Improving America's Schools Act of 1994

A Historical Essay

Editor's Note: The last reauthorization of Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the Bilingual Education Act) occurred in 1994. For most of its legislative life, Title VII was beleaguered, and advocates found it difficult to maintain a consistent policy framework for the program. The political winds swayed the law in various directions beginning in 1968 and ending in 2001. Ostensibly, Title VII was merged into the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) at that point. The author was a lead player in the last reauthorization of Title VII, which was part of an omnibus bill known as Improving America's Schools Act, the predecessor to NCLB. This essay is an insider's view of the dynamics the author encountered in helping the U.S. Department of Education in this effort. In an important sense, the version of Title VII that emerged from this activity led into a darker period in the history of bilingual education, one in which antibilingual education sentiment was [Page 378]stronger than ever. Hence, this entry describes bilingual education legislation, arguably, at its best.

The author of this entry was invited to submit an article reflecting a mm of information and expert opinion. We acknowledge that parts of it could be disputed or given an alternative interpretation. In several instances, the editors found this approach helpful in more realistically portraying the history and current status of bilingual education in the United States.

The ethnic and linguistic diversity of U.S. schools has grown significantly in the past three decades. This diversity has provided distinct new challenges for schooling efforts. New policy and federal programs, particularly exemplified in Title VII of the 1994 reau-thorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), attempted to address this challenge. This act called for integrated and comprehensive programming based on a new empirical and conceptual knowledge base, which had emerged over several decades. This essay addresses the demographic circumstances of student diversity, the emerging knowledge base, and the related federal educational reform policy changes that I worked on during the reauthorization of the ESEA in 1993–1994. That reauthorization was signed into law in fall 1994 under the legislative title Improving America's Schools Act, often referred to as the All Children Can Learn Act (the predecessor to the present No Child Left Behind Act of 2001).

The summons to change educational practices in the face of continued language minority student under-achievement were not to be ignored, as I came to Washington in September of 1993 as director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA), a senior officer in the U.S. Department of Education. I was immediately called upon to translate such calls for educational improvement related to language minority and immigrant students into program features that might be helpful to policymakers, educators, and the general public. I was committed to this task for several reasons. I will address two of them here because they are important as context for the policy work that I entered into, as I took on this new facet of my career in education. The first rationale was put simply by my eldest daughter, Marisol, around a dinner table as I discussed, with my two daughters and my wife, the invitation to join the Clinton administration in the U.S. Department of Education: “You are always complaining about policy, why don't you go and do something about it?,” she said. At the time, I was a full professor of education and psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and had been serving as dean of the College of Social Sciences at that university. I had built a solid professional career as a researcher and scholar, primarily investigating the early and later schooling of students like me, students who came to school speaking a primary language other than English. Much of that work did in fact provide a critique of educational practices related to these students. However, I had also spent time researching “effective schools”—schools that served these students well. I was concerned at the time that educational establishments were ignoring and even reluctant to utilize these findings, but I certainly did not see myself as a policymaker. Like anyone who has been trained to be primarily a researcher and academic, and has had some success at it, it was difficult to positively perceive a role change that would take me into the highly politicized policy making world, but as Marisol indicated, now supported by my wife and youngest daughter, “Why not give it a whirl?”

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