Bilingual Education

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the person who is not afraid anymore. We have looked into the future and the future is ours.”  - César E. Chávez

Bilingual education has been a subject of national debate since the 1960s. This essay traces the evolution of that debate from its origin in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Bilingual Education Act (1968), which decreed that a child should be instructed in his or her native tongue for a transitional year while she or he learned English but was to transfer to an all-English classroom as fast as possible. These prescriptions were ignored by bilingual enthusiasts; English was neglected, and Spanish language and cultural maintenance became the norm.

Bilingual education was said to be essential for the purposes of gaining a new sense of pride for the Hispanics and to resist Americanization. The Lau v. Nichols (1974) decision stands out as a landmark on the road to bilingual education for those unable to speak English: bilingual education moved away from a transitional year to a multiyear plan to teach children first in their home language, if it was not English, before teaching them in English. This facilitation theory imprisoned Spanish speakers in classrooms where essentially only Spanish was taught, and bilingual education became Spanish cultural maintenance with English limited to thirty minutes a day. The essay discusses the pros and cons of bilingual education.

Criticism of bilingual education has grown as parents and numerous objective analyses have shown it was ineffective, kept students too long in Spanish-only classes, and slowed the learning of English and assimilation into American society. High dropout rates for Latino students, low graduation rates from high schools and colleges have imprisoned Spanish speakers at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder in the United States.

This revolt, the defects of bilingual education, and the changes needed to restore English for the Children are covered in the essay. The implications of Proposition 227 abolishing bilingual education in California are also discussed.

The catastrophe of bilingual education should prove to any reasonable person the need to have our school systems responsible and sensitive to the desires of the local parents rather than the State and Federal education bureaucracy. Bilingual education has resulted in the waste of billions of dollars and held back the education of millions of children.

We are a nation of immigrants and for two centuries young immigrants and children of immigrants have mastered English quickly via the total immersion method. In fact language schools for businesses use the total immersion method to teach new languages quickly to their executives.

Bilingual education teaches children in their native language for up to seven years. They are taught English very gradually over period of years. This results in confusion and a poorer acquisition of English than the older total immersion approach. The cost of trying to provide instruction in 120 languages is huge and wasteful.

'Bilingual education is only part of the education quality problem, but it is indicative of the raw deal immigrants are getting from America's education system. They are usually stuck in cities with the most bloated school bureaucracies (half of New York's budget goes for administration, not classroom teachers). In many parts of Los Angeles, the white middle class has abandoned public education. And multiculturalist wheezes - - such as social promotion, whereby children are moved up a grade even if they have failed exams - - have done immigrant children few favors. ' All in all, the barriers preventing today's learners from becoming tomorrow's leaders still look worrying high. But immigrants have one enormous advantage: most of them desperately want to learn. That is why many of them have come to America.'