This article offers a critical interpretation of the current trends in instructional models for English language learners in California. We review key instructional models and analyze them from traditional (teacher-centered), progressive (student-centered), and critical orientations (society- and power-centered). These instructional models share many common effective principles and strategies for bilingual instruction that support and often accelerate language and content learning. While these instructional models exemplify many of the best traditional and progressive approaches to multilingual instruction, they do not encompass critical orientation to language teaching and learning. In this article we argue that none of the current models synthesize high-leverage practices from all orientations and thus offer a critical framework grounded in the sociocultural and raciolinguistic contexts of multilingual instruction to best serve all K-12 Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) in California.