A Success Story
GLORIA SMITH HAD just finished writing several sentences on the blackboard for her first-grade class at Public School 11 in Woodside, Queens. The words she wrote were all in English. They summarized the day of the week, the date and the year - and included a short forecast of that day's weather. When she'd finished, Smith picked up her pointer and directed her pupils to read the entire paragraph aloud, in Spanish. The children stared at the board and, without missing a beat, recited each word on the board in perfect translation. Welcome to the world of dual language education. There are now 55 dual language programs in New York's public schools. These are programs where all the children are taught to read and write in two languages. Most of them begin in kindergarten, and together they comprise one of the great success stories of our school system. As the Board of Education prepares tonight to review its policy on bilingual education, we hear almost nothing about the success of the dual language programs, which the federal government under President Clinton wants to expand. We hear a lot instead about how bilingual education has failed to educate children, but at PS 11, where more than 300 of the school's 1,300 children are enrolled in the dual language program, teachers and parents shake their heads at such nonsense. "My dual language children outperform the rest of the school," says Principal Vivian Anemoyanis. "Their test scores compare well with my gifted-and-talented classes. And the whole school's test scores are among the best in our district." The dual language program at PS 11 has become so popular that when Anemoyanis announced registration for this year's kindergarten class last spring, parents started lining up outside the school at 4 a.m. to enroll their children. The same is true at PS 98 in Washington Heights, where Principal Lisandro Marchi says the pupils in his dual language programs "have always surpassed the norms" when it comes to the school system's English proficiency tests. Some national studies show similar findings. One of the biggest is a 14-year study of 40,000 pupils in five school systems by George Mason University Profs. Virginia Collier and and Wayne Thomas. Collier and Thomas found that by the time they get to 11th grade, language minority students who have been taught in dual language programs far outperform most American students on a battery of standardized tests. In fact, the Thomas/Collier study finds that even immigrant children assigned to standard bilingual programs perform better by the 11th grade than the national average. So, how does one reconcile those findings with studies that show children in bilingual education are not learning English? According to Thomas and Collier, children who are placed in English as a second language courses appear initially to do better at learning English, but once they are placed in mainstream classes, they rapidly fall behind other students in all their subjects. By the time they get to 11th grade, those children are the worst-performing group. The children in dual language or bilingual classes may take longer to learn English, but once they do, they master it and also perform better in their other subjects. "The person who speaks more than one language is more flexible in their thinking," says Smith, who was first exposed to bilingual education while growing up in Costa Rica. The very process of learning to think in two languages and to translate concepts between the two sharpens the minds of children, says Anemoyanis, who came to this country from Greece speaking no English and is herself a product of bilingual education. "We see a second language always as an asset," Anemoyanis said. "We treat children who speak another language as gifted, and they behave that way." The rest of our school system, meanwhile, keeps treating immigrant children who speak another language as if they have some kind of learning disability. RATHER THAN NURTURE the second language while also teaching English, the misguided see it as an obstacle to learning. They have become so enamored of the dogma that all children should learn English right away that they forget the main goal of public education should be teaching children to think. A child who has learned to think and analyze, after all, can master any subject matter - even the almighty and all-powerful English language. |