The focus of this paper is on research in bilingual education in the United States, dealing with its history, practices, and potential. The introductory section describes a variety of models of bilingual education and establishes a foundation of terminology for those new to the field. The second section looks historically at research in the field of bilingual education, both in the development of evaluation research agenda and in basic research on bilingualism, to examine some of the forces that have influenced that research and have helped shape the present state of the field. The third section contrasts two very different approaches to studying bilingual education, the Significant Bilingual Instructional Feature Study and a longitudinal language immersion study, examining the design and methodology as well as the results and implications of these studies. The final section suggests a new way of looking at research in the field that aims to broaden the goals of bilingual education toward promoting a language-rich society and proposes an inclusive approach to research. (Contains 92 references.) (Author/SLD)