When Only the Language is Valued: Cultural Sustainability, Educator Erasure, and the Accelerating Threat of Anti-DEI Policy in Bilingual Early Childhood Classrooms

Abstract

Bilingual early childhood programs in the United States have grown in popularity, yet many operate through an extractive logic that values educators’ linguistic assets while rendering their cultural identities, funds of knowledge, and professional well-being invisible. Drawing on existing research and the author’s experience as a former director of a private bilingual preschool in Colorado, this essay argues that the commodification of language without culture undermines the sustainability of bilingual education for both educators and children. The essay further examines how the current wave of anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) legislation, curriculum surveillance, and neoliberal policy shifts, in the United States and internationally, is accelerating this erasure by dismantling the very frameworks that support critical self-reflection, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and inclusive practice. The author also considers how narrow definitions of inclusion in bilingual programs fail children with disabilities, as illustrated by her own daughter’s exclusion from bilingual education following an autism diagnosis. The essay calls for a reorientation of bilingual early childhood education toward genuine cultural sustainability: centering the identities and agency of Latinx educators, expanding commitments to inclusion, and inviting families into reciprocal cultural engagement.