Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is an interesting read as it examines the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols (1974), which involved Chinese students whose primary language was not English, as a basis for arguing that such a case in America, which advocated for a fairer approach towards bilingual students, was also relevant to stir a national debate in America about bilingual education. Bilingualism presents the dilemma of whether students can integrate into Anglo-American culture without giving up the diversity of their native languages, or whether American policies will favour multilingualism.

A review with the following minor revisions will refine the arguments. Could you revise the paper to avoid broad statements? The arguments of an academic paper appear more credible if the general reference is replaced with a specific one. I have included three examples below with suggestions on how to make the general claim more detailed. Such changes, in addition to strengthening the overall discussion, help ensure that the paper continues to refine the definition of the arguments.

p. 3, line 125. 'School districts across the country were required to uphold new federal regulations regarding bilingual education.' Provide examples of school districts as evidence for your argument.

p. 3, line 133. 'Historians often say that periods of political progress are followed by periods of 133 backlash and regression.' This sentence can be strengthened by quoting a historian who also discussed the response to political progress.  

p. 5, line 125. 'Due to those limitations, the authors instead advocated for the pluralist model of 215 bilingual education, in which students from different cultural backgrounds could create  “integrated bilingual-bicultural classrooms [that would] facilitate that sharing [of culture].” Mention the authors to show who is saying what clearly.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your time and valuable feedback on my manuscript. I greatly appreciate the reviewer’s constructive suggestions, which have helped strengthen the paper’s specificity and scholarly rigor. All revisions are now incorporated in the resubmitted version, with new details highlighted in yellow. Below, I address each point raised in turn.

Comment 1:

p. 3, line 125. 'School districts across the country were required to uphold new federal regulations regarding bilingual education.' Provide examples of school districts as evidence for your argument.

Response 1:

Thank you for this suggestion. I have added concrete examples of major school districts and cases that implemented bilingual mandates following Lau v. Nichols, including:

• New York City (ASPIRA v. Board of Education, 1974);
• San Francisco Unified School District (Lau Consent Decree, 1976);
• Brentwood and Patchogue-Medford in New York (Cintrón v. Brentwood, Rios v. Read, 1978);
• and the statewide litigation United States v. Texas (1982).

These additions appear in Section 2 (lines 131-139).

For example, New York City entered the ASPIRA consent decree on the 29th of August, 1974… statewide litigation in United States v. Texas (5th Cir. 1982) required Texas and its districts to ensure bilingual/ESL services.

Comment 2:

p. 3, line 133. 'Historians often say that periods of political progress are followed by periods of 133 backlash and regression.' This sentence can be strengthened by quoting a historian who also discussed the response to political progress.  

Response 2:

I completely agree. I added two authoritative sources to substantiate this historical pattern:

• Carol Anderson (2016), who writes that “the trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement”; and
• Michael Klarman (2004), whose work on Brown v. Board of Education documents how progress often spurred institutional backlash.

These appear in Section 3 (page 4, lines 144–148).

As historian Carol Anderson observes… Legal historian Michael J. Klarman likewise shows how landmark rulings such as Brown catalyzed organized resistance that reshaped subsequent policy debates.

Comment 3:

p. 5, line 125. 'Due to those limitations, the authors instead advocated for the pluralist model of 215 bilingual education, in which students from different cultural backgrounds could create  “integrated bilingual-bicultural classrooms [that would] facilitate that sharing [of culture].” Mention the authors to show who is saying what clearly.

Response 3:

This section of the text has since been removed in response to Reviewer 2's comments, but all other references to "authors" in the text are now explicit in citing the specific source and author name(s).

To avoid confusion about the scale of the changes since the last version was submitted, I would like to make clear that the current version of the manuscript has been significantly revised since the prior version in response to both reviewers. All of the yellow highlights in the current manuscript reflect these revisions, but most of those changes were not made in response to this reviewer; many of the changes were made in response to the other reviewer, who suggested more comprehensive edits that required larger changes.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a conceptual paper with a clear argument that is timely, interesting, and relevant. However, there is a vast omission of information related to research and theory over the past 20-30 years since Lau v. Nichols was decided. Of the most relevant, the establishment and remarkable increase of dual language (or dual immersion) programs is not even mentioned. These programs have a number of objectives, including providing multilingual education for English speakers, integrating English learners with English dominant speakers, and increasing the length of language education provision from 3 or so years to potentially 8th grade (i.e., all of elementary/middle school). In fact, San Francisco is one of the places where great gains were made in regards to dual language program offerings in Chinese, Spanish, and other languages. (Some of this is captured in the 2009 documentary "Speaking in Tongues.") Additionally, there is a vast amount of literature related to the "gentrification" of these dual language programs; in other words, the idea of providing language education for students already privileged with English fluency, inadvertently prioritizing largely white, middle-class families over the language rights and educational needs of English learners. Another conversation missing from this piece is any engagement with ideology, extending beyond the binary of assimilation vs. multiculturalism in relation to stance about the purpose of language education. For example, students identified as speakers of languages other than English are commonly known in education as English learners or even emergent bilingual students; limited English proficient (LEP) has long been considered an insulting and deficit-oriented term for referring to these students. Finally, one of the strangest points missing is the idea of how important it is for these types of judicial decisions and policies to be enacted/enforced by the executive branch, i.e., the federal government, often via the Office of Civil Rights. While there is a mention of the current Trump administration at the conclusion of the article, there is no engagement of how likely/unlikely it is for any of the recommendations to take place in the foreseeable future. Scholars like Gary Orfield have tackled at length what the role of the executive branch and even the politics of the judicial branch (i.e., the makeup of the Supreme Court) have on how much judicial decisions can be upheld or state or federal legislation enforced. He and others have discussed a similar undoing of desegregation policy over the years. In sum, while the policy suggestions at the conclusion of the article are valid, they lack in substance, do not provide examples of what is/not working in specific locations, and how realistic they are in the current federal climate. This is not say that we (advocates, teachers, researchers, citizens) should not fight for improvements to education for language minority students, but that these recommendations would be more helpful if the current political situation was taken into account.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf