Ethnographic and discursive approaches to educational language policy (ELP) that explore how policy is appropriated in context are important for understanding policy success/failure in meeting goals of educational equity for language‐minoritized students. This study describes how Paraguayan national policy for universal bilingual education successfully disrupted the traditional exclusion of Guarani from education, but it has failed so far to disrupt hegemonic monoglossic ideologies that continue to exclude Guarani‐dominant students from high‐quality education.