New bill would cut bilingual ed to one year
Ed Hayward
Calling the state's 29-year-old bilingual education laws a "colossal mistake," a state senator plans to file a bill today that would limit bilingual education to one year before moving students on to English language classes. Embracing the radical reforms of California's Proposition 227, which effectively ended bilingual education after its 1997 passage, state Sen. Guy Glodis (D-Worcester) said state regulations are unfair to the state's 44,000 students who speak limited English. "Statistic after statistic, fact after fact has demonstrated that bilingual education has failed the very students it intended to help," Glodis said yesterday. "It was a mistake of epic proportions. We, as a government and as a society, have an obligation to right a wrong." A draft of Glodis' bill states children will learn English "by being taught in English" and that they shall be promoted to mainstream classes after demonstrating a "good working knowledge" of English. Similar efforts to curb bilingual education in the 1990s met with failure in the Legislature and yesterday opponents were already taking aim at Glodis' proposal. "This is worse. One year of sheltered English instruction and nothing else," said Tom Louie, director of the Mass. English Plus Coalition. "People forget their own learning experience. Do you think that after one year of foreign language you could go on and learn history, math and other topics in that langauge?" Former Boston School Committee member Felix Arroyo said bilingual education should be reformed, but not scrapped. "He's treating it as the problem," said Arroyo. "It's a tool. Is it being used adequately or not? Has it been given adequate resources or not? Those are the questions that need to be answered before it is discharged completely." Glodis argues the state's bilingual education system is the problem because it can shield students from English and hinder their future learning. The state's bilingual education students can spend three or more years in Transitional Bilingual Education programs, where they learn subjects in their primary language as English is gradually introduced. As many as 80 percent of the students transfer to mainstream classrooms within three years, the state has said. Glodis repeated statistics that just two months ago Hispanic leaders cited to show the widening "achievement gap" - reflected in test scores and dropout rates - between Hispanic students and their white peers. Glodis said his proposal would eliminate a funding formula that provides financial incentives to hold children in bilingual programs for too long. "Quite clearly, districts that have bilingual education are given more money," Glodis said. "There is very little motivation to move kids out of bilingual education classes." Glodis would allow a few exemptions to the one-year limit, including giving parents the chance to seek a waiver if they want their child to remain in the immersion program. At their parents' request, special needs students and children older than 10 years of age would be allowed to remain in bilingual programs for longer, more flexible periods. Abigail Thernstrom, a Board of Education member who has talked about reforming the system, backed the proposal. "I would certainly like to see children out of bilingual classes that are in fact linguistic cultural maintenance courses," said Thernstrom. "They need to learn English." |