Educators’ construction of mainstreaming policy for English learners: a decision-making theory perspective

Increasingly across the U.S. and other industrialized democracies, teachers take dual classroom roles as both content and English language educators. Nevertheless, research on how educators actually understand and implement mainstreaming language education policies at the school and district level are sparse. This paper contributes a unique process-oriented longitudinal perspective on how educators at the local level in one small rural U.S. school district greeted a new mainstreaming English language education policy. The article applies an institutional “decision-making theory” framework that focuses on teachers as de facto local policymakers. It considers how educators vied with one another to (re)construct a usable history of and rationale for district language education policy that influenced educators’ collective sense of its fairness and appropriateness. The study also documents how teachers’ sense-making and moral judgments regarding their own and colleagues’ professional roles and identities were wielded in policy interpretation and implementation. Finally, the paper examines how the mainstreaming policy continually evolved as administrators at various levels of the school district hierarchy negotiated conflicting goals, and as teachers in each school improvised differing professional relationships and roles. In all, the paper finds that the meaning and form of mainstreaming language education policies are constantly reinstantiated by educators at the local level, and thus that local implementation of language education policies, and what “mainstreaming” means in English learner education, merit more careful scrutiny.