Models of bilingual education range from those intended to retrain students from a first language to the sole use of English to those which support students’ simultaneous development of two languages. In all models there is implicit or explicit tension between maintenance of cultural heritage and identity through language instruction on the one hand and assimilation and Americanization on the other.

Acceptance of bilingual education programs by the wider monolingual community can be correlated to the socio-economic status of those who attempt to develop them.

Bilingual education was originally conceptualized and implemented by upper-status immigrant groups such as the Germans, who maintained bilingual German—English instruction in some schools in the United States for an uninterrupted period between 1840 and 1917. Beginning in the 1920s, immigration of lower-status peoples from Spanishspeaking and Asian countries prompted criticisms of bilingual education programs.

Legislation has been passed in support of bilingual education, including Title VII, which was added in 1968 to the Elementary and Secondary Educational Act of 1965 to provide financial assistance for local schools to design educational programs for children in whose households the primary language spoken was not English. However, interpretation and implementation of bilingual education varies, and it remains a controversial issue closely tied to socio-economic status. Some states maintain that wellconceptualized and implemented programs promote success among students (see Texas, for example), while other states reject the idea and incline towards English-Only laws and school policies (see California, for example).