Bilingual education
Dale McFeatters
Ken Noonan has done something gracious and all too rare among his fellow professional educators: He has admitted he was wrong. Noonan, the superintendent of schools in Oceanside, Calif., was an opponent of English-only education; now he is a convert. In 1998, California voters overwhelmingly voted to eliminate bilingual education in the public schools in favor of English immersion. The voters said that, with some exceptions, classroom instruction should be in English. The idea of bilingual education was that pupils would be taught in their native language, usually Spanish, until they became proficient in English. Somehow, after four or five years, they never really did. The teachers unions, the bilingual-education establishment and some Hispanic activist groups predicted disaster when English-only became law. The reverse happened. The pupils, especially the younger ones, proved to be quick learners. In two years, the average reading score for California second-graders with limited English rose from the 19th percentile under bilingual education to the 28th percentile under English-only. In the handful of districts that retained bilingual education because of pre-existing court orders, the scores remained stagnant. Noonan says he resisted English-only but when it became law worked hard to make sure it worked. His efforts paid off handsomely for his students. In 1998, Oceanside's second-graders with limited English were in the 12 percentile nationally in reading, meaning that 88 percent of American second-graders read better than they did. This year, they scored in the 32 percentile and in math they did better still, soaring from the 18th to the 47th percentile. In TV appearances and interviews, Noonan is now making the case for English immersion. "Now I am convinced that English immersion does work and should begin on a student's first day of school," he wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post where the pro-bilingual U.S. Department of Education could not miss it. The educators allowed themselves to be sidetracked by issues of multiculturalism and diversity instead of paying attention to the expertise this country has in teaching immigrant children. In the early part of the last century, the big-city school systems in the East and Midwest successfully taught millions of immigrant children who were not only strangers to English but often to formal education. Those English-only classrooms were the incubators of what became known as "the classic American success story." |