Migration, language diversity and education policy: A contextualized analysis of inequality, risk and state effects

No Child Left Behind is federal education legislation consisting of implementation programs intended to reconcile the goals of insuring equality while promoting competition in public education in the United States. Immigrant students whose primary languages are not English are included in the mandate of NCLB, categorized as English Language Learners (ELLs), a category of at-risk students. Drawing on case studies of immigrant students in upstate New York, as well as surveys of school district compliance with ESL/Bilingual education requirements, this analysis is an exploration of how NCLB and its implementation simultaneously obscure economic differences and polarize ethnolinguistic identities at school, state, and federal levels. Drawing from ethnographic as well as sociolinguistic data, the concept of state effects is used to examine the articulation and re-articulation of ethnoracial and linguistic diversity along axes of poverty and relative privilege. It is argued that NCLB as enacted across diverse scales constructs social subjects in relation to differences that are obscured or emphasized and produces isolated individual subjects as well as new collective identities.