an ego, and overlook one particularly unsettling aspect of the SWAS landscape. In short, my district had approximately as many Hispanic students as White ones, but the same was not nearly true of my SWAS classes, and it is embarrassing how long it took me to question that disparity. To the extent that I gave any thought to the demographics of my surroundings at the time, I could stave off uncomfortable questions with the following flawed thinking: if more of my Hispanic schoolmates were gifted and talented like I was, they’d have done well enough on the placement test to be in my class too. I have come to understand that I was naively trusting a system that was ultimately proven to be unfair, and which both reflected and perpetuated an insidious linguistic ideology: that bilingualism was detrimental to scholarship and school-based literacy. Accepting that SWAS was for me and not my Hispanic peers was a tacit endorsement of that ideology, and a significant starting point for the un-learning I have had to engage in since adolescence.

Years after moving away for college, I began to hear whispers that my old school district was grappling with the idea that their elementary SWAS program might have been racist. I couldn’t help but recognize that the program had been pretty overwhelmingly White, so my initial reaction to the news was that it seemed about right. By not following up to research specifics, I was free to imagine a scenario that was very generous to the district: perhaps they realized that SWAS wasn’t as diverse as it could be, and are taking steps to reform their admissions process. That fiction - based on half-heard rumors and friendly assumptions - was what I intended this reflection to be about. It’s impossible to know whether my classmates and I were really among the most ‘gifted’ in the district, I would muse, going on to speculate about undiscovered talent and the giftedness of children from all backgrounds. However, the misplacement of gifted students of color in my school district was far from hypothetical. In McFadden v. Board of Education for Illinois School District U-46 (2013), the district was found to have violated the Equal Protection Clauses of the U.S. and Illinois Constitutions for operating a second gifted program in parallel with SWAS, called SET/SWAS: Spanish English Transition School Within a School. This program - which did not overlap with mine, and which I hadn’t heard of before last week - “admits only Hispanic children who have passed through the District’s ELL program or are otherwise sufficiently English proficient to succeed in mainstream classes” (McFadden, 2013, p. 31). That is to say, the “T” in SET/SWAS was a misnomer, because these students’ “transition” to English was officially over: they were no longer considered English Language Learners (ELLs). Despite the English proficiency they had achieved, these gifted Hispanic students were segregated from the primary SWAS program, because their previous designation as ELLs made the district doubt that they would succeed in an academically rigorous program that wasn’t bilingual. Therefore, the fact that my SWAS program was 97% White was not (only) the result of unconscious bias or a linguistically-discriminatory admission process, but of deliberate segregation as well (Ford, 2013, p. 191). That finding cost the district 2.5 million dollars.

I’m still reeling from this story, which seems to implicate the definition of literacy held by my school district more than I initially suspected. Their legal defense boiled down to the idea that the students in SET/SWAS had enough English language proficiency for a class where students weren’t designated as gifted, but not enough for a class of gifted students. This presupposes that academically gifted students use language in characteristic ways, and furthermore, that such uses of language can only be mastered by those who have only ever spoken that language monolingually. I argue that the above claim is more about literacy than language, because it concedes that all students under discussion know the same language, but that only some use it in ways that are conducive to academic work. In Gee’s (1991) terms, such students are considered literate because they have mastered the secondary academic discourse of school, by virtue of their acquisition of English from birth. Students who learned (rather than acquired) English at a later age may “consciously know more about” the language, but Gee wouldn’t allow for them to ever be as good at using it to participate in the school’s discourse community (1991, p. 24). That argument should be met with skepticism in any case, but for a school district to rely on such thinking to segregate bilingual, Hispanic students is problematic for another reason: it is probable that many if not most of the students in SET/SWAS acquired English and Spanish simultaneously from birth. To argue that those students are not just as much native speakers of English as I was is a blatantly racist case of (non)native speakering. Phrasing non-nativeness as an identity imposed on these Hispanic students by the institution is a reminder from Aneja (2016) that “idealized notions of native and nonnative speakers … are historically grounded as well as constructed over time through the discursive practices of individuals and institutions” (p. 575). The construction of two SWAS programs was likewise a discursive move by my school district to delegitimize the literacies of their gifted Hispanic students, whose absence from my classes I was made to accept as logical. In fact, their exclusion was unconstitutional, and borne of linguistic prejudice that permeated my adolescent years. While I am grateful for the elementary and secondary education I received, my educational task going forward is to dismantle some of the ideologies upon which it stood.

References

Aneja, G. (2016). (Non)native-speakered: Rethinking (non)nativeness and teacher identity in TESOL teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 572-596.

Ford, D. Y. (2013). Multicultural Issues: Gifted Education Discrimination in McFadden v. Board of Education for Illinois School District U-46: A Clarion Call to School Districts, State Departments of Education, and Advocacy Organizations. Gifted Child Today, 37(3), pp. 188-193. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1076217513509622

Gee, J. (1991). What is literacy? In C. Mitchell & K. Weiler (Eds.), Rewriting literacy: Culture and the discourse of the other (pp. 3-11). New York: Bergin & Garvey.

McFadden v. Bd. of Ed. for Ill. Sch. Dist. U-46, (N.D. Ill. 2013). Retrieved from www.maldef.org/assets/pdf/U-46_Trial_Decision.pdf