This panel brings together Chinese American educators, activists and students who were instrumental in the development and implementation of language programming in Cantonese bilingual education in collaboration with San Francisco schools and the greater Chinese and Chinese American community.

The seminal Supreme Court language rights case, Lau v. Nichols (1974) found that the San Francisco Unified School District’s failed to provide adequate and appropriate instructional programming to 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry who did not speak English, which denied them a meaningful opportunity to participate in a public education. In the fields of bilingual education and language policy, Lau is regarded as the national case that changed the legal landscape for bilingual education as an allowable provision in schools for multiple ethnolinguistic groups.