The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981

Awarded the Texas State Historical Association''s Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize; presented March 2005Despite controversies over current educational practices, Texas boasts a rich and vibrant bilingual tradition-and not just for Spanish-English instruction, but for Czech, German, Polish, and Dutch as well. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Texas educational policymakers embraced, ignored, rejected, outlawed, then once again embraced this tradition. In The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, author Carlos Blanton traces the educational policies and their underlying rationales, from Stephen F. Austin''s proposal in the 1830s to "Mexicanize" Anglo children by teaching them Spanish along with English and French, through the 1981 passage of the most encompassing bilingual education law in the state''s history. Blanton draws on primary materials, such as the handwritten records of county administrators and the minutes of state education meetings, and presents