Looking back on her youth growing up in Douglas, Arizona—nestled close to its Mexican sister city of Agua Prieta, Sonora—Laura C. Chávez-Moreno wishes she had had the chance to attend bilingual education classes.

She has had plenty of opportunities since then, including as a researcher who spent several years sitting in on classes and interviewing students and teachers participating in a dual-language program in the Midwest.

It was structured around what some might consider the optimal way to teach languages. Beginning in elementary school, roughly half of the program’s students would be native Spanish speakers and the other half native English speakers. They would all socialize while learning to speak, read, and write both languages, and they would graduate bilingually—a necessity for children whose first language was Spanish, and a cherished opportunity for children whose first language was English.

During her time visiting schools in the district, Chávez-Moreno was interested in observing how the program provided a culturally relevant education to the Latino students who were comprised of native Spanish speakers—after all, she says, the dual language model is rooted in The Chicano movement’s quest for bilingual education. Chávez-Moreno is an assistant professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

But she also saw contradictions, like how students seemed almost tired of the program’s lessons on race and equality by the time they were in high school. Or how its structure got in the way of Latino students getting the coveted “biliterate” endorsement on their diplomas while white, non-Latino students seemingly made it through.

The program shows how schools play a role in reinforcing differences between racial groups, Chávez-Moreno argues in her latest book, “How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America.”

EdSurge spoke with Chávez-Moreno about why she thinks it’s important for educators to take a critical look at how programs meant to help Latino students, even with the best intentions, can fall short — and what’s needed to course correct. (Chávez-Moreno used the term “Latinx” rather than “Latino” throughout the interview.)

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: I found the premise of your book, which contains some criticism of how dual language programs are run, interesting, because they’re usually talked about as this gold standard in language teaching, especially compared to more typical ESL programs.

Laura Chávez-Moreno: The reason (English as a second language) is called subtractive is because it subtracts the student’s home language so that they just replace it with English. It has been the more traditional way of dealing with this “problem” of having non-English speaking students in our classrooms.

So the reason that bilingual education is really used by communities to counter that is because these programs are what are called additive programs. They want you to, well, learn English because we’re in the US, and it’s the dominant language. But they also want you to keep the language that you grew up with, and that your family speaks, etc.

This is why bilingual education programs are really the best type of program for students to get from schools. In fact, my schooling was in Arizona, and as a student I did not have the opportunity for bilingual education. I wish I had.

It’s something that communities really have to fight for, and because of that, there has to be this kind of narrative that they’re very good for students, right? Like idolizing them, or as you’ve mentioned before, setting them as a gold standard, and they really are.

The problem is that there has also been this disconnection of bilingual education from ethnic studies. The Chicano movement also demanded, for example, bilingual education, and then this racially radical idea that students must be affirmed in terms of their culture and their families, etc.

The problem is that bilingual education is sometimes just viewed as a language education program, where they only really only teach Spanish, for example, or they only really teach English, or they’re, for example, sometimes even like, ‘Oh, yeah , they also teach about culture and try to make sure they affirm different cultures.’

But it’s not that it still doesn’t even go far enough, I argue in the book.

I think we talk about race as something that is defined outside of society, and then schools serve students regardless of race or background — that’s something that happens outside the school walls. How are schools part of defining race or racial groups?

Schools create race because race is not something that is just inherent in society. So how is our society (race) doing? It permeates our institutions, and schools are really important institutions in our society. So schools help create ideas about what is race and what are racialized groups in our society.

Why does it matter how we view the Latinx group – is it an ethnicity or is it a race? It is also an important question. One of the things that I argue in the book and in other work is that it matters because it shows us how we think about the concept of race itself. And sometimes we think of it as an inherent category in our society instead of a social construct.

The way we think about the Latinx group, and how it relates to the concept of race, also tells us about how we think about the process of how racial categories are created.

All of this is important for two things: It is important because we need to disrupt ideas that race is an inherent category in our society. Why is it that some groups, for example, experience certain material conditions that differ from others, and why are they not given the resources needed now or historically?

Then it is also important considering the Latinx group itself, because the students are interested in this issue. The students had questions and they noticed some contradictions. One of the things that I think good educators should do is follow the students’ questions about how our society works and what is happening in our society.

You write about teachers having conversations about what defines race and notice that they stopped at physical characteristics. Latinos were also seen as immigrants, rather than including students who were born here. Are there any examples that stand out to you about how schools played a role in defining race or ethnicity?

One of the things that I noticed throughout the program is that there were some individual teachers who took it upon themselves, who really took the initiative, to be able to teach about race in their classroom.

But then it was also really striking that unfortunately sometimes it was really just the individual teachers doing that kind of work instead of it being structured throughout the program. It was the case that, for example, students continued to learn about racist histories, but there was really no teaching about race itself as a construct.

In one case, you write about a teacher calling the black students in the dual language program the “cream of the crop” and feeling that it created a divide among those students.

A racial category exists because it is placed in relation to or in comparison with others. There must be others that are also related or compared to.

It’s important to talk about it, because firstly, that’s how race is created, in terms of allocating resources differently to different racialized groups. But then also the discourse of how you talk about these groups and form them and make them separate through the discourses. In terms of the idea of ​​how the Latinx group was formed, I noticed that it really pointed a lot towards Latin America more than, say, examining the experiences of people from here in the US.

I think one of the reasons it was done just because of the lack of material in Spanish in the Latinx community here in the US in terms of its history. The history of the Chicano movement is mostly in English.

On the program you observed, it was surprising to read that the test for native Spanish speakers to prove their English fluency was more difficult than the test for English speakers to prove their Spanish fluency. And that the students whose native language was Spanish did not have as good academic results as those who entered the program as English speakers.

This is how race is created in the United States. It’s distributing this resource differently to students, because ultimately the racial distribution of who could get the points needed was very much determined along racial lines.

When it comes to academic outcomes, we know that there is still a lot that needs to be done in education and in communities for students who have traditionally been underserved by schools to improve their academic outcomes. We know that it’s actually not just school. It is also part of the society or the city and the state and higher levels.

When we’re still following these logics in schools that are based on flawed ideas about what intelligence is, for example, and then measuring people based on that, it makes sense that you’re still going to get these academic outcomes to be different. You are still using the same methods that have traditionally been applied to show that a specific community is not doing as well.

It is also the case that currently the measures used to test academic achievement are really well thought out and really designed in a way to maintain the dominance of certain communities.

Do you think schools or teachers see themselves as having a role in this kind of critical thinking about race and how they shape it? Especially given that you observed this program during Trump’s first term as president, which was a time of much racial unrest, and it has been published as we enter his second.

I was in the schools that week when Trump won the first election, and it was devastating. But there were many teachers who talked to the students about it and helped them process, answered questions and told them, “I don’t know.” Sometimes just being able to have a dialogue about certain things and validating people’s feelings and fears is a good thing for teachers to be able to do.

One of the teachers I really admired shared something with me that I added to the back of the book. When she was a young teacher, she was really afraid to do things that she didn’t really know the answers to, or how it would be done.

And she said that now that she was a more experienced teacher, had more experience, that she realized that it’s OK for her to say, “You know, I don’t know,” and then learn with the students, and for them to together explore a particular thing that students had questions about.

I think it is something that teachers need to be supported in doing and for them to feel safe with. It really is the best way for teachers to engage in teaching.