Bilingual ban reaping big rewards for students
Editorial
Give conservative reformers their due: California's ban on bilingual education appears to be reaping big rewards for students. When Californians voted two years ago to force immigrant students to immerse themselves in English, many educators predicted disaster. Students need several years of bilingual classes to wean themselves gradually off their native languages, the educators argued, or else the students will get frustrated and stop learning. But standardized test scores show that those dire predictions haven't come true. On the contrary, student learning is improving at impressive rates. In the second grade, for example, the average standardized test score in reading of a student classified as limited in English increased 9 percentage points during the last two years. In mathematics, the increase was 14 points. The 10th and 11th grades were the only grades in which test-score increases were less than four points, which is likely due to entrenched language problems among teen-agers. In some cases, smaller class sizes were also implemented at the same time, so that could be a factor in test gains. But comparisons between school districts suggest that the bilingual ban deserves most of the credit for the improvements. For example, Oceanside, Calif., aggressively implemented the ban, while the nearby district of Vista---which is similar in size and economic backgrounds---granted waivers to about half of its limited English speakers. In nearly every grade, Oceanside's test score improvements were at least double those in Vista. Oceanside's superintendent, Ken Noonan, who originally opposed the bilingual ban, is now a convert. "I thought it would hurt kids," he said. "The exact reverse occurred, totally unexpected by me." The early success of the ban also raises another question worth pondering: If conservatives were right about bilingual education, are they also right about other reforms resisted by the education establishment, such as vouchers and wider use of phonics? |