Bigelow Martha(Editor) - The routledge handbook of educational linguistics

The child who used multiple languages in his/her everyday life was still in a situation in the world known as sink or swim, which had characterized public education for immigrant children and adults since the early 1900s (Higham 1955; Berroll 1995; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004). The child entered an all-English environment that made little room for the different languages and cultural experiences that the child brought to school. Educational and social statistics show that only some children succeeded in American life, while the majority failed schooling, even when learning the language and assimilating into the dominant culture (Perlmann 1990).

The period immediately following World War II was dominated by the Cold War and the competition with the then-Soviet Union as well as an internal shift in racial relations. The need to respond to the USSR military program and the launching of Sputnik into space in 1957 fueled the idea that the United States needed to effectively develop its own human resources and the notion that national defense required the development of foreign languages amongst the nations school children. During this era, poverty was put forth as the dominant explanatory variable of underachievement of certain groups of children as it was tied to patterns of English language use and parents socialization practices that disadvantaged children in school (1953 Puerto Rican study of New York [Morrison 1958]).

Oscar Lewis Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959), Glazer and Moynihans (1963) Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negros, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italian, and Irish of New York City , and the 1966 Coleman Report (Coleman 1968) firmly reinscribed the culture of the home and poverty as the main explanatory variables for school achievement. These studies were significant in shaping federal program responses, such as the Economic Opportunities Act of 1964 and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, established to provide compensatory economic and educational services for those living in poverty. By extension, educational solutions focused on alleviating the deficits in the home through compensatory programs. While race, ethnicity, and language were integrally interwoven with poverty, these factors were viewed as subordinate and merely implicated.