Bilingualism for students with disabilities, deficit or advantage? Perspectives of Latinx mothers

While access to bilingual education programs is on the rise, Emergent Bilingual Learners Labeled as Dis/abled (EBLADs) continue to experience English-mostly educational placements. Analysis of interviews with ten Latinx mothers of EBLADs revealed that educators recommended their children be placed in English-only instructional programs to avoid linguistic confusion. The mothers first resisted, but subsequently internalized, educators’ deficit-perspectives about their children’s language skills and accepted decisions to provide special education services to EBLAD children in English-only settings. Findings suggest that bilingual educators have contributed to the shift from perceptions of bilingualism as a deficit to bilingualism as an advantage and from bilingual education as a right to bilingual education as a privilege. These shifts have negatively impacted the education of EBLADs by limiting their access to multilingual instruction. Bilingual educators must advocate to safeguard bilingualism as a basic human right of EBLADs.