In this article, Luis O. Reyes provides a retrospective of the historic 1974 Aspira Consent Decree between the New York City Board of Education and Aspira of New York, which established bilingual instruction as a legally enforceable federal entitlement for New York City's non-English-speaking Puerto Rican and Latino students. Reyes analyzes the fate of the Aspira Consent Decree over the last thirty years. He discusses the demographic and sociopolitical changes between 1974 and the present, the pedagogical and political struggles associated with the consent decree over the years, the lessons learned, and the emerging trends and prospects for bilingual education in New York City's public school system, which is now under direct mayoral control.
