Two Recent Commentaries I Co-Authored
Organizing Around Multilingualism in Maryland Schools, and Responding to Anti-Semitism in Anne Arundel County
This month two commentary articles I co-authored were published in Maryland Matters and the Capital Gazette, respectively. Please find the direct links below.
These are both topics central to my identities and daily work. Feedback welcomed, as always.
Emergent Multilingual Students’ Exclusion within Educational Institutions not “Random”, but Systemic
Are the institutional challenges emergent multilingual immigrant students navigate in community college admissions any more “Kafkaesque visions of random bureaucratic dysfunction” (Harklau 2016: 602) than the elite college admissions process characterized by Operation Varsity Blues? Both are scandalous. Both belie higher education’s rosy self-image as a meritocratic ladder of social mobility. Where some scholars and practitioners see “random bureaucratic dysfunction”, I see designed bureaucratic intention.
Antiracist, equitable, and inclusionary praxes are not being thwarted randomly, but systemically. That actually makes me hopeful. I don’t know how to reform randomness. I do know how to reform systems.
Reform isn’t enough, though. Education policy in the U.S. over the last seven decades has consistently revealed the “limits of liberalism” (Baum 2011). We need to renovate and reorient. Lots to do.
