Dr. José Medina argues dual language can repair school harm

Dr. José Medina was six years old and strapped to a gurney when a teacher renamed him Joe. It was his first full day of first grade at a Catholic elementary school in downtown El Paso, after the principal had a nurse wheel the gurney into her office and told his young parents to hold him down. The teacher, he later understood, wanted him Americanized quickly.

He had already been sent home from kindergarten, and then from first grade, at an El Paso public school because he punched, kicked, screamed and ran into the street rather than sit in a room where no one spoke his language. His parents, who had finished the fifth and sixth grade in Ciudad Juárez, were told he needed to mature, and they left embarrassed.

Medina went on to teach, to lead schools as an assistant principal and principal, to direct dual language and bilingual education, and to work as a language researcher, and he now works with his own research team alongside colleagues including Vanessa Espitia. The moment is not neutral for the argument he makes: a 2026 study in the journal Educational Policy finds Texas Senate Bill 3 restricts equity-focused professional learning in the state's public schools, the kind of training Medina says he will not strip of its vocabulary. His claim on the recording is that dual language programs exist to repair what schooling did to children like him, and published enrollment data show how easily they end up serving someone else.

The law that already protected Medina when he was sent home

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on January 21, 1974, that San Francisco was denying 1,800 children who spoke no English a meaningful education. The District Court in Lau v. Nichols had counted 2,856 students of Chinese ancestry who did not speak English, about 1,000 of whom received supplemental English courses, according to the opinion text published by Justia. The other 1,800 received nothing, and the Court held that this violated Section 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the provision known as Title VI.

Section 601 bans discrimination by race, color or national origin in any program that takes federal money, so the ruling's force comes through funding rather than a prescribed curriculum. Justice Douglas wrote that teaching the children English was one choice and instructing them in Chinese was another, and the opinion notes that the petitioners themselves asked only that the Board of Education be directed to apply its expertise to the problem, urging no specific remedy on the Court. The Court also leaned on California's own Education Code, which made English the basic language of instruction, to say that handing a child the same textbooks and teachers in a language he cannot understand is not equal treatment.

The Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), in a September 2026 account, says the ruling affirmed the authority of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to require affirmative remedial efforts for what it called linguistically deprived children, and upheld HEW's May 25th Memorandum extending the Civil Rights Act to language-minority children. IDRA frames the principle as a duty on the school to adapt to the child's language, where San Francisco had argued it had no legal obligation to run any special program at all. Dr. José Cárdenas, a bilingual education advocate, helped prepare the plaintiffs' brief for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, IDRA says.

Enforcement lagged the right. IDRA says the Office for Civil Rights at HEW did not set up a Lau task force to write compliance guidelines until 1975, with Cárdenas among its members, and that U.S. v. Texas had raised the same question in Texas as early as 1971. Compliance therefore rested on guidelines still being drafted and on a family knowing how to complain, and Medina's parents, in his telling, did not know how to advocate.

For a bilingual director today, the floor has not moved: the same classroom for a child who cannot understand it is unequal treatment under Lau. The Court left the method to the district, which is the room dual language programs occupy.

From Joe to the administrator who spoke for those students

By second grade Medina was fluent in English and reading the Spanish his mother taught him at home. He insisted his parents return him to the public school as a third grader so he could show it had not broken him, and he arrived bilingual and biliterate. In the field's current vocabulary he was an emergent bilingual, a student adding English to a home language, a term Medina uses in place of English learner.

He stayed home for college at the University of Texas at El Paso, competed nationally in speech with a Spanish-English piece from Luis Valdez's Los Vendidos after a coach warned him he would lose, and opened scholarship mail in a work-study job. One letter announced a Rockefeller Brothers Fund graduate fellowship for first-generation students; he applied, interviewed in New York, told the panel he would succeed with or without the money, and won it. The fellowship paid for a master's degree at New York University, after which he returned to El Paso to teach.

His entry into dual language was an assignment. An assistant principal at the El Paso high school where he taught asked whether he spoke Spanish, then handed him a speech course in Spanish for students who had been in the district's dual language program since kindergarten and needed high school credit. Dual language bilingual education teaches academic content and literacy in English and a partner language, and a two-way program enrolls roughly equal shares of native English speakers and native speakers of the partner language, as The Century Foundation describes the model in a May 2023 report.

The shift from teacher to advocate came in Killeen, Texas, where his husband, then a sergeant major, pushed him to earn an administrator certification at Tarleton State University. In the certification classes, Medina says, he sat among former coaches and listened to how they described students who were learning English.

Medina says he interviewed repeatedly before Dr. Celina Estrada hired him, for his expertise with emergent bilingual students, as the administrator responsible for them at a high school then under close Texas Education Agency scrutiny. He went on to serve as assistant principal and principal at elementary and secondary schools, as a director of dual language and bilingual education, and in a guiding role at the Center for Applied Linguistics, before forming his own research team.

The enrollment data show the drift Medina warns about

English learner shares are shrinking in most dual language schools in New York City and four California cities, The Century Foundation found over five years. In the May 2023 report, the foundation and the Children's Equity Project built a database of more than 1,600 dual language immersion programs serving 1.1 million students across thirteen states and the District of Columbia. The five-year decline covers New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and San José.

A single-year snapshot from 2019-20 looked more equitable, according to the same report: in Dallas, New York City, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Oakland, San Francisco, Houston and Portland, most dual language schools enrolled a lower share of white students than their districts, and in Seattle and Orlando none was whiter than its district. Washington, D.C., ran the other way, with thirteen of seventeen dual language schools whiter than the district, as did half of Salt Lake City's. The Century Foundation's warning is that without equity structures the linguistic integration that makes two-way programs work can become a colonization that displaces English learners, tilting programs toward language enrichment for English-dominant children.

The foundation sets the stake in years. It says equity for English learners means helping the largest possible share reach English proficiency and be reclassified as former English learners within their first five to seven years in U.S. schools, and that a growing research consensus finds two-way programs do that best. A program that loses its English learners is losing the students the model was built to move through that window.

Researchers now treat that tilt as a documented problem with a name. A 2024 volume from Multilingual Matters, Overcoming the Gentrification of Dual Language, Bilingual and Immersion Education, edited by M. Garrett Delavan, Juan A. Freire and Kate Menken, gathers studies on how gentrification operates across instruction, leadership, parent engagement, language policy and school choice, and includes a chapter by Nelson Flores titled Nice White Parents and Dual Language Education. Gentrification here means a program created for emergent bilinguals filling with English-dominant, often wealthier families whose preferences then steer it.

That is the complication to Medina's reparations framing, and he does not dispute it; he says the same thing from the inside. He describes the field of language research as still a white space that needs to make room for Black and Indigenous researchers of color, and he says the students he works for are first-generation, translate for their parents, speak Spanish at home and were pushed aside. Language allocation, the plan for which subjects are taught in which language and for how much of the day, is where he says districts least want to hear criticism.

The outcome evidence favors his side when the programs hold their students. In an April 2016 report, the American Institutes for Research wrote that recent research suggests dual language programs provide English learners more opportunities to reach higher levels of academic achievement than other program types, while noting that states name these programs so differently that comparing them is hard and that districts face challenges developing, implementing and sustaining them. For a district bilingual coordinator, the practical reading of both reports is an annual check on who holds the seats and whether the English learner share is holding from year to year.

Where Texas limits equity training, Medina says he will not go quiet

Medina says that if the Department of Education or the state governor tells educators they can no longer talk about equity, social justice and critical consciousness in professional learning in Texas, and a district then asks him to drop those words and hands him a list of words he can no longer say in PD, that district should hire someone else. PD is the in-service training districts buy for teachers and principals. He says he will keep speaking up in the current political climate.

Texas Senate Bill 3 restricts equity-focused professional learning in public schools, a 2026 study in the journal Educational Policy finds. The study, which read SB 3 alongside state and national leadership standards, reports that although the bill is presented as a civics and curriculum measure, it limits instruction and professional learning related to race, systemic inequity and topics associated with diversity, equity and inclusion. Its three findings are restrictions on discussing systemic racism and historical inequity, constraints on equity-focused professional learning and leadership practice, and more political control over civic knowledge and educational decisions.

For dual language programs the squeeze is specific. The 2024 Multilingual Matters volume's chapter by Deb Palmer and colleagues, offered as practical guidance for educators, is titled Countering Gentrification through Critical Consciousness; critical consciousness, in plain terms, is the habit of asking which language carries status in a school and whom a program's design serves. Training built that way is equity-focused professional learning, the category the Educational Policy study finds SB 3 constrains, and the same study finds the law in tension with leadership standards that expect cultural responsiveness, so a Texas dual language coordinator now plans training between the two.

From TikTok to a hall of fame, the field makes room

Medina's public reach grew during the pandemic. He began posting short TikTok videos for dual language teachers and administrators, over his husband's doubts that a Center for Applied Linguistics researcher belonged there, and the following led to interviews with CNN and ABC News. He says the messages that matter most come from parents and students, thanking him for talking about Spanglish, for reframing the no sabo label, a jab at young Latinos who stumble in Spanish, as something to own, or for showing a parent how to support a lesbian daughter.

Recognition of the field's leaders is also new. Summit K12 created the Multilingual Education Hall of Fame to recognize pioneers and leaders who shaped multilingual learner education, according to a February 2025 announcement from WIDA at the University of Wisconsin, and the inaugural class inducted at the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) conference in Atlanta that month included Margo Gottlieb, Jim Cummins, Lily Wong Fillmore, Kathy Escamilla and Pedro Noguera. The announcement says that from 2026 Summit K12 planned to collect nominations and vote through a committee with NABE and other associations, and it lists no formal induction criteria.

His message to dual language educators is that the work changes lives for students who feel their language is not enough, whether that language is Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, Russian or Tagalog.

The Century Foundation's five-year trend is the measure a district can run on itself: when the English learner share of a dual language program is falling, the report says the program is at risk of becoming enrichment for English-dominant children, the reverse of the repair Medina describes.