This chapter frames bilingual education in a social theoretical perspective on standard languages and standardization that shape the use of more than one language in education and in society. Bilingual education offers a rich area in which to investigate the tensions surrounding standard language, standardization and institutionalized normativity in multilingual contexts. We present the case of bilingual education in the USA, where English language dominance has a long and contentious history. A civil rights and social justice issue in the 1960s and 1970s, a way of transitioning immigrant and minority language children into English-only instruction in the 1980s and an increasing ‘problem’ for standardized assessment and racialized nativist politics since the 1990s, bilingual education remains a highly contested and politicized issue, grounded in conflicting notions of language-as-problem, language-as-right and language-as-resource. We focus on the layered historicity of bilingual education in California, where bilingual education has recently come to evoke a multilingual future in which mobility and global identity figure prominently for all. In this age of globalization, we examine some key questions raised at the intersection of language educational issues, the growing demands of a global economy and the future of bilingual and multilingual education in neoliberal times.