This dissertation conducted a qualitative case study of the Texas Coalition for Bilingual Education (TCBE) to discover how it worked to promote and protect bilingual education programs and by extension educational opportunities of English Language Learners (ELLs) with particular attention to how members coalesced to mitigate the sociopolitical contextual factors that impacted bilingual education policy in Texas. The historical legacy and present creation and administration of policy, legislation, funding and implementation, including monitoring were included. The ELL population continues to rapidly increase while effective and additive bilingual education policy is on the decline; the academic achievement of ELLs is deteriorating in the face of substantiated civil rights violations, growing antiimmigrant sentiment and a contentious legislative atmosphere. My research indicates that bilingual education policy in Texas faces a wellfinanced threat from Structured English Immersion (SEI) proponents who try to justify the funding inequity for bilingual education. A court-ordered monitoring system for bilingual education has been replaced by a No Child Left Behind Act (2001) mandate that neither secures nor ensures equal education opportunity for ELLs (Pompa, 2006). Current bilingual education training programs are underfunded and under-populated when the growing enrollment of immigrant students, creates a critical demand. I employed a constructivist/interpretivist framework in this qualitative single case investigation. Additionally, Critical Race Theory framework (Noboa, 2002; Dicker, 2003), was utilized to demonstrate how racial identity, Latino leadership, coalitional strategies, social justice goals and political organizations addressed the issue of bilingual education policy reformation in Texas. I also employed the "weak ties" "strong ties" lens (Granovetter, 1973; 1983) to examine how these organizational representatives worked within and without the coalition to maximize limited resources. I collected data through interviews, court transcripts, observations of public meetings and trial proceedings, videos, archived documents and web casts. This research has implications for educational practices and future research because of the vulnerability of the ELL population and the devastating impact the present path will have for them and for all of Texas. Today's scholars, particularly Latinos, must be expert investigators in order to support the "best practices" in bilingual education, its attendant funding, policy, implementation and enforcement.

The Student Success Initiative (SSI) established, in 1999, various promotional gates for students to pass the state-mandated high-stakes assessment test known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills (TAKS), administered in the areas of reading for third graders and of reading and math for fifth graders. Largely perceived as antisocial promotion legislation, outcomes of the SSI implementation did not seem to coincide with their original intentions. To ascertain the veracity of this claim, interviews were scheduled with a variety of local level stakeholders serving as decision-making participants in a structure known as the grade placement committee. Grade placement committee members address student promotion and retention decisions when students do not meet the passing standards for the TAKS tests. Because the SSI is still recent in its implementation, to date there is not a wide body of research examining the stakeholder perceptions of the SSI and of their role in the decision-making process for student retention and promotion. To this end, several interviews were conducted with teachers, with parents, and with campus or district-level administrators. The interviews served to gauge the stakeholder perceptions regarding their role in the grade placement committee itself as decision-makers and also their perceptions or their experiences regarding how often or likely students are to be promoted or to be retained in the context of the grade placement committee meetings. The participants also spoke about their views regarding the effectiveness of the SSI and the outcomes of its implementation. The research participants spoke to their personal experiences with student retention and promotion. The stakeholders' views range from the perception that the SSI puts students at risk of failure, actually causing students to be promoted more often to the opinion that the SSI does hold both the teacher and the parents more accountable for student success. Several broad themes emerged from the data. The themes of perceived power, underlying or unwritten agendas and a call for change due to dissatisfaction with the current system were evident upon the examination of the data.

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