The Century Foundation, March 13, 2025, Dual-Language Immersion Programs and School Diversity in the Bay Area
1. Identify priority campuses for new DLI programs.
Districts should, whenever possible, establish new DLI programs on campuses with significant numbers of ELs and/or native speakers of the potential DLI program’s non-English partner language. The precise EL enrollment threshold may vary: districts lucky enough to have high rates of linguistic diversity might prioritize launching DLI in schools where it’s possible to reach a target of enrolling, say, 50 percent Vietnamese-dominant students in the new program. Districts with fewer ELs—or ELs who are spread across a large number of schools—may need to set lower thresholds.
Once districts have established priority campuses for new DLI programs based on linguistic equity, they should assess whether their current and proposed DLI programs will exclude any other student groups—particularly historically marginalized ethnic or socioeconomic groups.
Jason Richardson, Bruce Mitchell, and Jad Edlebi, Gentrification and Disinvestment 2020 (Washington, DC: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2020), https://ncrc.org/gentrification20/.
