Abstract
Implementing policies relies on their design, the will and capacity of implementors, the organizations within which implementation occurs, and individuals’ interpretations. Despite the fact that families’ decisions are critical to the successful implementation of educational programs, however, few studies examine their sense-making processes. Using life course theories, this ethnographic study examines how historical time and place and developmental timing shape immigrants’ choices for bilingual education. Findings demonstrate that the intersections of time and place (the history/structure of organizations, people, policies) and timing (family members’ composition and developmental needs) shape parents’ interactions with schools, understandings of policies, and children’s pathways toward bilingualism. Such findings have implications for theories about the policy process and for districts with growing immigrant student populations.
Keywords
The most recent U.S. census estimates that almost 25% of children in the United States are Latinos, a demographic and historical change that is largely due to immigration (Hernandez, Denton, & Macartney, 2007). By 2010, children from Latino immigrant households made up the largest percentage of English Learners in U.S. schools (Urban Institute, 2010). Moreover, an increasing number of families from Mexico (the largest group of Latinos in the United States), as well as other Latin American and Asian countries, have settled in Midwestern and Southeastern towns, leading to unprecedented growth in their foreign-born populations (Waters & Jiménez, 2005). School districts in these areas have responded by developing new language policies and programs. In turn, immigrant parents’ understandings of such policies and subsequent decisions to enroll their children in particular programs can be critical to the success of school districts, especially with the increased focus on the achievement of subgroups of students per federal policies like No Child Left Behind. However, little research explores how immigrants understand and take action regarding their children’s education. What shapes parents’ decisions? How and why do they make the choices that they do regarding new policies and programs?
Research on educational policy implementation has underscored that policies do not succeed or fail only because of their design, the will or capacity of teachers and principals, or the organizational system within which implementation happens (Spillane, Gomez, & Mesler, 2009; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002). Another key factor is at play: how all of the people involved understand a policy. Examining the cognitive and interpretive dimension of the political process is critical to analyzing the realization of new policies and programs (e.g., Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007; Coburn, 2006; Hill, 2001; Spillane, 1998, 2000, 2004). However, research rarely explores families’ roles in implementation, including their own sense-making. In general, most studies have overlooked the perspectives and experiences of the people for whom policies are designed (Lewis, 2010; Lewis & Maruna, 1998), despite the fact that their decisions (shaped by their sense-making) can be critical to a program’s success.
Drawing from sociological theories of the life course (Mortimer & Shanahan, 2003) and ground-breaking studies of teachers’ and principals’ sense-making that take a developmental approach (Drake, 2002; Loder & Spillane, 2006), this study posits that families’ life courses affect the ways that they interpret and make decisions about educational policies and related programs. Two key concepts in life course studies include: the historical time and place in which people live and the developmental timing of particular events, or the impact of one’s age and generational status during those events (Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003). Life course sociologists and psychologists typically study how these factors shape humans’ trajectories or pathways as well as individuals’ developmental outcomes. Through grounded theory analyses, this project questioned: How does an immigrant family’s life course shape parents’ sense-making about bilingual education policies and programs? Specifically, how are Mexican parents’ sense-making processes shaped by (a) the historical time and place they live and (b) their own family’s developmental timing?
I have examined these questions as part of a 3-year ethnography of the implementation of a “two-way immersion” (TWI) language policy, with special focus on 18 months of participant observation and interviews with six case study families from Mexico. TWI programs enroll approximately equal numbers of majority language (in the United States, English-dominant) 1 and minority language (e.g., Spanish-dominant) students, with the goal of bilingualism and biculturalism for all students at the end of elementary school (Christian, Howard, & Loeb, 2000). Most TWI programs have been designed because research suggests that this model best advances the academic and linguistic skills of English Learners (Thomas & Collier, 2003), making immigrant families critical policy agents. That is, without the enrollment of minority language–speaking children within the classroom, such programs would likely fail.
Analyses demonstrate that the socio-political time and place that the Mexican families in this study lived—including the demographics of their neighborhood and other district policies—influenced how they found out about TWI. These circumstances intersected with families’ developmental timing, or the ages and composition of family members, to shape parents’ decisions regarding the program. In turn, children’s educational pathways were forged in particular directions, potentially impacting the overall outcomes of the district’s language policy. In the following, I argue for integrating the life course perspective into studies of policy implementation. This may be especially important when studying policies designed for immigrant families, who are shifting their “time and place” and are often in the midst of personal transitions as they strive to make sense of a new school system. Moreover, I argue that the life course perspective extends theories on policy implementation: Not only family members, but also educators—from superintendents to teachers—have agency in the process, and their life courses shape sense-making, which in turn alters the direction of educational policies.
Guiding Frameworks: Policy Implementation, Sense-Making, and the Life Course
Recent work in policy implementation argues that studies must go beyond an examination of outcomes, which hides how the process is uneven and significantly affected by context. Instead, we should analyze “what works for whom, where, when, and why” (Honig, 2006). Building on this framework and studies that use sociocultural (Hamann, Wortham, & Murillo, 2002), bottom-up (Ball, 2006; Hornberger, 1996), and interpretive approaches (Yanow, 2000), I argue that an examination of families’ sense-making and their changing socio-political contexts is central to understanding whether and how policies are carried out (Dorner, 2011; Spillane et al., 2002). In other words, analyzing how parents and students make sense of a policy is necessary because their interpretations will matter for their subsequent decisions and in turn how a policy works (or not). Moreover, employing key concepts from life course theories will illuminate the systemic factors that are critical to sense-making processes and expand the knowledge base on parents’ and students’ roles in policy implementation. See Figure 1 for a depiction of this argument, expanded in the following.
The black box of policy implementation and sense-making.
The Who of Sense-Making: Parents and Students as Policy Agents
I define policy agents as individuals who shape the definition, direction, and evolution of a policy. In some ways, this stretches the traditional meaning of “policymakers” to include both those who create and those who receive a policy. That is, policy agents include state and federal legislators, “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980) like teachers and administrators, and other institutional players like funders and curriculum developers (Burch, 2007). In addition, educational policy agents include those who make choices for particular programs, such as parents and students. Policy research often calls these individuals “targets” and uses metaphors like “policy impacts.” Such terms suggest that families are acted upon, rather than competent actors. In contrast, influenced by the importance of individual agency in life course studies (Elder, 1994), policy agent signifies any actor who takes action in policymaking and implementation processes.
As pointed out by recent reviews of research (Honig, 2006; Spillane et al., 2009), a growing number of scholars have recognized that sense-making is central to politics (e.g., Hill, 2003; Lin, 2000; Spillane, 2004; Weick, 1995; Yanow, 1996). In education, studies have examined the significance of teachers’, principals’, and district leaders’ varying interpretations of policy (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007; Coburn, 2001, 2006; Drake, 2002; Hill, 2001; Spillane, 1998, 2000 are reviewed in the following section). However, despite calls for attending to “public interpretations” of educational policies (McDonnell, 2009) and even though agents’ responses can be critical for implementation (Lewis, 2010), very few studies have examined students’ or parents’ sense-making processes. In the following, I briefly review related research on language programs as well as one study that analyzes students as policy agents.
In the field of language policy and planning, a few studies have examined students’ perspectives on classroom practices or how they are part of putting policies into action through their own reactions and interpretations (González, 2005; Lincoln, 2003; Orellana, Ek, & Hernández, 1999). For example, in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms in rural Arkansas, Latino high school students with diverse immigration and language trajectories felt isolated from the mainstream student body both because they were separated into ESL as well as singled out in their Spanish classes (Lincoln, 2003). Lincoln (2003) suggested that ESL students’ perceptions of schoolwide practices and others’ beliefs about their language use led them to limit their access to advanced work and development in the dominant language of English; this is the very opposite of what ESL policies desire. Another study examined how elementary-aged students responded to a dual language policy (González, 2005). Here, even very young students were attuned to politics, wondering if they could speak Spanish after the state proposition passed. This work demonstrates how context matters for language use and the implementation of policy.
In a different field, taking a cultural sociological approach, Anagnostopoulos (2006) studied teachers’ and students’ views of merit promotion. She found that different groups of students had different reactions to their school’s policy; their interpretations depended on their prior experiences with demotion. That is, students actively made sense of the policy depending on current and prior classroom contexts. In turn, the policy contributed to the social identities that students took on as “true demotes” (who were generally proud of their “failures”), “real students” (who got tripped up and momentarily or wrongly ended up in a classroom of “demotes”), or “promoted students” (who were the “good kids” who had not failed).
Taken together, these studies suggest that recipients of policies will make sense of them based on their varying contexts, experiences, and personal histories. In turn, policies may reshape aspects of students’ lives—like their identities and language use—and affect future choices for education in ways that may upset policymakers’ original intentions. Careful consideration of intersections among agents’ life courses and sense-making is necessary to understand the implementation process and its results.
The How of Sense-Making: Contexts and the Life Course
Studies in sense-making highlight that what a policy means to agents is derived not only from one’s knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes but also from one’s context and the situated learning and interactions that happen in those contexts (Coburn, 2001; Coburn & Russell, 2008; Spillane et al., 2002). Moreover, policy agents’ sense-making processes are not static. They develop over time, just as a policy and its meanings develop across time and place (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007; Dorner, 2011; Hill, 2001). Because of the key ideas suggested here—context, time, and place—I draw from life course theories to examine how systems and practices shape the sense-making of policy agents. This section reviews studies that directly and indirectly apply life course theory and defines the two concepts that emerged as critical in this grounded study: historical time and place and developmental timing.
Historical time and place
Recent studies of teachers and school leaders have suggested that organizational structure, cultural context, state politics, and time itself can shape sense-making and the implementation of educational policy (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007; Coburn, 2001, 2006; McDonnell, 2004). For instance, an examination of educators’ interpretations of “sanction” policies demonstrated that social contexts, including a principal’s skills in those contexts and the organization of a high school’s various departments, shaped the implementation of initiatives designed to help schools avoid negative sanctions (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007). As schools carried out other initiatives over time, teachers’ implementation of different parts of the sanction policy changed (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007). Similarly, a study of teachers’ sense-making processes and actions over one year demonstrated that a school’s culture, informal and formal networks, and authority relations shaped what teachers collectively “took up” from school reform (Coburn, 2006). In short, one’s historical time and place alters sense-making about policy.
The principle of time and place in life course studies foregrounds that individuals’ pathways are “embedded and shaped by the historical times and places they experience” (Elder et al., 2003, p. 12). This idea of place includes peoples’ geographic location, the material culture that exists there, as well as the meanings and values that they associate with the context (Gieryn, 2000). The aforementioned studies suggest that the particular histories, relationships, and politics of a school—the ways that academic departments, social networks, and prior policies have been arranged—affected how educators interpreted and took action about reforms. Thus, taking a life course approach helps to consider how social spaces and historical times shape policy agents’ interpretations. What we do not know, however, is how historical time and place matter for parents’ sense-making processes.
Developmental timing
In a recent essay naming a “Big Change Question,” Loder and Spillane (2006) asked not only how contexts matter for educators’ approach to their work, but also how policy agents’ generation and age matter. Indeed, they have found that teachers’ generational status, race and ethnicity, and marital status shaped whether or not women decided to become principals (Loder, 2005). This work claims that personal and professional biographies interact and affect how educators interpret and take action in their work. Such factors also shape how they implement policy (Drake, 2002).
Drake’s (2002) and Loder’s (2005) studies directly apply life course theory, paying special attention to the relationships between policy agents’ developmental timing and sense-making. The principal of timing in the life course suggests that what happens before and after “life transitions, events, and behavioral patterns” varies “according to their timing in a person’s life” (Elder et al., 2003, p. 12). In Drake’s study, for example, whether or not teachers were experienced or new when a mathematical reform was introduced shaped how they understood and responded to that reform. Likewise, in this study, I argue that a family’s developmental timing—including its composition of people of varying ages at certain points in time—will matter for how they understand and make decisions about educational policy.
In summary, only a limited number of studies has explored the sense-making processes of parents and students, especially as they figure out what new policies mean. Using a life course perspective, I argue for analyzing how historical time and place and developmental timing shape policy agents’ sense-making processes. Such work will enhance our understanding of parents’ and students’ involvement in the policy process and how they make decisions about education. The next section explains the methods used to examine these life course factors: How were Mexican parents’ sense-making processes shaped by (a) the historical time and place they lived and (b) their own family’s developmental timing?
Research Methods
To understand immigrant families’ sense-making processes, I analyzed field notes from 18 months of participant observation, multiple informal interviews, and 11 transcribed interviews with six case study families from Mexico. Because the effects of time and place are critical to the questions asked here, this section starts with a brief description of the research site, Engleville (a pseudonym), and then describes the data collection and analysis procedures.
Engleville and Language Education
In the 2000s at the time of this study, Engleville was a large, diverse, resource-rich suburb of Chicago with public school demographics largely split between three groups: Black (about 40%), White (about 40%), and Hispanic (about 15%). 2 Since the 1970s, immigrants from Mexico had settled here, but in the 1990s, Mexican immigration significantly increased. This made Engleville part of the new “Latino Diaspora” (Hamann et al., 2002) and an important place to examine demographic and educational policy change.
Due to the first wave of newcomers, as well as civil and language rights movements in the 1970s, Engleville’s school district designed a Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) program, much like Chicago schools did in response to Mexican and Puerto Rican immigration (Farr & Barajas, 2005; Judd, 2004). In TBE, English Learners initially received the majority of their content-area instruction (e.g., math, reading, social studies) in their home language of Spanish. They also had intensive English as a Second Language courses. After 1 to 3 years in TBE, students usually transferred to English-only classrooms (Christian, 2006).
Engleville’s TBE model functioned as their educational policy for Spanish-dominant English Learners for the following 20 years. However, as the suburb’s Hispanic population grew 90% from 1990 to 2000, concerns mounted that TBE was not helping newcomers succeed. In turn, a group of parents and educators in Engleville advocated for a two-way immersion program. Following other models, they recommended that TWI classrooms: (a) mix equal numbers of students from English- and Spanish-dominant backgrounds, (b) provide content-area instruction in Spanish 50% of the time through fifth grade, and (c) develop reading and writing proficiency in both English and Spanish as well as cross-cultural competence (Christian et al., 2000). These advocates claimed that TWI was in the best interest of all students and, especially, that it would improve the academic achievement of children from immigrant families. Such a recommendation reflected nationwide policy conversations in the 1990s, with growing federal support for TWI from both the Bush and Clinton administrations (Lindholm-Leary, 2001). In fact, TWI programs have continued to grow substantially, from only a handful in the early 1990s to over 350 by 2010 (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2010).
After some years of debate, Engleville’s school board implemented a pilot TWI project. Two years later, citing positive test score results, the board voted for a new policy that determined “Two-Way Immersion” would be the sole instructional model for Spanish-speaking English Learners in grades K-5. This policy stipulated that elementary-aged children from Spanish-dominant families whose performance on district tests classified them as “Limited-English Proficient” (LEP) would be enrolled in TWI. (English-dominant students enrolled by choice and, if necessary, a lottery.) As demonstrated in other reports (Dorner, 2011), the implementation of the new policy became contentious, as the district had to determine where to place all of the new TWI classrooms. It was within this historical and socio-political context that immigrant parents had to make sense of TWI and choose whether to enroll their children. 3
Research Participants and Data Collection
This report analyzes 18 months of data from six case study families from Mexico, including monthly participant observation, informal interviews, and 11 transcribed interviews. This triangulation of data collected as the TWI policy was implemented allowed for observations of families grappling with educational decisions in real time, as well as conversations where participants recounted their experiences with other bilingual programs and district policies. As Charmaz (2010) notes, “What respondents assume or do not apprehend [which may be observed], may be much more important than what they talk about [in interviews]” (p. 186).
Recruitment and researcher identity
I recruited participants during the year that the school board voted to make TWI the official language policy of the district. At this time, some families had already enrolled their children in the pilot program, while others were considering their options. TWI’s location was in flux for this entire time, so parents were continually making sense of the policy debate and deciding whether or not it was right for their children. To recruit participants, I explained the research project to families in Spanish at public meetings. I also employed snowball sampling and invited families who I knew from previous studies focused on language brokering (Dorner, Orellana, & Jiménez, 2008; Orellana, 2009; Orellana, Dorner, & Pulido, 2003).
Out of the families I knew and met, I purposefully chose six. Three of them had been involved in the prior studies, so we had already developed relationships (Balderas, Fernández, Gutiérrez); three others were new. Parents told me that they favorably viewed this opportunity. They had questions about the new TWI policy and their children’s education, and they viewed me (a White, middle-class, prior ESL teacher who worked at an area university) as knowledgeable. As a way to thank families for their time, I fulfilled a resource role, sometimes working with younger children on homework or answering older children’s questions about high school and college admissions.
I chose participants who shared demographic characteristics: All families were Mexican immigrants, had two parents, and at least two children. They differed across life course experiences, however. Such purposeful variety enabled broader theory building about sense-making, the life course, and policy implementation (Huberman & Miles, 2007; Ragin, 1994). The differences focused on historical time and place and developmental timing: (a) The Gutiérrez, Fernández, and Navarro families had enrolled kindergarten children into the pilot TWI program 1 year before the study started, while the Inez and Pérez families enrolled kindergarten children the year after the policy was set (during the study). Meanwhile, the Balderas family enrolled a child after the study started, into second grade. (b) Some families had siblings who were older than the TWI students, while others had younger siblings in preschool. (c) Given their different ages, the eldest children in some families had attended the district’s TBE program, while some families only had children in TWI. (d) All families qualified for free or reduced lunches, but parents’ education, work, and immigration experiences varied (see Table 1).
Case Study Families
Note. TBE = Transitional Bilingual Education; TWI = two-way immersion.
Field work
In order to understand families’ ongoing sense-making processes regarding TWI, district policies, and education in general, I met them regularly, at least once or twice each month for 18 months (see Table 2). We usually met at participants’ houses for 1 to 3 hours; other times, we met at school board meetings, public forums, and family gatherings, such as picnics at the park. During these visits, I spoke with children and adults—usually mothers but sometimes fathers, relatives, and friends—about their ongoing interactions with the school district, beliefs about education, and experiences with the district’s language policies over time. I recorded over 100 sets of field notes.
Synopsis of Field Work
These interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed; interviews with Sras. Inez and Navarro were integrated into field work conversations and recorded into field notes from jottings.
This column counts the total number of meetings with individual families. I also spoke with more than one family at joint events (e.g., school board meetings and other public forums, noted in second to last row). Thus, adding these 9 joint visits to each family’s total, I met with each family at least 18 (Inez) but no more than 39 (Gutiérrez) times.
Interviews
While participant observation with families was critical for witnessing sense-making, it was also important to understand families’ histories and “member check” (Merriam, 2009). I conducted interviews with mothers from each family at the end of the study (written into field notes) and also transcribed 11 audio-recorded interviews with Sras. Balderas (2), Fernández, Gutiérrez (2), and Pérez; Sr. Balderas; Aunt Inez; and three elder siblings (Estela Balderas, Junior Fernández, and María Gutiérrez, ages 13-15). These conversations covered participants’ immigration stories, perspectives on Engleville, experiences with schooling, interactions with the district, views of the community, and opinions about TWI. The interviews with adults were in Spanish; the interviews with teenagers were in English. Two trained undergraduate research assistants (native Spanish-speaking, bilingual daughters of Mexican immigrants to the Chicago area) helped to translate the interviews, answering questions about colloquial language use.
Data Analysis
Grounded, qualitative projects start with broad, overarching questions often formed in relation to prior theories or research (Creswell, 2009; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Noting gaps in extant studies, this project started with the questions: What shapes parents’ decisions about bilingual education? How and why do they make the choices that they do regarding new policies and programs? As the study progressed, preliminary analyses suggested that the life course shapes sense-making, so the specific research questions became: How does an immigrant family’s life course shape parents’ sense-making about bilingual education policies and programs? Specifically, how are Mexican parents’ sense-making processes shaped by (a) the historical time and place they live and (b) their own family’s developmental timing?
Data analysis followed a constructivist approach to grounded theory (Charmaz, 2003): an iterative process of coding data, reading literature, conducting fieldwork, writing memos, and developing assertions. After open-coding about halfway through the data collection, I found that families’ histories and elder children’s experiences in TBE shaped parents’ beliefs and hopes regarding TWI. Specifically, these analyses compared the experiences of families whose eldest children had experienced TBE (Balderas, Fernández, Gutiérrez, and Navarro) and those whose eldest children started directly in TWI (Inez, Pérez). I created domain analysis charts (Spradley, 1980) to analyze the ways that families’ developmental timing (how many children, age of children) mattered for their sense-making about bilingual education.
Although this first set of analyses suggested that families made sense of TWI given prior policy experiences, not all families who had elder children made the same choices. My next step strove to understand the “negative case” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) of the Balderas family, who did not initially choose TWI for their daughter Jasmine. Following Saldaña (2003), I constructed case study portraits of each family’s education-related experiences and then compared parents’ sense-making and choices across their life course situations: (a) their neighborhood make-up, (b) what was happening in their district and community, and (c) what was happening within the household. In other words, I coded these portraits for patterns across historical time/place and developmental timing.
Findings
To fully understand educational policy implementation, one must examine the sense-making processes of policy agents, including family members. How parents interpret new policies shapes their decisions to sign up children for particular programs, and these decisions can have significant effects on students’ educational pathways. The analyses that follow build theory about how families make sense of policy: Life course factors emerged as significantly shaping parents’ sense-making processes and choices. Specifically, historical time and place and developmental timing intersected and affected how Mexican immigrant parents in Engleville understood and made decisions about TWI. The subassertions of this argument are:
The historical time and place that families lived—changing neighborhood demographics, their school’s language practices and personnel, and local organizations—influenced how parents found out about and gained access to TWI.
These circumstances intersected with families’ developmental timing—including the ages and composition of family members and perspectives on children’s developmental needs—to shape parents’ decisions to choose the program.
These findings demonstrate that historical time and place and developmental timing shaped the sense-making processes of each case study family, no matter when they enrolled their children in TWI. However, one family—the Balderas—chose TWI later than the others. Each of the following sections starts with an explanation of common patterns found across most families and then moves to an in-depth analysis of this negative case (the Balderas).
Historical Time and Place
The time and place that families live—which includes such factors as the demographics of one’s neighborhood, language practices and personnel at area schools, and other organizations like the local library, work, or church—can influence how parents discover and gain access to educational programs. Almost all of the case study families had relatively frequent interactions with middle-class bilinguals in their neighborhoods, local organizations, or at work. Many of them also had close ties with Jefferson Elementary School, the district school that had historically served English Learners. It was through these networks that most immigrant families in Engleville heard about TWI and made sense of it.
For instance, Sra. Gutiérrez learned about TWI from a petition that was circulated after one of the Spanish masses at their local church, St. Mark’s. Sras. Inez and Pérez both discussed TWI with bilingual friends and colleagues at the local Spanish-English preschool where they worked. Sra. Fernández found out from White, middle-class, bilingual neighbors, one of whom had been a dual language teacher at a Chicago public school and who had led the original petition for TWI’s development. The other was a fellow mother she met at the local park while their children played; this bilingual advocate was married to an immigrant and was a professor at a Chicago-area university.
After having found out about the program from these different contacts, organizations like Jefferson Elementary School and St. Mark’s became critical places for many immigrant families to make sense of the policy. The families with older children at Jefferson Elementary School, especially, continued their sense-making there, where there were Spanish-speaking staff members they knew and trusted. For instance, as they decided whether or not to enroll Samuel, their middle child, the Gutiérrez parents spoke about TWI with Jefferson’s bilingual secretary and principal. Sra. Gutiérrez recounted:
Jenny, que se le encarga el programa, dijo que nos beneficiaba a nosotros, los Hispanos. Y dijo ella, que para desenvolverlos bien. . . . Ella dijo, “El que viene de Mexico, dura cinco o sies años para agarrar bien en íngles.”
Jenny, [the principal] who is in charge of the program, she said that it has benefited us Hispanics. And she said that it will develop the children well. . . . She said, “He who comes from Mexico, it takes five or six years to do well in English.”
This quote represents one of many times that mothers in this study had conversations about how the TWI program would work for their children. In the aforementioned conversation, Jenny and Sra. Gutiérrez were discussing the research on developmental bilingual education: Well-implemented TWI programs develop English Learners’ skills in their first language, which they then transfer over to learning their second language of English; within 5 or 6 years they are not only bilingual, but also academically competent in both languages (see Cummins, 1981; Krashen, 2000; Thomas & Collier, 1997/1998).
Another time, I observed Sra. Fernández explain the program in similar terms to two Mexican mothers who were new to Engleville; in part, she was echoing what she had discussed with her White, bilingual, neighborhood friends. In fact, drawing from those conversations, she often worked to convince other Hispanos in town that TWI was best to develop children’s bilingualism:
Les digo, “no, para mí es mucho mejor que sepa de los dos idiomas, a que no más sepa de, de uno.” Y me dicen no, “mira, que en la casa le puedes aprender el español.” Le digo “pero no va a aprender todo, no más aprender si acaso hablarlo. No que para leerlo.”
I tell them, “No, for me it’s better that they know two languages, not just one.” And they tell me, “Look, you[r children] can learn Spanish at home.” I tell them, “No, but you[r children] are not going to learn everything, only how to speak it, not how to read it.”
In short, how the families made sense of TWI was shaped by their particular “time and place,” which included information they received and conversations they had at their local parks, churches, and schools.
The Balderas Experience
Sra. and Sr. Balderas and their eldest daughter, Estela, immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the 1990s, when Estela was about 3 years old. They settled in the mixed-income suburb of Engleville because Sra. Balderas’ sisters lived there. Originally, they rented the second floor of a house in an area populated with mostly African American and Mexican residents. By the time of this study, however, they had purchased a house that bordered an upper-income, mostly White neighborhood. Their family had grown as well, now including: a toddler, a baby, Jasmine (who was entering kindergarten), and Estela (who was entering fifth grade at Wilson Elementary School). This time and place shaped how they interacted with schools and made sense of TWI.
The family’s “place.”
Although Estela, the Balderas’ oldest daughter, had started her schooling in Spanish TBE at Jefferson Elementary School, she had been in general education classes all in English at their neighborhood school, Wilson, since second grade. Estela, Jasmine, and their mother all described Wilson and their current neighborhood as primarily “White” and “English-speaking.” For example, in this following conversation, the mother observed that none of the teachers at Wilson spoke Spanish, which Estela and Jasmine confirmed:
I: 4 ¿Y hay personas en Wilson que hablan español? Are there people at Wilson that speak Spanish?
Sra. Balderas: ¿Español? No. Spanish? No.
I: ¿Nadie? No one?
Estela: Sííí. Está, la maestra de kindergarten. Ms. Smith, hablaba un poquito, pero— Yesss. There is, the kindergarten teacher. Ms. Smith, she spoke a little, but—
Jasmine: No, no! No, no!
Estela: No. Pero no hablaba en la clase. No [agreeing with Jasmine]. But she did not speak in class.
Wilson, in fact, had 60% White, 25% Black, 5% Hispanic, and 20% free/reduced lunch students. At the time of this study, none of the teachers or staff spoke fluent Spanish, and there was only a pull-out ESL program for a handful of students. Most English Learners attended other schools, like Jefferson, which had strikingly different demographics (30% White, 30% Black, 35% Hispanic, and 50% free/reduced lunch).
This lack of Spanish speakers in their neighborhood and school contrasted with their prior housing situation, where Hispanics had previously shared advice and spoken with Sra. and Sr. Balderas about the district’s educational policies, including TWI. As Sra. Balderas explained, in prior years, a friend from the old neighborhood had said to her that TWI “‘Es muy bueno, el programa.’ Dice, ‘Pona la niña y no se la vaya en clases regulares, como lo hiciste con Estela.’” (“TWI ‘is a very good program.’ She says, ‘put the girl [Jasmine] there and she won’t go into regular classes, like you did with Estela.’”) In fact, they intended to enroll Jasmine in TWI; Sra. Balderas spoke about her original intentions prior to registration: “Yo quiero ese programa.” “I want that program.” However, now living in Wilson’s attendance area, the family was more isolated from Engleville’s bilingual networks. Most critical, when they needed to enroll Jasmine in kindergarten, they did not have a Spanish-speaking advocate or educator at their neighborhood school to ask for clarification about registration or TWI.
The family’s “time.”
When Jasmine turned 5 years old, the TWI program was only starting its second, pilot year. As such, parents were not the only ones trying to figure out the new policy; district staff were trying to make sense of it, too. That is, given the newness of the program, it was not immediately obvious—to families or educators, especially those outside of the traditional bilingual schools in the district like Jefferson—how and which students should sign up. In short, the socio-politics of their historical time also shaped the Balderas’ sense-making and access to information.
Prior to Jasmine’s kindergarten year, the family went to Wilson to obtain registration paperwork, as instructed by Estela’s teachers there. They also received enrollment forms for TWI from Jasmine’s Head-Start program. Not knowing what to do, they filled out both forms, trying to indicate—on each—their desire for TWI. Shortly thereafter, the parents received a welcome letter from Wilson, for Jasmine’s enrollment into the regular all-English program. Days later, the family got another welcome letter, this time from Jefferson’s TWI program. However, they had already finished Wilson’s registration process. As Sra. Balderas explained:
Le mandaron dos papeles, uno para ir a la Jefferson y otro ir a Wilson. Le llegó primero el [papel] de la Wilson, y luego yo fui a la conferencia y todo eso.
They [school personnel] sent two documents to her [Jasmine], one to go to Jefferson and the other to go to Wilson. The document from Wilson arrived first, and then I went to the conference [and signed up] and all that.
In other words, the Balderas family received conflicting information from the school district: letters of welcome from two different schools/programs. In turn, they registered Jasmine at the school that sent the first letter. This suggests that not only parents, but also district staff were “making sense” of TWI and who belonged in it during this time; the TWI policy was still under negotiation in its second year as a pilot program. This led to the Balderas family receiving instructions to sign up their English Learner daughter for the regular English-only instructional program.
Developmental Timing: Family Composition and Developmental Needs
While historical time and place influenced how parents learned about TWI, developmental timing subsequently shaped parents’ decisions. “Timing” includes the ages and composition of family members and parents’ perspectives on children’s developmental needs. Parents with older children compared the language programs that their eldest children had experienced to TWI. Families’ sense-making also centered on their perceptions of each child’s needs, ages, and temperaments.
Specifically, the Fernández, Gutiérrez, and Navarro families made decisions about TWI in light of their experiences with TBE. For example, years before the TWI policy was implemented, the eldest child in the Fernández family, Junior, tested “proficient” in English. He was in second grade, and he was required to switch from TBE at Adams to the regular program at his neighborhood school. However, both Junior and his mother wanted him to remain at Adams for TBE’s Spanish language instruction and because “había muchos Hispanos;” “there were many Hispanics (there).” Thus, the transfer was quite difficult. Years later, when the district was implementing the TWI pilot program, these memories impacted their choices for the younger siblings. They wanted TWI because they wanted a more stable elementary school experience; they saw Junior’s transfer as detrimental to his educational outcomes.
Similarly, in Samuel’s first year of TWI schooling, Sra. Gutiérrez compared his experiences to his older sister’s: TBE “era duro.” “It was hard [for María]” because she had “más en español” (“more in Spanish”) at first and then transferred quite abruptly to English only. In contrast: “Y este [TWI], está aprendiendo los dos a la misma vez.” “And in this [TWI program], [Samuel] is learning the two [languages] at the same time.” In short, many parents made sense of TWI in light of their eldest children’s experiences in prior language programs, most often viewing TBE (and especially its transferring of students) negatively in comparison.
Families also considered each child’s temperament and age-related needs as they chose programs. Sra. Fernández knew that her quiet daughter disliked the hour-long commute she had to the pilot TWI program during her kindergarten year. (She commuted to Adams because their neighborhood school at the time did not have a program for English Learners.) As the district decided on TWI’s final school locations, the Fernández family moved into Jefferson Elementary School’s boundaries. Because Jefferson became a formal site for TWI, this ended her commute, and so they maintained Diana’s enrollment in TWI. They would have left it otherwise; Diana “contaba los días,” “counted the days,” until starting at Jefferson. Meanwhile, Sra. Inez was worried about Miguelita’s behavior and believed that TWI classrooms were better for her because classroom management and social conversations would occur in Spanish, Miguelita’s most comfortable language at age 5 and 6. Sra. Pérez, in contrast, fought for her already bilingual daughter to enroll in TWI because she felt that maintaining an equal balance of both languages in her life was critical for her particular development and academic needs (see Dorner, 2010).
The Balderas’ Timing
Just like the other case study families, the Balderas parents initially made sense of TWI in a particular time and place. However, they accepted her placement into “regular” English classes due to developmental timing. This section describes how (a) the composition of the family and (b) the families’ perspectives on Jasmine’s developmental needs shaped their ultimate decisions.
Family composition
The Balderas family considered their eldest daughter’s school experiences when making decisions for their next-oldest, Jasmine. However, in contrast to the previously mentioned families—who thought about the difficulties their children had with TBE and thus chose TWI for younger siblings—the Balderas parents observed that Estela had succeeded in English-focused education, and so they believed that Jasmine would succeed with it too. In addition, the family’s particular composition—having three younger siblings all close in age—constrained their sense-making.
The experiences of the eldest child, Estela, shaped what Sra. Balderas and her husband believed could work for Jasmine. Sra. Balderas reported that she put Jasmine in a “regular program” because she believed she could defend herself (“se supo defender”), just like her elder sister Estela had. Moreover, because of Estela’s experiences at Wilson, they knew and trusted the teachers there. One time, Estela said: “I wanted her [Jasmine] to stay at Wilson, ’cause my teacher was there,” and her mother interrupted: “Oh! Esa maestra, yeah, esa maestra, oh mi God, le ayudó muchi-chísima!” (“Oh, that teacher, yeah, that teacher, oh my God, she helped you so very much!”). Together, they reported that because Estela had successfully completed English-only schooling at Wilson, they felt that Jasmine could succeed there, too.
While having an elder sibling shaped sense-making in this way, having three younger siblings constrained it, especially for Sra. Balderas. With a baby, toddler, and the two elder girls, Sra. Balderas felt that she could no longer attend programs in town that provided access to bilingual advocates and other sense-making resources:
Yo estaba yendo también, desde que naciera ella [Molly], en el Family Center. . . . Ahora que ya nació ella, ya es muy diferente. Ya no puedo. O sea, que uyy!
I was also going, since before she [the youngest daughter] was born, to the Family Center. . . . Now that she is born, it is very different. I can’t any more. It’s like, oh boy!
In short, the family’s composition—having young children that constrained the Balderas’ sense-making opportunities and having an eldest child that thrived in all-English classes—led to the parents’ acceptance of Jasmine’s placement at Wilson, rather than in TWI. However, the Balderas parents’ perspectives on their daughter’s developmental needs also shaped this ultimate decision.
Perspectives on children’s development
Part of developmental timing includes parents’ perceptions of their children’s needs. Estela and her parents both described Jasmine as “shy” or “timid” many times over the course of the study: “Ella es muy tímida, muy tímida.” (“She is very timid, very timid.”) This perception of Jasmine’s shyness at this time of her life shaped her parents’ decision enroll her at Wilson. There, even though she would not get instruction in Spanish, at least she would be near her older, more confident sister.
The following conversation reflects how Sra. Balderas and Estela together discussed and understood Jasmine’s needs during first grade, after Estela had moved to the district’s middle school:
I: ¿Quiso ir a Wilson? ¿Por qué? Jasmine wanted to go to Wilson? Why?
Estela: Yo estaba allí. I was there.
Sra. Balderas: Sí, ella quiere ir. . . . O sea, que Jasmine es bien tímida, bien miedosa. Yes, she wants to go. . . . It’s like, Jasmine is quite timid, quite fearful.
Estela: She needs our help for everything.
In this conversation, both Estela and Sra. Balderas characterized Jasmine’s developmental aptitudes and temperament: She was different from Estela, especially being “timid” and slower. In fact, Jasmine herself pleaded to remain at Wilson. When they had an opportunity to transfer her at the beginning of kindergarten, Jasmine told her mom: “‘Please, Mami, please no, no, no. Yo me quiero quedar allí.’” “‘Please, mommy, please, no, no, no. I want to remain there [at Wilson].’” These perspectives on developmental needs were woven into families’ sense-making about TWI and affected parents’ ultimate decisions about the policy.
Discussion and Conclusion
This analysis has demonstrated how immigrant parents made sense of a new language immersion policy in the context of their life courses. Specifically, families’ historical time and place and developmental timing were two systemic factors that shaped sense-making processes and decisions regarding bilingual education. This study also highlights how immigrant families—in this case, those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who do not speak English fluently—think critically about their educational choices, discuss options with others, and assess children’s developmental needs in making decisions for them. This contrasts with deficit-minded views often held by school personnel. Moreover, where immigrant families live and who gives them information shapes this sense-making and can have detrimental effects on school districts’ outcomes.
Policy Implications
All of the case studies except for the Balderas family enrolled children directly into TWI for kindergarten. How everyone made sense of the policy in context shaped children’s educational pathways and, ultimately, TWI’s effects. For example, Jasmine’s tumultuous experiences—spending 2 years in all-English classes where she understood little—likely affected the measure of TWI’s success into the future. That is, Jasmine missed critical learning opportunities in her kindergarten and first-grade years because she was in an all-English environment that she did not fully understand. Once Jasmine switched to TWI, she could not immediately make up the literacy and content learning that she missed while in the English-only program. This does not bode well for her standardized test scores, which are used by districts and the state for accountability purposes.
Considering the list of developmental differences across the case study families, what sets the Balderas apart is not just one thing. It is not simply that they experienced different neighborhoods or socio-politics or that they viewed their eldest daughter’s experiences in all-English classes positively. Instead, it is how their historical time and place intersected with their developmental timing. The constraints of having many young children, while lacking bilingual advocates, coupled with having an elder daughter who succeeded in all-English classes, all within the historical time of TWI’s implementation, led the Balderas parents to choose an all-English education for Jasmine. In-depth analyses of each case study demonstrate the same thing: It is not simply families’ contexts or perceptions, but rather the combination of cumulative experiences and changing family needs over time that shapes sense-making about policy.
More and more U.S. school districts are serving English Learners from immigrant families. Knowing that parents make sense of reform within particular networks and neighborhoods using particular perspectives on developmental needs can help districts better support sense-making opportunities. Toward this end, districts with new immigrant populations could run focus groups to better understand families’ concerns and situations. Here, they could ask elder children to help compare new options or programs with families’ and children’s previous experiences. Districts could arrange meetings between newcomers and known bilingual advocates from the community. Most important, all district staff—even at schools that do not serve newcomers—must understand new policies in order to implement them equitably.
Policy Agents, Theories on Sense-Making, and Implementation
Rarely have studies in educational policy examined how the ultimate agents—parents and children—make sense of new policies, despite the fact that their decisions can shape the very nature of implementation. In contrast, this study examined the ways that immigrant parents made choices for their children’s language education. Grounded analyses determined that life course factors shape sense-making, thus influencing the decisions that agents make. Weaving life course perspectives into studies of sense-making will open the black box of policy implementation.
It is simply not enough to analyze “what’s implementable” or “what works” in education; studies must explore the intersections of policies, places, times, and peoples (Honig, 2006). Examining sense-making processes of all policy agents is a critical part of this, for the ways that people perceive new policies will affect whether and how they choose to take part (Lewis, 2010). Knowing more about these sense-making processes will help policymakers better address and communicate with the populations for whom they work (Park, Jones, Yonezawa, Mehan, & Datnow, 2009). Findings may also lead to the creation of more effective interventions themselves (Lewis, 2010).
Most significant, this analysis has built theory about families’ sense-making processes and the importance of historical time and place and developmental timing. Integrating a life course perspective into studies of policy implementation is critical. Such a perspective helps to bring forth the how systemic factors (agents’ social context, neighborhood composition, and other educational policies) interact with individual and familial factors (family members’ ages, composition, and perspectives on child development) to shape interpretations and decisions. Such perspectives can be applied not only to families as policy agents, but also to teachers, principals, legislators, and others who likewise create, interpret, and implement policies.
Future Research
Theory-building and grounded studies such as this one are necessarily limited by a small sample size and particular context, as a trade-off in order to more completely understand the nature of sense-making. Thus, future work must continue to build and test the theories discussed here by examining the sense-making and life course of other policy agents—from board members to teachers—in a variety of historical and political contexts. In addition, studies could more closely analyze the sense-making interactions that happen between school personnel and family members, including fathers, mothers, and youth themselves. That is: How do school personnel’s interpretations of policy affect family’s choices, as the apparently different understandings that Wilson school staff and Jefferson’s bilingual principal had about TWI seemed to influence families’ choices in this study? How are educators’ interpretations formed, and how are they communicated to families? Moreover, this study focused on the beginning of the implementation process: How do families make sense of and choose a new program? Future work could follow family members as their sense-making and children’s educational pathways develop over time: How does sense-making change or develop, and what does the changing nature of interpretations mean for the eventual success or failure of a policy, as measured by typical accountability procedures?
In conclusion, despite the fact that families’ decisions may be critical to the successful implementation of educational programs, few research studies examine how parents and children act as policy agents. Moreover, few studies of policy implementation and sense-making take into account the effects of one’s life course. Future work in these areas will help to build more thorough theory on the political process, especially how policy agents interpret, choose, and shape the policies that exist presumably for them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, James P. Spillane, Helen Schwartzman and Dan McAdams for their feedback on this research project and unending support. I also thank Natalie Bolton, Chip Meyer, Joseph Polman, Eric Turley, and the anonymous reviewers for astutely critiquing this work; María Meza Peate and Lucila Pulido for their assistance with this project; and all of the Engleville immigrant families who welcomed me into their lives.
I did not receive any direct funds for this research, which was part of my dissertation study. However, indirectly, over the years, I had support from various assistantships and fellowships from Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy.
Notes
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