Wednesday, August 07, 2002
"Bilingual Breakthrough:" Yes and No
Tuesday's Boston Globe hailed Massachusetts' latest reform of bilingual education as a "Bilingual Breakthrough." Given that Massachusetts was the first state to legally require bilingual education, the legislation is a breakthrough of sorts.
However, the editorial's grasp of the facts is limited, at best. The Globe claims that "bilingual's [sic] failings have become undeniable only with the advent of high-stakes testing." Undeniable by whom? The failings of bilingual education were widely known at least by 1978 with the release of the first major study on bilingual education's effectiveness to Congress (which had mandated the program four years earlier). In fact, the Globe itself carried a page-one article on the failings of bilingual education in the early 1990's.
The Globe editorial finds it praiseworthy that under the new law, "Districts will no longer be allowed to . . . hire teachers who are not themselves fluent in spoken and written English." Why did it take the state over 30 years to require "bilingual" teachers to be, well, "bilingual"? (Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) threatened to filibuster a proposal to make this same requirement national in 1994. Kennedy grudgingly allowed schools to hire teachers who were "individually or in combination" fluent in English.)
The Globe also hopes the new law will stave off "[t]he one-size-fits-all ballot question of California businessman Ron Unz, which would replace the status quo with one year of structured immersion in English." The Globe argues that the Unz initiative "would ban options like two-way bilingual, which puts English-speaking and foreign-speaking students in the same class and helps both groups learn the other's language."
Two-way bilingual education turns out to be ineffective at teaching English, for reasons I wrote about in detail here.
Advocates of two-way bilingual education also seem far more interested in increasing the self-esteem of non-English speakers than in ensuring they actually learn English:
Many teachers cited the opportunity for fairness that two-way immersion education can provide as a major benefit. Because TWI [Two-Way Immersion] can put all students on an equal level, it gives them an equal chance to broaden their horizons and an equal opportunity to learn from and teach one another. According to one second grade teacher, "For native Spanish speaking students, TWI can be a chance to have Spanish language and culture validated and can potentially raise students' self esteem by giving them the experience of being the ones in the know."
A child who does not know English and lives in America needs to learn the language. The new Massachusetts' law is a good first step. The Unz initiative remains a necessary second step.
|posted by Jim on 12:02 AM|
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