Selling and resisting English-medium schooling on Milwaukee’s multilingual Near South Side: A typology of choice schools’ marketing strategies Journal website: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/ Manuscript received: 12/29/2020 Facebook: /EPAAA Revisions received: 9/27/2021 Twitter: @epaa_aape Accepted: 9/29/2021 education policy analysis archives A peer-reviewed, independent, open access, multilingual journal Arizona State University Volume 30 Number 28 March 8, 2022 ISSN 1068-2341 Selling and Resisting English-Medium Schooling on Milwaukee’s Multilingual Near South Side: A Typology of Choice Schools’ Marketing Strategies Andrew H. Hurie Carroll University United States & Deborah K. Palmer University of Colorado-Boulder United States Citation: Hurie, A. H., & Palmer, D. K. (2022). Selling and resisting English-medium schooling on Milwaukee’s multilingual Near South Side: A typology of choice schools’ marketing strategies. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 30(28). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.30.6359 Abstract: Extant research has emphasized the importance of information to help families of English learner-identified children to navigate school choice structures, and raised critical questions about the information that is made available through school marketing. At a time of increasing tension around school choice and the rapid expansion of certain forms of bilingual education, we argue for the importance of documenting language minoritized parents’ experiential knowledge as one means of combating choice-based exclusion. Drawing from theories of racial capitalism, language ideologies, and language policy, we analyze charter and voucher school websites and interview data from a nine - month critical bifocal ethnography on the intersections and tensions between bilingual education and school choice policy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our findings identify six marketing strategies that choice schools employed on Milwaukee’s Near South Side, a http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/ https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.30.6359 Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 2 place with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking, low-income Latinx families. We also present one working-class Mexican father’s narrative of choosing a school for his child as an example of the ways in which parents actively resist the racializing logics embedded within choice-based, marketized school systems. The article provides policy agents with a typology to help generate additional, place-specific analyses of the marketization of language education in multilingual communities. Keywords: bilingual education; racial capitalism; school choice; marketization Vender y resistir la escolarización en inglés en el Near South Side multilingüe de Milwaukee: Una tipología de la estrategia de marketing de las escuelas de elección Resumen: La investigación existente enfatizó la importancia de la informaci ón para ayudar a las familias de niños identificados como aprendices de inglés a navegar las estructuras de elección escolar y planteó preguntas críticas sobre la información que se pone a disposición a través del marketing escolar. En un momento de crecie nte tensión en torno a la elección de escuela y la rápida expansión de ciertas formas de educación bilingüe, defendemos la importancia de documentar el conocimiento experiencial de los padres como un medio para combatir la exclusión basada en la elección. A partir de las teorías del capitalismo racial, las ideologías lingüísticas y la política lingüística, analizamos los sitios web de las escuelas chárter y de vales y entrevistamos los datos de una etnografía bifocal crítica de nueve meses sobre las intersecciones y tensiones entre la educación bilingüe y la política de elección escolar en Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Nuestros hallazgos identifican seis estrategias de marketing que las escuelas de elección emplearon en el Near South Side de Milwaukee, un lugar con altas concentraciones de familias latinas de bajos ingresos que hablan español. También presentamos la narración de un padre mexicano de clase trabajadora sobre la elección de una escuela para su hijo como un ejemplo de las formas en que los padres resisten activamente las lógicas racializadoras incrustadas en los sistemas escolares mercantilizados basados en la elección. El artículo proporciona a los agentes políticos una tipología para ayudar a generar análisis adicionales, específicos del lugar, de la mercantilización de la educación lingüística en comunidades multilingües. Palabras-clave: educación bilingüe; capitalismo racial; elección de escuela; mercantilización Vendendo e resistindo ao ensino de inglês no multilíngue Near South Side de Milwaukee: Uma tipologia de estratégia de marketing de escolas de escolha Resumo: A pesquisa existente enfatizou a importância da informação para ajudar as famílias de crianças identificadas como aprendizes de inglês a navegar nas estruturas de escolha da escola e levantou questões críticas sobre as informações que são disponibilizadas por meio do marketing escolar. Em um momento de crescente tensão em torno da escolha da escola e da rápida expansão de certas formas de educação bilíngue, defendemos a importância de documentar o conhecimento experiencial dos pais como um meio de combater a exclusão baseada na escolha. Com base nas teorias do capitalismo racial, ideologias linguísticas e políticas linguísticas, analisamos sites de escolas charter e vouchers e entrevistamos dados de uma etnografia bifocal crítica de nove meses sobre as interseções e tensões entre educação bilíngue e política de escolha escolar em Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Nossas descobertas identificam seis estratégias de marketing que as escolas de escolha empregaram no Near South Side de Milwaukee, um lugar com alta concentração de famílias latinas de baixa renda e falantes de espanhol. Também apresentamos a narrativa de um pai mexicano da classe trabalhadora de escolher uma escola para seu filho como um Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 3 exemplo das maneiras pelas quais os pais resistem ativamente às lógicas racializantes incorporadas aos sistemas escolares mercantilizados e baseados em escolhas. O artigo fornece aos agentes políticos uma tipologia para ajudar a gerar análises adicionais específicas do local da mercantilização do ensino de idiomas em comunidades multilíngues. Palavras-chave: educação bilíngue; capitalismo racial; escolha da escola; mercantilização Selling and Resisting English-medium Schooling on Milwaukee’s Multilingual Near South Side: A Typology of Choice Schools’ Marketing Strategies Over the past three decades, myriad market-based education reforms have flourished in the US (Scott & Holme, 2016). For example, when Betsy DeVos began her tenure as U.S. Education Secretary, she expanded the Obama administration’s promotion of school choice via charter schools to further privatize education through federal support of publicly funded private school vouchers. Yet the sustained resistance of community groups and teachers’ unions has largely moved the official Democratic platform toward a renewed support of public education (Meckler, 2019). Across school sectors, many language-in-education policies and practices operate from capitalist logics of competition and economic value. This trend is apparent in the marketization of bilingual-bicultural education (BBE), especially as two-way dual language (TWDL) programs proliferate across the country (Valdez et al., 2016). TWDL is a program model for bilingual education that explicitly includes English-dominant students alongside their language minoritized peers, with a stated goal of bilingualism and biliteracy for all students (Howard et al., 2018). Critical scholars and multilingual communities of color have raised concerns about the contemporary TWDL expansion and its detachment from the race radical demands of prior BBE movements (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Flores, 2016), as bilingual schools serving high concentrations of students of color face continued threats of closure (e.g., Flores & Chaparro, 2018). For decades, struggles around bilingual education and school choice have been waged in the U.S. city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Beginning in the late-1960s, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Chicanx activists fought for and implemented developmental BBE, an enrichment model with a goal of sustained bilingualism and biliteracy for language minoritized multilingual students, to replace the English-medium, and largely remedial, instruction that prevailed in the public schools. Although the district now uses the labels of one-way and two-way dual language instead of developmental bilingual education, its contemporary definition of dual language reflects a similar commitment to promoting “the development of language, literacy, and content in English and Spanish from kindergarten through grade 12, enabling students to achieve proficiency in both languages” (Milwaukee Public Schools, 2020). Throughout this article, we use the term ‘BBE’ to emphasize the continuities between contemporary Spanish/English language programs and the social movements that brought these programs into existence over a half-century ago. Milwaukee is also home to the oldest urban school voucher program (Witte et al., 2014), known officially as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). In general terms, school vouchers (as well as additional policy mechanisms such as state-funded private school scholarships and tax credits) allow qualifying families to apply public funding toward private school tuition (Chen & Moskop, 2019). As such, they have been a flashpoint in struggles over school privatization. This article analyzes data from a nine-month critical bifocal ethnography (Weis & Fine, 2012) carried out by Andrew on the intersections and tensions between BBE and school choice in Milwaukee. Critical bifocal ethnography is a multilayered approach to ethnography that examines the Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 4 interplay between everyday discourses within a place and the broader social, cultural, historical, and economic structures that partly shape the conditions of possibility within that place. Focusing on Milwaukee’s Near South Side, we explore relationships between choice schools’ (i.e., MPCP- affiliated and charter schools’) outward facing discourses related to language education and multilingual learners, and the ways that some language minoritized parents in Milwaukee have used their experiential knowledge to make strategic decisions about schooling on an educational terrain not of their choosing (Pedroni, 2007). Specifically, we pose the question: What alignment (or misalignment) exists between choice schools’ marketing strategies in multilingual communities, and minoritized parents’ decision-making about the language of their children’s schooling? Drawing from theories of racial capitalism and language ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000; Robinson, 2000), our findings analyze choice schools’ websites and their selling strategies in an area of the city with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking, low-income Latinx families. Crucially, this work follows Aggarwal (2018) in refusing the suggestion that families on Milwaukee’s Near South Side are duped into choosing charter and voucher schools. At the same time, we recognize that school choice is structured as a “three card monte” (Chapman & Antrop-González, 2011, p. 789) to withhold or re-present certain kinds of information, and thus minoritized parents must navigate exclusionary systems in hopes of finding a school that (partly) matches their own understandings of quality, at times making do with hostile and subtractive school environments (Joseph, et al., 2017). At other times, such conditions compel parents to withdraw their children and seek schooling elsewhere, as we will demonstrate below through the example of Mr. Paredes, a working-class Mexican father (a pseudonym, as are all individual school names in this article). We therefore underscore the importance of language minoritized families’ experiential knowledge as a necessary counterbalance to choice schools’ language program marketing strategies. Ultimately, we argue that the selling strategies of choice schools largely worked to undermine the radical origins of BBE in Milwaukee, and thus demonstrate a misalignment with the Near South Side’s multilingualism. The article contributes a multilayered analysis of the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of school choice within this context, and provides policy agents, or “individuals who shape the definition, direction, and evolution of a policy” (Dorner, 2012, p. 464), with a typology to analyze choice schools’ marketing strategies and local language education policies. Literature Review Partly in response to white supremacist educational policies such as English-only instruction, intentional segregation, disparate allocation of funding, and emphasis on industrial training, many Mexican origin communities across the U.S. Southwest have long sought private schooling to maintain religious practices, develop bilingualism and biliteracy, contest assimilationist ‘Americanization,’ and promote academic achievement (Degollado et al., 2019; San Miguel, 2013). Some of these multifaceted motivations for seeking private schooling have tenuous affinities with market-based approaches to education, which have historically emphasized freedom of choice and competition through a radical shrinkage of government (e.g. Chubb & Moe, 1990; Friedman, 1955). While more recent justifications for school choice reforms have adopted a language of racial equity (Gooden et al., 2016), competition and parents’ logical decision-making are often proposed as key mechanisms to enhance educational equity within this perspective. Still, the actual implementation of school choice policies and their interrelations with language education remain understudied (Bernstein et al., 2021). In this section, we review literature that explores school choice policies and their implications for language minoritized communities. Specifically, we synthesize scholarship that Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 5 analyzes barriers to and production of official school information (often referred to as the ‘supply side’ of educational marketing in economic discourse). We then review scholarship that documents the educational aspirations and sensemaking of language minoritized parents as they engage with school choice policies (also labeled the ‘demand side’ of school choice). Barriers to School Choice Information and EL-Labeled Students Among studies of school choice, a growing body of research indicates varying degrees of underrepresentation of EL-labeled students in charter schools (e.g. Buckley & Sattin-Bajaj, 2011; Mavrogordato & Harris, 2017; Stern et al., 2015). A lack of quality information in multiple languages has been identified as a central phenomenon contributing to inequitable access to charter schools, especially for parents who are not comfortable speaking English (Mavrogordato & Stein, 2016; Winters, 2014). Indeed, Welner (2013) points to some charter schools’ provision of materials only in English as an exclusionary mechanism for language minoritized families. Buckley and Sattin-Bajaj (2011) signal an ‘information gap’ affecting parents, as well as the lack of incentives or requirements for charter schools to enroll EL-labeled students and students from economically exploited families. The dearth of official information for multilingual families becomes even more pronounced when considering the cumbersome structuring of choice-based education systems. Drawing from a range of social science literature, Chen and Moskop (2019) argue that complex markets like choice- based school systems require “active efforts by organizations and professionals to help people learn how to do exchanges” (p. 13). They argue that a lack of organizational assistance plays a central role in the failure of school choice proponents’ promises of educational equity. Collectively, these studies point to a general underrepresentation of EL-labeled students in various choice schools across the US, as well as a lack of official information for multilingual families. We now offer a brief review of research on choice-based school marketing, or the official information that is made available to parents, students, and families. School Marketing and EL-Labeled Students Coinciding with the choice-based restructuring of schooling that emerged after the landmark Brown v. Board I ruling in 1954 (Aggarwal, 2018), U.S. schools across all education sectors have adopted marketing strategies to attract students amid increasing competition. Some common school marketing practices include advertising on billboards or radio, mailing flyers, providing incentives for referrals, participating in school fairs, and creating branded materials with school logos (DiMartino & Jessen 2018; Gewirtz et al., 1995; Jabbar, 2016). Like for-profit advertising, some of these marketing strategies produce misleading or deceptive information about schools (Chen & Moskop, 2019; DiMartino & Jessen, 2018; Rosenbloom, 2010). Further, as Jabbar (2016) finds, school leaders may try to ‘game the system’ by using marketing to screen, select, and exclude students, including by not marketing their school out of fear of attracting students who they assume would lower the schools’ standardized test scores. School websites have become a ubiquitous aspect of school marketing for disparate audiences, and critical scholarship has documented their role in reinforcing educational inequalities. For example, Wilson and Carlsen (2016) analyze websites from charter schools across the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and conclude that the websites served to simultaneously brand the school and reinforce differences between schools, thereby contributing to patterns of increasing racial segregation. Hernández (2016) found that two charter management organizations prominently displayed images of students of color on their websites, yet the written texts largely evaded direct questions of race and racism, and instead deployed deficit discourses about communities of color for the implied audience of donors. Rather than an inconsequential aspect of education, these studies demonstrate that school websites actively participate in the construction of racialized knowledge of Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 6 schooling, and like other aspects of marketing, constitute “an extremely valuable indicator of other highly significant issues in the new, competitive schooling landscape” (Olson Beal et al., 2016, p. 2). Studies that examine the marketing of language education programs have highlighted tensions between promoting linguistic diversity in schools and reifying the systemic privileges of white and wealthy English-speaking families. For example, Turner (2018) interviewed administrators at two mid-sized public school districts in Wisconsin that were engaged in marketing diversity to dissuade families from leaving the districts through an interdistrict transfer program. While the marketing strategies and accompanying policy changes occasionally resulted in more inclusive programming like two-way bilingual education in one district, Turner (2018) argues that administrators and school board members in both districts ultimately reified whiteness by emphasizing the benefits of racial and cultural diversity for white and affluent families. Similar patterns have been documented in the marketing of Utah’s expansion of Spanish/English language programs across the state (Valdez et al., 2016). Even in states with long histories of Latinx-led bilingual education programming, school choice policies have shifted bilingual school administrators’ perspectives and practices toward neoliberalized framings of education as competition, and school leaders’ roles as marketers who cater to their ‘customers’ (Bernstein et al., 2021). Related tensions were apparent in Kim and Dorner’s (2020) analysis of the websites of six school systems in Missouri. The researchers demonstrate that the districts’ multimodal messages ostensibly valuing racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity also included implicit narratives of competition and deficit framings of communities of color, yet one district honored the inherent importance of family and community cultural and linguistic diversity. Collectively, the studies highlight tensions in school districts’ marketing of language programs, which often upheld white supremacy, capitalist accumulation, and English hegemony. Latinx Parental Sensemaking about School Choice and Language Education Programs An extensive body of research has documented parents’ perspectives and school choosing processes (e.g. Bell, 2009; Holme, 2002; Pedroni, 2007; Roda & Wells, 2013), yet comparably little of this scholarship foregrounds the sensemaking of Latinx and/or language minoritized parents in relation to language education (Frankenberg et al., 2017). However, some studies have made important initial contributions, often comparing parents from different ethnolinguistic communities and their discourses related to selecting bilingual schools (e.g. Shannon & Milian, 2002; Whiting & Feinauer, 2011). Pearson et al. (2015) document the case of a public two-way dual language school in Colorado, and suggest that Latinx and white parents selected the school because of the administration’s parent education efforts and middle-class interest convergence around bilingual education. Analyzing data from a three-year ethnographic study in the U.S. Midwest, Dorner (2012) describes the life courses, family composition, and historical circumstances that influenced Mexican immigrant families’ decisions to enroll their children in a school district’s two-way immersion program. These studies attest to the importance of attending to Latinx family and community funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005), whereas some school choice scholarship tacitly positions parents solely as recipients or consumers of other people’s knowledge (i.e. official information). In contrast, and following the robust tradition in the fields of bilingual education and critical studies (e.g. Baquedano-López et al., 2013), we understand Latinx and language minoritized parents as knowledge holders with substantive ideas to guide their children’s schooling. The research outlined above has pointed to market-based reforms’ limited access and information for EL-labeled students and families. Moreover, the information that is made available through marketing can be misleading or superficial (DiMartino & Jessen, 2018; Lubienski, 2007). To our knowledge, research has yet to explore the kinds of language program information made Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 7 available through school privatization and how this relates to longer histories of Latinx-led educational struggles and contemporary parent activism. Accordingly, this article seeks to bridge the analytical divide between the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of school choosing. We understand these as dialectic and mutually-constitutive, such that school marketing partly shapes parental sensemaking, and parents also always exert agency in the process, even when placed in subordinate ‘consumer’ positions based on their economic capital and proximity to whiteness. In the following section, we synthesize theories of racial capitalism, language ideologies, and language policy. These are helpful because they offer a critical lens to view the racialization inherent in capitalist market processes (like school choice) as well as their intersections with language and its regulation. Conceptual Framework Racial Capitalism Market-based policies like those associated with school choice are rooted in capitalist orientations to education (Scott & Holme, 2016). In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson (2000) explains that capitalism’s possibilities and enclosures began with Europeans’ racialist epistemologies seeking to organize lifeworlds and exploit labor. The possibilities of private property and capital accumulation necessitated the enclosure of commonly-tended land and the severing of connections between this land and its human (and more-than-human) inhabitants so that the labor of the latter (now cast as biologically inferior) could create surplus for the owning class. Capitalism then became a world system only through Occidental colonization and its profound and incommensurate violences (Byrd et al., 2018). Stated differently, white supremacy has sustained capitalism since its inception, such that “capitalism is racial capitalism” (Melamed, 2015, p. 77, italics in original). Within this perspective, race and racialization are at the core of all subsequent iterations of capitalism (Robinson, 2000). Neoliberalism has often been used to name the current historical iteration of capitalism. It emphasizes the supremacy of the market, the privatization of public goods, and individual consumer citizenship, although there is variation in the alliance of cultural and political groups that adhere to neoliberal economic paradigms (Apple, 2017). Within the field of education, neoliberalism has nurtured an “austere pedagogy” (De Lissovoy, 2015, p. 15), with tecnified and punitive logics routinely and differentially applied to economically exploited students of color. Critical scholars have questioned the ways in which the mechanisms of school choice and accountability through standardized testing have undermined Euro-Western notions of democracy (e.g. Apple, 2017). Further, racial capitalist critique helps to explain the underlying dynamics of marketing across school sectors in an era of neoliberalized schooling. As noted in the literature reviewed above, the barriers to school information and the problematic information that does circulate via marketing, participate in the predictable yet not inevitable privileging of white and wealthy English-speaking families (Benjamin, 2020). Multilingual education has been subjected to the globalizing shifts of neoliberalism. Duchêne and Heller (2012) theorize that earlier discourses around multilingual education emphasized “pride” stemming from national, cultural, or ethnic identities. Increasingly, these justifications have been subsumed into discourses of “profit,” which support multilingual education for competition in a globalized knowledge society. From a perspective of racial capitalism, the shifting emphasis from pride to profit is in fact organized through white supremacist logics, which have operated throughout the creation of underfunded bilingual education “basements” and their conversion to “boutique” TWDL programs (Flores & García, 2017). Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 8 Language Ideologies and Language Education Policy We also draw from work on language ideologies to analyze the interconnections between the racializing mechanisms of school marketization and their particular manifestations with respect to bilingual education. Early work on language ideologies explored individuals’ sensemaking of their language use as well as a language’s inalienable connection to its users (Silverstein, 1979). Irvine and Gal’s (2000) definition emphasizes a broader set of sociocultural relations: “[T]he cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (p. 5). Contention between dominative and counter-hegemonic ideologies points to the moral and political interests in Irvine and Gal’s (2000) definition, with dominative language ideologies signaling the language-related beliefs, feelings, and practices that serve the interests of groups currently wielding economic, social, and political power (Martínez, 2013). Counter- hegemonic language ideologies, on the other hand, resist these framings and offer alternative discourses that often name power and seek to transform inequitable power relations. We look to Gee (2012) to define “discourses” in relation to ideologies. “Big D” Discourses, according to Gee, are generalized ideas that circulate in society of which we are often unaware; they are culturally embedded ways of being, doing, and making sense; this is not unlike our definition of ideologies. “Little d” discourses, for our purposes, are the actual words and images on the websites, the turns of phrase and organization of material for consumption. Departing from the dominative/counterhegemonic binary, Ruiz (1984) articulated three distinct orientations toward language: language-as-problem, language-as-right, and language-as- resource, advancing the third, language-as-resource, as a potential way forward for bilingual education in the US. The dominative language ideology, or Discourse (Gee, 2012) of English hegemony, i.e. the idea that English is superior in importance to all other languages while all other languages pose a problem, prevails in education discourse and language education programming in a U.S. context (Macedo et al., 2003). In particular, research has documented and variously theorized the overwhelming presence of English hegemony within U.S. bilingual education (Flores, 2016; Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000; Palmer, 2011) as well as the long-standing counter-hegemonic efforts of civil rights movements for bilingual education such as Milwaukee’s struggles to establish a bilingual language policy with developmental BBE programs. Yet research has also documented the tendency of the language-as-resource orientation, proposed by Ruiz (1984) as a potential resolution to these conflicts, to fall prey to neoliberal, market-based discourses (Ricento, 2005). Katznelson and Bernstein (2017) argue that dominative language ideologies are not immutable and indeed adapt based on changing interests: “When discourses of neoliberalism, global human capital, and linguistic instrumentalism are put into the service of a language as resource orientation, their narrow construal of ‘resource’ in solely economic terms eclipses the myriad other benefits of learning and speaking more than one language” (p. 22). Beyond adaptability of dominative and counter-hegemonic language ideologies, the multiplicity of language ideologies remains an important construct in the literature, at times reflected in tensions between individuals’ embodied and articulated language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2010; Martínez, 2013). At the same time, these multiple ideologies cannot be separated from imperial histories and the multifaceted ways that individuals and groups take up, reconstruct, and resist their social positions and societal meta-stories about their lives (Degollado, 2019). Language education policies, the implicit and explicit rules for language use and instruction that are policed in classrooms, schools, and schooling systems, are intimately tied to the ideologies in the communities in which they develop, which in turn are related to larger histories of racial capitalism (Allard, 2017; Iyengar, 2014; Ricento, 2005). Our analysis takes an ecological perspective toward language ideologies and language education policies, embracing the complex network of Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 9 relationships - and mutual interdependence - between languages and the social-political contexts for language users across time and space, implicating individual, classroom, and community choices and moments as well as explicit policies operating across schools, districts or states (Allard, 2017; Dorner, 2012; Hornberger, 2003). In this analysis, we particularly examine the relationships of interconnection between the larger city-wide policies of BBE and school choice, choice schools’ outward-facing policies toward language education within their walls, and one family’s self-described policies about language and education for their child. Methods Critical bifocal ethnography is a research approach that analyzes the interplay between broader political and sociocultural processes—including racial and economic formations—and the everyday discourses that circulate within a particular school or community setting (Weis & Fine, 2012). The nine-month critical bifocal ethnography from which we drew data included over 150 hours of participant observation at a bilingual public school in Milwaukee, 16 semi-structured interviews with teachers, staff members, and administrators from the focal school, seven focus groups with focal school students, one focus group with focal school parents, five oral history interviews with people who either participated directly or experienced firsthand the movement to launch developmental BBE in the city, geospatial mapping, and document analysis. For the present study examining choice schools’ marketing strategies, we reiterate our guiding question: What alignment (or misalignment) exists between choice schools’ marketing strategies in multilingual communities, and minoritized parents’ decision-making about the language of their children’s schooling? We analyzed the websites of choice schools in relatively close proximity to the focal school, drawing from research on Latinx parents’ school choosing processes, as well as the larger data set to confirm and interrogate findings. Consistent with the layered approach of bifocal ethnography, we now offer a brief description of the city of Milwaukee and the area of our analysis, highlighting some of the broader historical, political, and sociocultural processes relevant to our discussion of choice schools’ marketization of language education. The Milwaukee Context Milwaukee is the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Potawatomi Nations (Noodin, 2017). Despite its designation as “the most foreign city” in the US at the end of the 19th century (Gurda, 2018), Milwaukee resembled other places in the emerging U.S. settler state in its tolerance of European multilingualism and violent yet always incomplete subtraction of Indigenous languages and cultural practices (Iyengar, 2014). Anti-Blackness and Black resistance were/are also acutely present (Jones, 2009; Trotter, 2007). We do not mean this to be a flippant statement about these complex histories; rather, we seek to acknowledge some of the enduring struggles that partly inspired widespread Latinx resistance to white supremacist schooling in Milwaukee. Since the arrival of 100 Mexican laborers to the Pfister-Vogel Tannery in 1922 (Rodríguez & Sava, 2006), the spatial arrangements of Latinx peoples have been intimately structured by the racial capitalist exploitation of migrant labor. Many of the early Mexicans and people of Mexican descent arrived in Milwaukee to work in the city’s factories, tanneries, railroads, and foundries, occupying homes on the Near South Side, which were being vacated by working-class white ethnics who sought a better life in the suburbs (Rodríguez & Sava, 2006; Rodríguez & Shelley, 2009). Similarly, Puerto Rican migrant laborers began to settle in economically poor neighborhoods on the East Side in the late 1940s, but since this area became a target for urban renewal in the 1970s (Rodríguez & Sava, 2006), many Puerto Rican families moved to the Near South Side. Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 10 Resisting systemic subordination, Latinx-led social movements in the 1960s and 1970s sought better employment, housing, and educational opportunities (Miner, 2013; Rodriguez & Shelly, 2009). In education, after several Latinx-led uprisings and sustained community organizing against the inferior schooling conditions for Latinx students, the Milwaukee school board adopted a developmental model as the district’s official approach to BBE in 1976 (Báez et al., 1980; Peterson, 2017). In this manner, Spanish-English bilingual education in Milwaukee responded to community demands partly emanating from the focal area of this study, long characterized by high concentrations of Latinx-identified residents, economic poverty, and multilingual households. Over the past decade, the area has experienced increasing racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, with significant populations of Rohingya, Somali, Burmese, and Hmong families moving there (Miner, 2018). Milwaukee’s Near South Side has increasingly been targeted for choice school proliferation, although the earliest iterations of school choice policies focused primarily on predominantly Black communities. For example, after several unsuccessful attempts by the white conservative Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson to promote earlier school voucher legislation, various African American politicians, community activists adhering to Black Nationalist principles, and white conservative power brokers formed a tentative coalition to pass the MPCP in 1990 (Miner, 2013). Since its inception, the program has grown to include 28,978 students (WDPI, 2019), which would make it the third-largest school district in the state (WDPI, 2020). According to Levine (2016), largely because of the MPCP, Milwaukee now has the highest percentage of Latinx-identified students enrolled in private schools out of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US. Voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee have been successful in recruiting large numbers of students in part because of the public school system’s failure to institutionalize humanizing pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2014) for all students, but especially Black students and other students from historically marginalized communities (Holt, 2000; Pedroni, 2007). While several traditional private religious schools entered the MPCP between 2013 and 2017, the bulk of choice school expansion in the Near South Side was attributable to brand new schools and established ones opening in new locations (Hurie, 2020). Since 2013, voucher school expansion occurred in conjunction with 2011 Act 32, which allowed for higher incomes for Milwaukee families and eliminated enrollment limits and geographic requirements for participating MPCP schools. The proliferation of choice schools also coincides with the elimination of geographic restrictions on independent charter schools through 2015 Act 55 (Kava, 2017; Pugh, 2017). Almost all of the voucher and charter expansion during this time period positioned new choice school branches in close proximity to bilingual public schools, which could thus be understood as a mechanism of enclosure seeking to increase voucher and charter schools’ ‘market share’ by drawing students away from the public schools. Crucially, all of the new choice school branches promoted English-medium instructional models. Data Sources Within the 32 census tracts that approximate Milwaukee’s Near South Side, there were 20 choice institutions in total, including 13 voucher schools (eight Catholic, two Lutheran, two non- denominational Christian, and one non-sectarian), and seven charter schools (two authorized by the public school district, two by the city’s Common Council, and three by the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee). We consulted publicly available electronic sources, including website descriptions of school histories, mission statements, academics, and student recruitment pages, as well as digital documents such as school curriculum guides (see Table 1). After examining the webpages’ network of hyperlinks and tabs, we created a final digital archive of 66 focal documents with written text and Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 11 images that were particularly relevant to the choice schools’ marketing strategies. Thus, many of the focal webpages included the ‘home’ or landing page of the school, as well as brief descriptions of the school curriculum or reasons why parents should select the school. The amount and length of the documents varied by school, likely in relation to the available resources and priorities of each school (Kim & Dorner, 2020). We uploaded these focal documents to NVivo 10, a qualitative data management program. Table 1 Choice School Information School Name Descriptors Focal Webpages Semillas Charter authorized by city Home, About Us Elevation Public Schools Charter authorized by city Home, Milwaukee Home The STEM Network Charter authorized by public school district Home, Academics Venceremos Charter School Charter authorized by public school district Who We Are, Academics Stronger Together Charter authorized by UWM Top 10 Reasons, Academics, Curriculum Guides Starward Academy Charter authorized by UWM About, Our Program Prairie Academy Charter authorized by UWM About, Elementary School Success Institute Voucher, non-denominational Christian Home, Academics St. Galgani Voucher, Lutheran Home, Curriculum St. Cassian Voucher, Catholic Academics, About Us, History St. Abigail Voucher, Catholic Home, Curriculum Kingdom Come Voucher, Catholic Home, About Us, Academics St. Ephraim Voucher, Catholic Home, Our School, Academics St. Magnus Voucher, Catholic Home, Academics Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 12 School Name Descriptors Focal Webpages St. Claude Voucher, non-denominational Christian About, Why Our School, Statement of Beliefs St. La Salle Voucher, Catholic Home, About Us, MPCP St. Giuseppe Voucher, Catholic Home, Academics, Curriculum St. Bernadine Voucher, Lutheran Home, About St. Daniel School Voucher, Catholic Home, Curriculum Determinación High School Voucher, non-sectarian Home, About The focal participant, Mr. Paredes, was one of nine parents and grandparents who were interviewed as part of the larger ethnographic project, in which Andrew spent nine months at one of the bilingual public schools on Milwaukee’s Near South Side. The nine adults shared a range of reasons for selecting different schools for their children, including a school’s proximity to their home, school size, and religious orientation. In this paper, we have selected Mr. Paredes as a focal participant because he most clearly emphasized the role of language in his decision-making around school selection. During participant observation at the school, Andrew regularly conversed with Mr. Paredes during the times that both volunteered in a classroom at the bilingual public school. His experiences and insights support our efforts to unite what is often framed as the ‘supply side’ and ‘demand side’ of school choice. Data Analysis Starting with a broad examination of the relationships between BBE and school choice policies, both historically and currently, within Milwaukee, the analytic process took place throughout the inquiry and included coding data, integrating categories, and writing analytic memos. We combined inductive coding in which the analytic codes emerged directly from the data rather than from preconceived hypotheses (Miles et al., 2014), with a consideration of the broader political and sociocultural structures that dialectically inform the everyday discourses and actions within individual schools (Weis & Fine, 2012). Inductive coding yielded 31 preliminary topics or ideas that formed the basis of a codebook. Throughout the study, we refined and consolidated codes, thus allowing for more explanatory and inferential codes (Miles, et al., 2014). For example, in the analysis of choice schools’ promotional materials, we included the code Spanish Use, which we defined as “refers to the use—through images and writing—of the Spanish language.” Although this definition does not sufficiently address boundary-making in the naming of languages (García & Wei, 2014), it helped us to conceptualize choice schools’ use of Spanish as Adornment, a code that we developed later in the analytic process to refer to “the use of Spanish in a superficial and decorative manner, as opposed to the language forming a central part of official social practices at the school.” The coding process thus helped us engage certain contradictions below the data’s discursive surface (Madison, 2012). Following Olson Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 13 Beal et al.’s (2016) assertion that school marketing serves as a highly visible indicator of deeper and more covert phenomena occurring through market-based education reform, we use the website descriptions to extrapolate the choice schools’ language program models. However, it is possible that the schools’ website descriptions differed from their actual language program implementation, the latter of which was outside the scope of our research. While we conducted inductive coding with the digital documents, we also sought to employ a critical bifocal lens in data analysis, which Weis and Fine (2013) explain as the “deliberate placement of ethnographic and narrative material into a contextual and historic understanding of economic and racial formations” (p. 224). A second analytic process thus included putting the typology into conversation with theories of racial capitalism and language ideologies in order to engage the broader economic and racial formations that interacted dialectically with choice schools’ selling of predominantly English-medium schooling. We looked for implicit and explicit messages about race, class, and language in our codes and data, and then wrote analytic memos linking the marketing strategies to key theoretical concepts. In our understanding, it was not enough to simply describe a pattern of English hegemony in choice schools, but rather we sought to make sense of this pattern through the unique historical and sociocultural context represented in this place. While conducting the study, we employed various strategies to ensure the trustworthiness of our analysis, including member checking with research participants like Mr. Paredes, triangulation, and peer debriefing (Mertens, 2020). In the next section, we describe six approaches that choice schools employed. It is important to note that while we conceive of these strategies as distinct ways to market language education, several choice schools in the focal area seemed to employ various strategies and thus did not fall into just one category of selling. In this manner, our typology accounts for the multiple ways that these schools articulated their language-in-education programs while drawing attention to these same programs’ dominative (e.g. assimilatory and monolingual) ideological bent. Our Positionalities Andrew I am a middle-class white man in my late 30s, and I worked as a teacher assistant, bilingual teacher, and school administrator in one of the few bilingual charter schools in Milwaukee for nine years. During this time, I worked with dedicated colleagues to implement culturally-relevant instruction, yet also developed skepticism around choice advocates’ claims of the failure of Milwaukee’s public schools. As part of the experiential knowledge of many bilingual teachers in the city, I knew of the English-only orientation of many choice schools, and I sought to revisit these issues through critical ethnographic research at one bilingual public school on the Near South Side. My lack of time spent in private schools in Milwaukee is a limitation to this study, while my long- term connections to the city, and my Milwaukee-based professional and personal networks constitute strengths. As a resident of the city, I recently engaged in the school selection process for my own child, which helped me to appreciate some of the tensions and complexities that parents face, although I did so through various privileged social positions, and thus my raced and classed experiences differed greatly from those of the parent participants at the focal school. Deb I am a middle-class white woman in my 50s originally from the U.S. Northeast. I have worked as a teacher, researcher and advocate in the field of bilingual education since the mid-1990s, primarily in California, Texas, and Colorado. My relative lack of familiarity with the Milwaukee context offers both affordances and limitations, as I bring to this analysis an outsider’s perspective Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 14 and insights drawn from a range of different bilingual education spaces, while depending on my co- author to ensure this analysis reflects Milwaukee’s unique history and context. Collectively, we analyzed data for this study and discussed its relevance to the field of bilingual education. Findings Choice Schools’ Marketing Materials, Bilingual Program Models, and Community Multilingualism: A Typology of Approaches In this section, we analyze the choice schools’ advertising approaches and their apparent instructional program models, specifically in relation to the surrounding community’s multilingualism. Our analysis suggests that the choice schools engaged in six approaches related to the Near South Side’s multilingualism: omission, adornment, English support, ambiguity, guarded inclusion, and development. Table 2 provides the frequency and examples of each strategy: Table 2 Choice Schools’ Marketing Strategies on Milwaukee’s Near South Side Marketing Strategy % of Choice Schools Employing Strategy* (little-d) discourse Example Omission 30 Kingdom Come: “Students participate in religion, math, reading, language arts, science, social studies, art, general music and physical education classes.” Adornment 30 St. Bernadine: The principal “hosts monthly ‘Café con la Principal’ as a way to plan activities for the school with parents as the driving force.” English support 25 St. Daniel School: “English as a Second Language (ESL) support is offered and bilingual assistants are in the youngest classrooms to support student language and emotional development.” Ambiguity 15 Stronger Together Charter School: “The curriculum is designed to develop students who become proficient in the English language while maintaining facility in Spanish.” Guarded Inclusion 20 STEM Network Charter School: “3 Years of Spanish (or Spanish Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers).” Development 5 Venceremos Charter School: “Our Bilingual and ESL programs go hand in hand as we implement a developmental model that allows students to learn in their native language, Spanish, while providing them with an incrementally increasing and fully supported instruction in English.” * The percentages do not total 100% because some choice schools engaged in multiple marketing strategies. Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 15 As noted above, these approaches to advertising and organizing their curricular programs were not mutually exclusive, and several schools leveraged multiple strategies. Omission Treatment by omission made no direct reference to the multilingualism of the surrounding community in key program documents. Rather, this selling strategy highlighted schools’ adherence to state and national standards, core subject areas, co-curricular offerings in contrast to MPS, and religious content in voucher schools. Approximately 30% of schools adopted this approach, and included both charter and voucher schools. For example, as one of its program highlights, the charter school Prairie Academy advertised its “well-rounded instruction in reading, math, language arts, science, social studies, physical education and music.” The omission of any reference to languages other than English in primary advertising or curricular descriptions suggests that several of these schools offered educational programs of “non-recognition,” without specialized English language support or educators qualified to teach multilingual students (García & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 30). In this manner, the choice schools’ tacit embrace of the Discourse/ideology of English hegemony represents an explicit rejection of the demands leveraged by the Latinx-led movement for developmental BBE in Milwaukee. Given the parameters of school choice policy and the neoliberal logics of market competition, the 30% of schools that deployed the strategy of omission seem to have the autonomy to maintain overtly English-only schooling despite their location within the boundaries of the school board’s BBE policy mandate. Adornment This approach refers to the use of Spanish in a superficial and decorative manner, as opposed to the language forming a central part of official social practices at the school, and could be understood as a language-specific strategy related to Gewirtz et al.’s (1995) discussion of ‘glossification.’ Approximately 30% of schools engaged in this strategy, which spanned both charter and voucher schools. Adornment occurred in various ways. Several schools in the focal area had names in Spanish, but the descriptions of their curricula did not include substantial instruction in Spanish. In fact, several of these schools maintained English-only programming with little accommodation for their multilingual learners (i.e. essentially “sink-or-swim”). Even the schools in this category that offered English as a Second Language (ESL) support to their multilingual students did not emphasize nor advertise this service to potential families. Adornment was also evident in the imagery employed by schools. On its curriculum webpage, St. Galgani School posted a photo of a light-skinned girl with brown hair and brown eyes holding up the picture book (translated from English), Olivia la princesa (Shaw, 2011). However, no part of the school’s written description of its curriculum referenced bilingual education or the Spanish language. Adornment also took the form of a Spanish word or phrase interspersed among English content. For example, the Elevation Public Schools national charter chain (which, like others in this category, offered English-only programming) displayed four of its “core values” in English and one additional core value in Spanish (i.e. responsibility, respect, empathy, persistence, and esfuerzo). We contend that the fifth core value, esfuerzo [effort], was an adornment because on the website of another Elevation campus in an area of the city with a majority African American population, the same charter network only listed the four core values in English. Thus, the superficial inclusion of Spanish in this case could be understood as a marketing scheme to attract Latinx families from the surrounding community. Yet despite the relative visibility of the Spanish language, these schools’ English-medium program offerings suggest that their missions of cultivating spiritual piety and/or academic excellence adhered to an ideology of English supremacy. As with the strategy of omission, Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 16 the strategy of adornment allowed schools to leverage school choice policies to explicitly reject public BBE policy mandates in Milwaukee’s linguistically diverse Near South Side. English Support Schools adopting this marketing approach emphasized the staff and resources dedicated to helping students learn the English language. About 25% of schools engaged in this strategy, offering some variation of what is known in the field as English as a Second Language (ESL) pull-out or push-in services to multilingual students. St. La Salle advertised “bilingual aides” in its K4 and K5 classes, and “bilingual office staff” to communicate with parents. Similarly, St. Bernadine claimed that its “Bilingual teaching staff and assistants help Spanish speaking students be fully immersed in the English Language.” While these schools appeared to recognize their multilingual school communities, the ultimate goal of their educational programs was clearly English language acquisition, evidenced throughout their materials. In this fashion, the Kingdom Come School promoted its “ESL Support”: [The school] strives to serve all students, providing English Language Learner (ELL) support for students who are acquiring the English language. Two reading specialists support the reading instruction of our students and participation in the Title I program provides supplemental reading instruction to students who are well below grade level in reading. The school’s description of its English support services problematically conflated EL-labeling, poverty, and perceived underachievement in reading. However, it is consistent with the other schools in suggesting English acquisition as its ultimate goal. With these critiques, we do not suggest that the strategy of English support is entirely without merit. For many language minoritized families, learning English is an important aspect of their children’s schooling, as we will discuss further through Mr. Paredes’s account below. However, we argue that it is problematic for schools to engage in English support as a marketing strategy that ultimately reifies the ideology of English hegemony in U.S. schooling; what’s more, within the boundaries of Milwaukee school board’s BBE policy, this strategy - like omission and adornment - stands in direct opposition to the developmental bilingual program this community long fought for (Peterson, 2017). Ambiguity This approach signals an obfuscation of terms common to the field of bilingual education, and a lack of clarity in written school policy regarding services for multilingual learners. As such, it coincides with a range of misleading marketing highlighted in the school choice literature (DiMartino & Jessen, 2018; Jabbar, 2016). About 15% of schools engaged in ambiguity. For example, on its homepage, the K4-8th grade St. Abigail School advertised its “dual language” program for Spanish- and English-dominant speakers. A closer examination revealed that the dual language program ended at third grade, when the students transitioned to the school’s upper-level campus and took Spanish classes in a foreign or heritage language model, since Spanish was listed along with English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Religion. This framing of dual language thus differs dramatically from other scholars’ and practitioners’ use of the term to reference a discourse of language-as-resource, to describe an asset-based program that seeks bilingualism, biliteracy, intercultural understanding, and educational equity for language-minoritized students, over a period of at least the six years of elementary education (Howard et al., 2018). Importantly, it also differs from Milwaukee’s own definition of developmental BBE; the model St. Abigail School appears to have implemented more closely resembles a transitional bilingual program, in which Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 17 children’s home language is used only in order to move them to English-medium instruction as quickly as possible (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000; Palmer, 2011). Ambiguity also manifested in Stronger Together Charter School’s description of its curriculum: “The curriculum is designed to develop students who become proficient in the English language while maintaining facility in Spanish.” At face value, this explanation seems to index a developmental bilingual program, and yet the school had long departed from its prior advocacy of bilingual education. In its 2012-2013 curriculum guides that were posted on its website through 2018, the school listed an overview of its learning targets for all grade levels from kindergarten to eighth for subjects including Reading, Math, Science, Social Studies, Speaking and Listening, Art, Music, and Instructional Technology, among others. The document repeatedly referred to “standard English” and “standard English capitalization.” As a telling signal of the school’s vision of its student body, the learning targets for “English Language Learners” stopped at fifth grade, although the school offered instruction through 8th. Like all of the other subjects for third grade, the “English Language Learners” subject area contained no mention of Spanish: This course supports regular teachers in increasing the proficiency level of English Language Learners in the skill areas of listening, speaking, reading and writing through support classes that students receive regularly in small groups. At the same time, this course improves outcomes for ELLs in mainstream classrooms and fosters students’ academic achievements, social growth, self - confidence and self-worth, while developing language proficiency. Stronger Together’s “mainstream” is unmistakably English-medium, fronting an English hegemony ideology. The manual’s suggested “At Home Activities” are directed toward parents, and include flashcards, graphic organizers, and descriptive writing. Echoing a “parents as first teachers” discourse that pushes “the expansion of normative practices into the home” (Baquedano-López et al., 2013, pp. 152-153), the suggested “English Language Learner” activities encouraged parents to mimic the practices of teachers. Moreover, it appears that the school practices for the home would follow an English-medium pedagogy without encouraging students to explicitly consider bilingualism as part of their learning. Stronger Together’s claim of students “maintaining facility in Spanish” thus demonstrates the selling strategy of ambiguity, since it draws from the language of the public schools’ long- instituted developmental or ‘maintenance’ BBE program, even though the school did not support bilingualism and biliteracy for its elementary students. Importantly, Stronger Together’s instructional program offered Spanish as a foreign language in middle school to its majority Latinx student population, and therefore we argue that the school also engaged in guarded inclusion, which we describe in the next section. Though less explicitly than previous categories, the 15% of schools engaging in ambiguity also flaunted the Milwaukee public schools’ BBE policy, paying lip service to a bilingual language ideology while also promoting an English hegemony paradigm in their curricular documents and descriptions. Guarded Inclusion This approach refers to the limited inclusion of Spanish in instruction, usually as a foreign or heritage language. Approximately 20% of the schools engaged in guarded inclusion. Unlike its elementary curriculum, Stronger Together Charter School introduced Spanish as a “Foreign Language” in sixth grade. Its “Spanish course objectives/description” for 2012-2013 read: “Students in sixth grade Spanish will show achievement of the Wisconsin State Performance Standards for Foreign Language Learning at the beginning level of the Wisconsin State Standards.” Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 18 Again, the “At Home Activities” listed a variety of stereotypical school practices such as memorizing vocabulary lists, practicing grammar, and translating assignments. Two suggested activities seem to recognize the community multilingualism surrounding the school: “Practice conversational Spanish to build fluency and vocabulary; Encourage writing and reading in Spanish.” Similarly, the STEM Network Charter School emphasized its college preparatory curriculum that included “3 Years of Spanish (or Spanish Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers).” This division between the imagined linguistic backgrounds of STEM Network students acknowledged the surrounding community’s multilingualism and the fact that many students entered their high schools and middle schools with deep knowledge and engagement with Spanish. At the same time, these framings of Spanish as foreign or heritage language are susceptible to purist ideologies (Leeman, 2018), and often lack an explicit commitment to sustaining the language practices of minoritized communities (Valdés et al., 2008). In this sense, the schools’ guarded inclusion of Spanish may represent a broader depoliticization that reorients historical Latinx-led struggles around language without questioning other normative criteria of educational success. Through the logics of propriation (Byrd et al., 2018), guarded inclusion becomes a civilizing mechanism to make Stronger Together students proper to society. As another instance of guarded inclusion, St. Ephraim School offered ambiguous descriptions of its curriculum, at times referring to an apparently English-medium model of “Religion, Math, Reading, Writing, Science, Social Studies, Art, Music, and Physical Education,” while also describing its “core curriculum” as including “Math –Matemáticas” and “Religion/Family Life –Religión” among other English-medium subjects. The clearest description of the school’s inclusion of Spanish appeared in relation to its discussion of the religious curriculum: Our Catholic faith is at the center of everything we do. Students participate in daily prayer in English and Spanish, weekly mass with a Spanish mass once per month, and participate in religious holidays and celebrations such as Our Lady of Guadalupe and Las Posadas. The schools’ guarded inclusion of Spanish, whether as daily prayer, monthly mass, or foreign/heritage language, appeared to create a restricted space that maintained Spanish as a subordinate language. As gestures to the focal area’s community multilingualism, these schools’ inclusion of Spanish seemed to align with their focus on academic achievement and access to prestigious spaces, and/or on Christian gospel and recruitment of new parishioners and students. Like the strategy of Ambiguity, schools engaging in Guarded Inclusion while not in direct opposition to the BBE mandate, still appeared subject to dominative ideological perspectives as they did not embrace a developmental bilingual model. Development The Development approach describes schools that promoted a developmental BBE program over at least students’ elementary school years, with the goal of developing multilingual students’ full bilingualism and biliteracy. One school (or 5% of the schools in the focal area), fell into this category. Venceremos Charter School offered the following description: Our Bilingual and ESL programs go hand in hand as we implement a developmental model that allows students to learn in their native language, Spanish, while providing them with an incrementally increasing and fully supported instruction in English. Through academic content, we are developing both languages of our students beginning in K4 so that by the time they graduate from 8th grade students are bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural. Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 19 Venceremos’ bilingual program did not necessarily constitute an innovation within the larger context of BBE in Milwaukee, but the school stood in marked contrast to the other choice schools on the Near South Side. Unique among choice schools, Venceremos actually appeared to take advantage of choice school policies to enhance their developmental BBE program, thus aligning their language education program with the surrounding community’s multilingualism and framing their students’ bilingual development as a strength. Our review of choice schools’ marketing materials reveals that only one of the charter and voucher schools in the focal region described employing a developmental model of BBE. All others described practicing sink-or-swim, ESL, Spanish as a foreign or heritage language at the secondary level, or transitional bilingual education. This pattern coincides with the analyses of the oral history participants in the larger study from which we drew data. Four of the five participants underscored the English-medium orientation of many of the choice schools on the Near South Side. Indeed, Tony Báez, a well-known bilingual education activist and educator, recounted an episode of choice schools’ active rejection of the concept of bilingual education for their predominantly Latinx students: I brought in some people from New Mexico that were doing dual language education, at that Hillview building on 22nd [a building on Milwaukee’s Near South Side]. So I sent invitations to Stronger Together, to esta gente at Elevation, to St. Magnus: “There are some people here who are gonna talk about what communities have been talking about. These are experts and they’re doing very well where they’re doing. Why don’t you join us for this conversation?” Ni uno showed up—not one! I made an effort to try to bring them to listen to research. Nada. They had the solution. According to Báez’s comments, these choice schools’ “solution” for educating predominantly Latinx students privileged English-medium instruction. In this manner, the oral history interviews lend support to our suggestion that the choice schools’ marketing strategies simultaneously point to their promotion of English-medium schooling and disconnection with the community-led movements to establish and sustain BBE in Milwaukee. While the strategies of omission, adornment, English support, ambiguity, and guarded inclusion may reflect the schools’ efforts to recruit Latinx families, the schools’ descriptions of their program models suggested that the rapid acquisition of English was the requisite means of cultivating piety and/or achieving high test scores, reflecting adherence to an ideology of English hegemony. Unfortunately, we do not have observational data to corroborate the website information about these schools, and therefore we cannot speculate with regards to whether schools’ actual practices toward their bilingual communities were aligned with the discourses reflected on their websites. That said, we stand by the assertion that these various strategies – even if solely in the schools’ public-facing information - undermined the BBE policy that Milwaukee Public Schools had committed to supporting, in that parents were generally faced with making choices based largely upon what they saw of schools prior to enrolling – i.e. this public-facing material. In the following section, we share the account of one Mexican father’s school selection process in order to illustrate some of the difficult decisions that minoritized parents must make on a terrain not of their choosing (Pedroni, 2007). One Parent’s Journey: Navigating School Choices Of fundamental importance to the field of school choice are the ways that parents figure out, engage, and resist the deeply problematic approaches to language education marketing that we Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 20 detail above. Here, we share the school selection account of Mr. Paredes, a working-class Mexican man who arrived in Milwaukee as an adult and was raising four children with his wife on Milwaukee’s Near South Side. Mr. Paredes recounted his youngest son’s academic struggles after switching from a bilingual public school to Elevation, one of the English-medium charter schools described in our typology as utilizing the marketing strategy of adornment (but offering an English- only curriculum): Mi hijo cuando iba a entrar a KFive aquí [en La Escuela Bilingüe Foster]…mi esposa comete el error de cambiarlo a una escuela…Elevation o algo así. Hablan puro inglés, puro inglés. Mi esposa cometió ese error, pero a mí no me gustó esa escuela para na’ porque mi niño se empezó a atrasar. Puro inglés, inglés, nada de español. El niño se empezó a orinar en los pantalones, en seguida lloraba…Le digo a mi esposa, “Algo está pasando aquí. El niño no se siente bien en esta escuela.”…Porque la maestra se firma na’ más tres veces a la semana qu e el niño estaba en el baño, que ha hecho pipí, no comprendía lo que le decían. Le digo, “Es que, mija, ese es puro inglés y el niño entonces no aprende.” Lo que yo hice, lo saqué de la escuela y lo volví a meter aquí. Entonces el niño empezó otra vez a agarrar el ritmo de aquí de la escuela. Empezó a mejorar, porque allá, lo estaban atrasando en esa escuela. [When my son was going to enter K-5 here [at the bilingual public school]…my wife makes the mistake of transferring him to a school… Elevation or som ething like that. They only speak English, only English. My wife made that mistake, but I didn’t like that school at all because my child started falling behind. English only, English, no Spanish. The boy started to pee in his pants and cry...I told my wif e, “Something is happening here. The boy doesn’t feel good at this school.”…Because the teacher sends a note home at least three times a week saying that the boy went to the bathroom, he peed himself, he didn't understand what they were saying. I told my wife, “My love, this is because it’s English only and then he doesn't learn.” So then what I did was I took him out of that school and brought him back here. Then the boy started to pick up the rhythm again at this school. He started to improve, because there, they were leaving him behind in that school.] (Our translation) Contrary to pervasive deficit discourses about Mexican origin families (Valencia, 2010), Mr. Paredes expressed a clear concern for his son’s academic achievement. In addition, we want to highlight his expansive notion of learning. Instead of discussing academics in relation to grades or standardized kindergarten readiness exams, Mr. Paredes argued that Elevation’s English-medium orientation not only stifled his son’s academic learning but also, and inseparably, the school climate adversely affected his son’s socioemotional wellbeing. In making this critique, Mr. Paredes refused to accept the deficit logic and displaced responsibility embedded in the teacher’s various negative notes sent home. His son was not deficient; rather, the school’s subtractive approach (Valenzuela, 1999) to English-medium schooling was responsible for his son’s perceived lack of academic progress and emotional disquiet. Even as he denounced Elevation’s English-only approach, Mr. Paredes sought for his children to become bilingual. He was not opposed to them learning English. Mr. Paredes’s sensemaking of and engagement with language learning included his wife and four children, as well as fellow parent volunteers at the bilingual public school: Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 21 En este tiempo que he estado envuelto en la escuela, me ha encantado. He aprendido muchas cosas tanto de mi hijo como de los otros padres...En la casa [mis hijos] hablan el español, en ratitos se agarran ellos hablando inglés per o ahí puro español se habla. El más chiquito ahí va aprendiendo poco a poco el inglés, ya más o menos pero es poco a poco como dicen ellas. Entonces entre ellos mismos también ayudan a su hermanito. Los que están más grandes le ayudan a hacer la tarea a veces, le enseñan a hablar palabras en inglés y pos, se envuelven bien ellos cuatro. De parte nosotros, yo estoy aprendiendo inglés y mi esposa y pos también nos ayudan ellos a nosotros. [During the time I’ve been involved in this [bilingual public] school, I’ve loved it. I’ve learned a lot from my son and from other parents...At home my children speak Spanish. I’ll sometimes catch them speaking English but just Spanish is spoken there. The youngest is learning English little by little, he knows it alright, but it’s little by little as they [female parent volunteers] say. So among themselves my older children help out their little brother. Sometimes they help him do his homework, they teach him to say words in English and really, the four of them get along well. Even us, my wife and I are learning English and our children also help us.] (Our translation) Mr. Paredes described English-language learning as an intergenerational project that included his wife and four children. His understanding of language learning as a process was reinforced through his participation in the bilingual public school’s parent center. Throughout Andrew’s fieldwork at the school, members of the parent committee repeatedly expressed their commitment to continual Spanish-language instruction, which could not be abandoned or diluted in order to rush the process of English-language acquisition. Similarly, Mr. Paredes described his family’s bilingualism and language learning as a continual process purposefully embedded in community practices. In sum, Mr. Paredes’s understanding of language learning within communities made more salient the incongruence with many choice schools’ promotion of English-medium instruction. Discussion and Conclusion From a critical bifocal perspective (Weis & Fine, 2012), the choice schools’ six approaches to selling predominantly English-medium schooling must be considered in relation to broader racial and economic formations. The language ideologies undergirding choice schools’ selling strategies point to their investments in English hegemony, most explicitly through omission and English support. Such approaches rejected the possibility of schools that cultivate and normalize the multilingualism of their surrounding communities, which constituted an explicit demand of the movement to launch developmental BBE in Milwaukee (Báez et al., 1980). Other approaches like adornment and ambiguity resembled school marketing strategies involving some degree of deception (DiMartino & Jessen, 2018), perhaps in recognition that many families in the surrounding community engage daily with languages other than English. The relatively few choice schools that actually sought to cultivate bilingualism and biliteracy did so through guarded inclusion and development. We argue that guarded inclusion, beyond a student recruitment strategy, also functioned as an exercise of depoliticizing tolerance, which “responds to, links, and tames both unruly domestic identities or affinities and nonliberal transnational forces that tacitly or explicitly challenge the universal standing of liberal precepts” (Brown, 2006, p. 8). In other Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 22 words, guarded inclusion does not value the dynamic language practices of multilingual communities, a process that would risk transformation led by these unruly identities and voices (Sanchez & Garcia, 2021). Nor does it critically engage the transnational processes that may lead recently-arrived families to explicitly challenge the Eurocentrism and hegemonic English of U.S. schooling. Rather, guarded approaches to Spanish-language instruction framed the language as an individual academic subject to be learned after attaining ‘English proficiency’ and in preparation for college admission and competition in a globalized economy. This framing of Spanish thus reifies a discursive severing of languages from the communities that use them, tacitly upholding liberal precepts of individual liberty and market order. While omission and development were mutually exclusive strategies, 13 (or 65%) choice schools in the focal area employed various combinations of English support, adornment, ambiguity, and guarded inclusion. These latter strategies allow for a recognition of languages other than English, yet ultimately reinforce an ideology of English hegemony and whitestream assimilation. From a perspective of racial capitalism, these market processes are in fact organized through racial logics that violently seek to partition bodies, uphold white supremacy, and serve capital (Brown & De Lissovoy, 2011). Our study thus builds on Turner’s (2018) important investigation of two mid- sized Wisconsin school districts’ strategies to “sell White families on the instrumental value of the racial and multicultural capital of schools with students of color” (p. 810). Our work suggests that the racializing logics of school choice and marketization operate in particular ways according to the targeted community or ‘market niche’ (Wilson & Carlsen, 2016). On the Near South Side of Milwaukee, a city fraught by enduring racial segregation, choice schools’ market logics did not necessarily seek to transgress racial segregation by recruiting affluent white families, but instead they reified whiteness by denying linguistic diversity and promoting English hegemony as de facto language policy for the predominantly low-income, Spanish-speaking Latinx residents. As demonstrated in Mr. Paredes’s account of school selection, this dominative language policy bolstered through school privatization met with resistance due to its misalignment with the community’s multilingualism. While we note the importance of bilingualism in Mr. Paredes’s account, we also recognize that minoritized parents must contemplate multiple aspects of schooling in addition to language, including religious orientation and class size, among others. Thus, while we agree with Cheng, et al. (2016) that parents make “systematic decisions,” we argue that these decisions take place amidst market structures that uphold white supremacist exclusion (Aggarwal, 2018; Turner, 2018). We therefore reject the argument of choice proponents who would interpret Mr. Paredes’s narrative as evidence of the market system working equitably. Such reasoning holds that if more people like Mr. Paredes ‘vote with their feet,’ then the Elevation charter school would be forced to improve or face closure. Yet market logic was not responsible for the option that Mr. Paredes’s family selected. That is, Mr. Paredes had the choice of enrolling his children in bilingual schools because of the Latinx-led community uprisings and public school activism in Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s (Báez et al., 1980). As is evident in our typology of the choice schools in the focal area, school privatization and market-based reform have largely worked against these community demands, insisting on individual metrics and white English hegemony as the only, unspoken option. We have argued that choice schools on Milwaukee’s Near South Side engaged in six approaches to sell predominantly English-medium schooling to the surrounding multilingual communities: omission, adornment, English support, ambiguity, guarded inclusion, and development. Crucially, these strategies did not determine parents’ responses. Rather, some parents like Mr. Paredes actively resisted choice schools’ racializing promises of success severed from community multilingualism. Therefore, we argue that it is necessary to reverse the direction of Selling and Resisting English -Medium Schooling 23 information implicit in much (but certainly not all) school choice research and policy writing. Instead of providing language minoritized families with more information about their schooling options, we propose that school choice researchers and education policy writers learn from these families what it means to engage in a humanizing dialogue (Paris & Winn, 2013) about children’s educational experiences. Neoliberal models of education, rooted in longer histories of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, continue to perpetrate multiple forms of violence. We therefore suggest the following policy interventions, not as palliatives to sustain an inherently oppressive system (Love, 2019), but as tools to pry open and expose the ever-present fissures in these approaches to education. We suggest that the typology of selling strategies has potential to support language minoritized communities’ resistance to dominative, racializing discourses. Armed with additional words to name the ideologies of English hegemony and deception that underlie the majority of marketing strategies in our study, language minoritized parents and communities would then be better positioned to demand the kinds of changes needed for more congruence between their aspirations and actual school offerings. In this manner, the work could support parents’ roles as language policy makers effecting change through collective action. In one possible scenario, the typology could serve as a flexible organizing tool for inquiry into different education contexts. Adapting the typology, parent-community groups could study the selling strategies and curricular designs of schools situated in multilingual communities. It is possible that choice schools in places with long histories of language subtraction in the public sector would manifest different selling strategies. Moreover, the typology’s attention to school marketization may also be relevant for public schools that increasingly take up bilingual education within neoliberal paradigms (e.g. Bernstein et al., 2021; Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017; Valdez et al., 2016). In addition, we reiterate our call for education policy writers, school choice researchers, and school administrators to learn from the experiential knowledge that language minoritized families often develop through their school choosing experiences. For example, school districts new to BBE (which could be urban, suburban, or rural, depending on the specific sociopolitical context) could hold parent conversations across district lines, centering the knowledge of language minoritized parents from places with long histories of BBE and benefiting from their wisdom. These conversations could help illuminate possibilities for multilingual schooling that the parents and district officials had yet to consider; and the conversations would connect districts’ current efforts to historical struggles. If we engage parents in such dialogues, essentially conducting parent-driven language policy making, perhaps language minoritized parents would be more likely to make clear their own investments in bilingualism, and to challenge the exploitation of BBE for profit and dispossession (Flores & García, 2017). In the current climate, with unprecedented movement to acknowledge the importance of community organizing in the lives of minoritized and marginalized communities in a white supremacist culture, the role of parent and community resistance to marketing strategies for subtractive schooling cannot be overemphasized. We have argued that the experiential knowledge of minoritized families, born from their school selection experiences, plays an important role in catalyzing and expanding this resistance. Instead of school choice’s individualized market-based project, we assert the ultimate need to redefine education for multilingual children as a community- grounded, collective endeavor for the public good, even as it questions and transforms past and contemporary violences enacted through white supremacist definitions of the public. Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 30 No. 28 24 Acknowledgements We would like to thank the committed bilingual parents, teachers, and activists who contributed to this work, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers whose generous and insightful feedback helped to strengthen this paper. References Aggarwal, U. (2018). After rights: Choice and the structure of citizenship. In L. 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Hurie Carroll University ahurie@carrollu.edu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5550-341X Andrew H. Hurie is an assistant professor of bilingual/bicultural education at Carroll University. He received a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from The University of Texas at Austin. His research uses qualitative methods and critical theories to examine education policies and practices, with specific attention to educational justice for language minoritized students and communities. Deborah K. Palmer University of Colorado Boulder debpalmer@colorado.edu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4547-1589 Deborah K. Palmer is a professor of equity, bilingualism and biliteracy in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. A qualitative researcher, her interests include equity in dual language bilingual education and bilingual teacher leadership/activism. Her 2018 book, Bilingual Teacher Leadership for Social Change was published by Multilingual Matters. education policy analysis archives Volume 30 Number 28 March 8, 2022 ISSN 1068-2341 Readers are free to copy, display, distribute, and adapt this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Policy Analysis Archives, the changes are identified, and the same license applies to the derivative work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. EPAA is published by the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education at Arizon a State University Articles are indexed in CIRC (Clasificación Integrada de Revistas Científicas, Spain), DIALNET (Spain), Directory of Open Access Journals, EBSCO Education Research Complete, ERIC, Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson), QUALIS A1 (Brazil), SCImago Journal Rank, SCOPUS, SOCOLAR (China). 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