Chapter 12: Literacy Sin Fronteras: Deconstructing Borders for Language and Cultural Inclusion

According to national media, public education in America is deemed broken. There is a crisis and Mistral’s words echo, it cannot wait until tomorrow: it must be resolved today! Many stakeholders of our educational system can be accused of this predicament; however, scholars point to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2002) implementation in present day public schools as a major culprit. The undercurrent goal of this policy is for public schools to fail so that public education can be privatized. (Giroux & Schmidt, 2004; Lipman, 2007). As Lipman (2007) states:

This accountability system with its punitive sanctions victimizes and blames crucial stakeholders of our educational system: teachers, students and parents. Teachers whose students do not pass the states’ high-stake tests are blamed for not teaching effectively. Students who score low on tests are blamed for not trying while parents are blamed for not caring about the education of their children. This blame game results in a public perspective of incompetent teachers, students and parents who are useless, inept, incapable, unskilled and ineffective. This is a deficit lens (MacSwan, 2000; Valencia, 1997) predominant in our present educational system. It postulates a self-fulfilling prophecy that can impact reality (Reza-López, 2006). These individuals begin to depend on a system that will tell them what to do instead of trusting their own intellect. Teachers, students, and parents await policymakers’ decisions on best strategies, approaches and scripts for classrooms. They wait on policies mandated by policymakers or state boards of education who are not educators and have very little experiential knowledge about classroom environments, educational context, curriculum and pedagogy. As a result, we have an educational system of dependency; one not grounded on teachers’, students’ and parents’ experiences. This is especially true for the Latino English Language Learner (ELLs). No Child Left Behind mandates signed into law in 2002 for best teaching and learning are not supportive of the language and culture of Latino students and their parents, thus creating a pedagogy of exclusion.