Supporting Multilingual Education in Illinois.

The article discusses the efforts made in Illinois to support multilingual education, particularly for Latinx students. The state has a history of strong bilingual policies and requires school districts to offer bilingual education programs when there are 20 or more limited-English fluency students enrolled. Illinois was also the first state in the Midwest to promote statewide bilingual policies for pre-K instruction. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's College of Education has created the Bilingual-Bicultural (BLBC) Concentration and Bilingual and/or ESL Endorsement to address the needs of diverse communities and disrupt deficit ideologies about minoritized bi/multilingual communities. The BLBC program is led by three Latina faculty members who draw on their own experiences to guide their teaching. [Extracted from the article]