Looking back at her youth growing up in Douglas, Arizona — nestled up snugly against its Mexican sister city of Agua Prieta, Sonora — Laura C. Chávez-Moreno wishes she’d had the chance to partake in bilingual education classes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: I thought the premise of your book, which includes some critique of how dual language programs are operated, was interesting, because they’re typically talked about as this gold standard in language education, especially compared to more typical English as a second language programs.

Laura Chávez-Moreno: The reason [English as a second language] is called subtractive is because it subtracts the home language of the student in order for them to just replace it with English. That has been the more traditional way of dealing with this ‘problem’ of there being students in our classrooms who are not English speakers.

So the reason bilingual education is really used by communities in order to counter that is because these programs are what's called additive programs. They want you to, yes, learn English because we are in the U.S., and that is the dominant language. But they also want you to maintain the language that you grew up with, and that your family speaks, etc.

That's why bilingual education programs are really the best type of programs for students to receive from schools. In fact, my schooling was in Arizona, and as a student, I didn't have the option of bilingual education. I wish I would have.

It is something that communities really have to fight for, and because of that there has to be this type of narrative of them being very good for students, right? Like kind of idolizing them, or like how you've mentioned before, putting them as a gold standard, and really they are.

The issue is that there has also been this disconnecting of bilingual education from ethnic studies roots. The Chicano movement also demanded, for example, bilingual education, and then this race-radical idea that students have to be affirmed in terms of their cultures and their families, etc.

The issue is that bilingual education sometimes is just thought of just purely as a language education program, where that they just really are just teaching Spanish, for example, or they're just really teaching English, or they're, for example, sometimes even like, ‘Oh, well, they're also teaching about the culture and trying to make sure that they are affirming different cultures.’

But that's not that's still not even going far enough, I argue in the book.

I think we talk about race as something that outside society defines, and then schools serve students whatever their race or background may be — it’s something that happens outside of the school walls. How are schools part of defining race or racial groups?

Schools make race because race is not something that's just inherent in society. So how does our society make [race]? It makes it through our institutions, and schools are really important institutions in our society. So schools contribute to making ideas about what is race and what are the racialized groups in our society.

Why does it matter how we look at the Latinx group — is it an ethnicity, or is it a race? That's also an important question. One of the things that I argue in the book and in other work is that it matters because it shows us how we're thinking about the concept of race itself. And sometimes we think about it as if it is an inherent category in our society instead of a social construction.

The way that we think about the Latinx group, and how it is in relation to the concept of race, also tells us about how we're thinking about the process of how racial categories are made.

This is all important for two things: It's important because we need to disrupt ideas about race being an inherent category in our society. Why is it that certain groups, for example, experience certain material conditions different from others, and why are they not given the resources that are needed now or historically?

Then it's also important in terms of the Latinx group itself, because students are interested in this question. Students had questions, and they noticed some contradictions. One of the things that I think good educators should do is follow students’ questions about how our society works and what's going on in our society.

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

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

But then it was also really striking that, unfortunately, sometimes it was really just the individual teachers doing that type of work instead of it being structured throughout the program. It was the case that, for example, the students kept learning about racist histories, but there was not really any teaching about race itself as a construct.

In one case, you write about a teacher calling the Black students in the dual language program ‘the cream of the crop’ and feeling that created a division among those students.

A racial category exists because it's put in relation or in comparison to others. There has to be others that are also put in relation or compared to.

It's important to talk about that because, for one, that's how race is made, in terms of distributing resources differently to different racialized groups. But then also the discourse of how you're talking about these groups and forming them and making them separate through the discourses. In terms of the idea of how the Latinx group was formed, I noticed that it really pointed a lot toward Latin America more so than, for example, examining the experiences of folks from here from the U.S.

I think that one of the reasons that that was done is just because of the lack of materials in Spanish of the Latinx community here in the U.S. In terms of its history. The Chicano movement's history is mostly in English.

At the program you were observing, it was surprising to read that the test for native Spanish speakers to prove their English fluency was more difficult than the test for English speakers to prove their Spanish fluency. And that the students who were native Spanish speakers didn’t have as good academic outcomes as those who entered the program as English-speakers.

This is how race is made in the U.S. It's distributing this resource differently to students, because in the end the racial distribution of who was able to obtain the scores needed was very determined based on racial lines.

In terms of the academic outcomes, we know that there are a lot of things that still need to be done in education and in communities in order for students who have been traditionally underserved by schools to improve their academic outcomes. We know that that's actually not just the school. It's also part of the community or the city and the state and higher levels.

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

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

In your view, do schools or teachers see themselves as having a role in this kind of critical thinking about race and how they shape it? Especially given that you observed this program during Trump’s first presidential term, which was a time of a lot of racial turmoil, and it’s been published as we head into his second.

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

One of the teachers that I really admired shared with me something that I added in the back at the end of the book. When she was a young teacher, she was really scared of doing things that she didn't really know the answers to, or how it was going to go.

And she said that now that she was a more seasoned teacher, had more experience, that she recognized that it's OK for her to say, ‘You know, I don't know,’ and then to learn along with the students, and for them to explore together a certain thing that the students had questions about.

I think that that's something that teachers need to be supported in doing and for them to feel confident about. That's really the best way for teachers to engage in teaching.