“Discover the real story behind Ten Who Dared Texas Bilingual Education and the ten brave educators who transformed Texas history.”
Same flag as before — “Culture & Trends” still doesn’t fit anywhere in this passage without changing the actual wording. This piece is a personal narrative about “Ten Who Dared,” bilingual education policy, and Texas history — it has nothing to do with a “Culture & Trends” theme, so there’s no natural spot to drop that phrase in without altering or adding to the sentences themselves.
Before I do anything, I want to check with you on a couple of things, since this happened last time too:
- Is “Culture & Trends” the correct keyword for this piece? It reads like a category label from a different content brief (maybe accidentally carried over from another project) rather than something meant for this Texas bilingual-education story.
- Where do you actually want it placed? A few real options, if it does belong here:
- As a category/section tag sitting above or below the piece (e.g., “Filed under: Culture & Trends”) — this wouldn’t touch your original text at all
- As a subtitle/kicker line added before the piece — again, separate from your existing text
- Woven into a sentence in the body — this would require adding or adjusting wording, which conflicts with “do not change the text”
Let me know which you meant, and I can apply it cleanly without disturbing your original writing.
Enter the Educators Who Said “No More”
This is where the ten in ten who dared comes into play although the number ten is A lot less important than the illustration to be made here of a movement of teachers who sought to resist the old, traditional way with great resolve. Again, that teacher is one like Jose Crdenas teacher at Edgewood ISD is one we hear over and over again and for good reason. He examined the failure rate amongst Spanish speaking students and reached what, in hindsight, appears obvious, yet at the time, was revolutionary; the children were not failing school; school was failing them.
That’s the kind of re-framing I’m talking about that makes all the difference, right? It’s the difference between faulting a plant for not thriving in the shade and understanding that you simply need to transfer it to the sun. What the teachers like Crdenas hadn’t completed, politicians got into the legislature to finish.
State Senator Joe Bernal, for example, who was himself a product of a period when the use of Spanish was outlawed in Texas schools, was the architect of the 1968 measure that repealed that archaic constitutional restriction; he’d suffered under the restrictions himself before he sought to abolish them as a legislator. Senator Carlos Truan was Governor Mark White’s chief ally in the conservative effort to turn the Bilingual Education Act into a significant legal tool: I find this detail strangely poignant.
Supporting a cause is one thing; supporting a change of principle is another.
Supporting a cause because of one’s own, still painful scar is a different matter. Bernal wasn’t just making policy; he was editing his own childhood story, in a sense, for the children who would follow in his footsteps.
But this is where the story moves out of the end of the classroom and school house and into the court house. Parents, students and teachers started to complain that.
Not only was this undervaluing them as students, but treating them as if they were a problem that needed to be fixed” was a violation of civil rights. Eventually, a federal court took their side: it did something hugebroke the major implication that bilingual education was a “nice idea if we can afford it” by shifting the focus of the ruling to civil rights. As soon as they did that, there was an obligation that Texas school districts could no longer ignore ESL students and that they had no choice but to identify them and provide services.
Around the same time, the fight was playing out on the national stage too. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson — himself a former Texas teacher, which feels almost poetic given where this story is set — signed the Bilingual Education Act, known as Title VII. For the first time, the federal government formally recognized that forcing English-only instruction on non-English speakers put them at a real, measurable disadvantage. That didn’t happen out of nowhere. It happened because of years of protests, petitions, research papers, and, yes, educators quietly bending the rules in their own classrooms long before the law caught up with them.
Why This Still Matters Today
● This history crosses my mind every time I visit a school that touts its “dual language” program as if it were merely one of many other “world language” courses to be selected from a list, next to tennis and the high school band. But in some ways, this is the very point that it no longer seems extraordinary.
● That’s progress. That a Texas classroom can now highlight Spanish and English, not shame them, can be none other than the work of people who endangered themselves to make it real.
● Yet this is not the end of the story, and it’s something I believe we need to say straightforwardly rather than gloss over to help a happy ending. Discussions of immigration and language policy continue to influence the funding and public perception of bilingual education in Texas and elsewhere.
● The “Ten Who Dared” opened a debate that has not concluded it has only grown, and it persists to this day in school board hearings and state legislatures across the nation.
● If this is a school paper you’re writing, a lesson plan you need, or you’re just like me who stumbled down a rabbit hole one afternoon here’s what it all boils down to: when using the phrase, “Ten Who Dared”, it refers to a 1993 NABE video of real teachers and activistsnot a list of ten people using a literal number.
● The movement was born from the bitter English-only instructions of Texas schoolssome of which still prevailed in 1989, having been around since 1918.
● Main actors such as Jose Crdenas, Joe Bernal and Carlos Truan were advocates of modification from within the classroom and Congress.
● Lawsuit in federal court that officially declared linguistic discrimination a civil rights issue, meaning TX schools had to truly put their money where their mouth was for ELs.
● The federal Bilingual Education Act (Title VII) in 1968 was the first national recognition of the problembut the state battles, like in Texas, created the foundation for it.
The one thing what strikes and remains with me the most honestly is not even the policy specifics – it’s the people’s complete stubbornness which is so much different than others. They didn’t know about the future outcome of the matter and that they’ll get what they have demanded. Yet, just for a feeling that a wrong was being committed, without any support of the facts, they decided to keep up with the fight. This can be a fairly reasonable picture of the word ‘courage’, at least, as far as my understanding of that word goes. It’s not the mere non-existence of doubt but getting up again and again, be it at school legislature court, until even the most reluctant, unyielding system could see no other way.
Additional Resources:
- Bilingual Education — Handbook of Texas: The Texas State Historical Association’s authoritative encyclopedia entry covering the state’s English-only era and the 1973 Bilingual Education and Training Act.
- The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1936–1981: A TSHA scholarly publication tracing how Texas policy swung from embracing to outlawing to re-embracing bilingual instruction across the 20th century.
