In the United States, the efforts being made and the money being invested in the special programs to help immigrant, migrant, and refugee school children who do not speak English when they enter U.S. schools is still largely misguided. The current population of limited-English students is being treated in ways that earlier immigrant groups were not. The politically righteous assumption is that these students cannot learn English quickly and must be taught all their school subjects in their native language for three to seven years while having the English language introduced gradually. Twenty-seven years of classroom experience with this education policy and a growing body of research show no benefits for native-language teaching either in better learning of English or better learning of school subjects. These facts have hardly dented the armor of the true believers in the bilingual education bureaucracy.

Yet some changes and improvements have occurred in this most contentious area of public education. Research reports contribute additional evidence on the poor results of native-language instruction as the superior road to English-language competency for classroom work. But the successful results from programs emphasizing intensive English are beginning to appear, now that some small measure of funding is being allocated to these so-called alternative model programs.

All too often, it remains almost impossible to voice criticism of bilingual education programs without being pilloried as a hater of foreigners and foreign languages and of contributing to the anti-immigrant climate. Another area in which little positive change has occurred in the past few years is in reducing the established power of state education departments to impose education mandates on local school districts. The power of the bilingual education bureaucracy has hardly diminished, even in states like California where the state bilingual education law expired in 1987. However, there. are counterforces opposing the seemingly settled idea that native-language programs are the single best solution for limited-English students, and these challenges are growing at the local school level.

Updating the Research

The basic questions posed in the early years of bilingual education still have not found clear-cut answers. Are there measurable benefits for limited-English students when they are taught in their native language for a period of time, both in their learning of the English language for academic achievement and in their mastery of school subjects? Has a clear advantage emerged for a particular pedagogy among the best-known models – transitional bilingual education, English as a Second Language, structured immersion, two-way, dual immersion, or developmental bilingual programs? There is no more consensus on the answers to these questions than there was five years ago. However, there is growing evidence of an almost total lack of accountability in states that have invested most heavily in bilingual education for the past fifteen or twenty years and have not collected data or evaluated programs to produce answers to the questions raised above. The research that has been published in recent years includes a study by the General Accounting Office, the ALEC Study, a review of the El Paso Bilingual Immersion Project, a longitudinal study of bilingual students in New York, a report of a two-year study of California’s bilingual education programs, and a report of a state commission on Massachusetts’s bilingual education.

The GAO Study

Every year since the late 1970s, the school enrollment of limited-English students has increased at a faster rate than the rest of the school population, and the costs of special programs nationwide are beginning to be tallied. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) published a study in January 1994 titled Limited-English Proficiency: A Growing and Costly Educational Challenge Facing Many School Districts at the request of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. The GAO study provides an overview of the serious problems confronting U.S. public schools in meeting the needs of limited-English students, new demographics on where these students are concentrated, and a detailed description of five representative school districts with rapidly growing limited-English proficient (LEP) populations.

Briefly, the GAO report highlights these problems in the five districts that are common to all public schools with LEP students:

* Immigrant students are almost 100 percent non-English speaking on arrival in the U.S.

* LEP students arrive at different times during the school year, which causes upheavals in classrooms and educational programs.

* Some high school students have not been schooled in their native lands and lack literacy skills in any language.

* There is a high level of family poverty and transiency and a low level of parental involvement in students’ education.

* There is an acute shortage of bilingual teachers and of textbooks and assessment instruments in the native languages.

The information gathered by the GAO study is valuable to educators, researchers, and policy makers. An alarming fact reported in this study is mentioned only in passing and never explained: Immigrant children account for only 43 percent of the limited-English students in our schools. Who, then, make up the other 57 percent and why are such large numbers of native-born children classified as limited- or non-English proficient and placed in native-language instruction programs? In a private conversation with one of the GAO regional managers, I was unable to get an explanation for the high percentage of native-born students classified as limited-English. I was told that the GAO had not found an agreed upon definition of what a “limited-English person” is and that they have included in this category children who speak English but who may not read and write it well enough for schoolwork. In that case, there surely are a large number of students who are wrongly enrolled in programs where they are being taught in another language when what they urgently need is remedial help in reading and writing in English.

Curiously, the GAO study does not provide any data on the costs of different types of bilingual education programs even though “cost” is part of the study’s title. However, a report on costs and other issues of bilingual education in the United States was prepared by the American Legislative Council (ALEC) as a special supplement to its publication The Report Card on American Education, 1994.

The ALEC Study

The ALEC Study makes a bold attempt to unravel the mysteries of exactly how many students are served by special programs that aim to remove the language barrier to an equal education, what kinds of programs they are enrolled in, where these students are concentrated – by state – and how much is actually being spent in this special effort. As a former school administrator, I know firsthand that it is quite possible to account for special costs. In the Newton, Massachusetts, public schools annual budget there is an account for bilingual/ESL programs that covers all the costs incurred for the LEP students: teachers, teacher aides, books, materials, transportation, and administration. One knew what was spent each year, over and above the school costs for general education, and in Newton this averaged about $ 1,000 per student per year for LEP students. Not all school districts keep such information, and it is not collected consistently by all state education departments because this is not required by the federal government.

Analyzing data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA), and various other federal and state sources, the ALEC study synthesizes the data to arrive at these conclusions for the 1991-1992 school year:

* On average, all federal funding for education amounts to 6 percent; state and local sources provide roughly 47 percent each.

* Federal funding for bilingual education, $ 101 million in 1991 and $ 116 million in 1992, was mostly allocated to native-language instruction programs, giving only 20-30 percent to ESL programs.

* There were 2.3 million limited-English students enrolled in U.S. public schools while only 1.9 million were enrolled in any special language program, leaving 450,000 LEP students without any special language help.

* Of the 1.9 million students in special programs, 60 percent were enrolled in bilingual programs, 22 percent in ESL, and 18 percent in a category labeled “unknown” because states could not describe their special language programs.

* Candidly explaining the difficulties of collecting strictly accurate data, the costs of programs for LEP students are estimated to be $ 5.5 billion (56 percent) for bilingual programs, $ 1.9 billion (20 percent) for ESL, and $ 2.4 billion (24 percent) for unknown programs, totaling $ 9.9 billion for 1991-1992.

* Projecting that increases in enrollments in 1993 would be the same as recent increases, spending on special language programs would amount to $ 12 billion in 1993.

The ALEC study draws some tenable conclusions from the data summarized above while it admits that the approximate cost figures may be over- or underestimations of what is actually spent. Both federal and state agencies do give preference to native-language instruction programs over ESL in funding decisions by a wide margin, even though “there is no conclusive research that demonstrates the educational superiority of bilingual education over ESL.” Even if the ALEC cost estimates were overestimated, this is only one of several recent reports that point out the widespread lack of accountability in bilingual education. Twenty-seven years of heavy investment in mainly bilingual programs has not produced exact data on how much these programs cost or how successful they are in realizing their goals in student achievement.

The cost to adult immigrants of not having fluency in the dominant language has been reported by economists Barry R. Chiswick and Paul W. Miller. In a 1995 study, they published their analysis of the differences in human capital earnings in some of the largest immigrant-receiving countries, between immigrants who have acquired dominant-language fluency and those who have not. Earnings for immigrants with English-language skills were 8.3 percent higher in Australia, 16.9 percent higher in the United States, and 12.2 percent higher in Canada. They also defined the factors that contribute to the development of fluency in the new language: exposure to the language, efficiency in second-language acquisition (related to level of schooling and age), and perceived economic benefits from language fluency. These elements are comparable to the factors contributing to successful second-language learning and school achievement for LEP students: sufficient exposure to the target language, sufficient schooling in the new language, and an understanding of the benefits of second-language acquisition for school success and complete integration with English-speaking, mainstream students. The research has yet to be done on differences in earnings for immigrant/migrant/refugee children schooled in the United States who do not acquire English-language proficiency as a result of their long years in bilingual classrooms.

Though cost should not be the determining factor in deciding on special language programs for LEP students, analyses of cost benefits inevitably do affect decision making on education policy. Some recent studies comparing native-language instruction programs with intensive English-language assistance provide indirect cost comparisons from the oblique angle of student achievement. In both the El Paso and New York City. longitudinal studies whose descriptions follow, students in the English-language, structured immersion programs met program goals in three to four years and were assigned to regular classrooms without special help, while students in the traditional bilingual classrooms needed six to seven years to reach the same level of skills for mainstreaming. Although neither study set out to study costs, it becomes obvious that the expense of giving large numbers of students extra services for two to three additional years are formidable.

The El Paso Bilingual Immersion Project

In 1992, the Institute for Research in English Acquisition and Development (READ) published a monograph by Russell Gersten, John Woodward, and Susan Schneider on the final results of the seven-year longitudinal study of the Bilingual Immersion Project; the results were summarized by Gersten and Woodward in The Elementary School Journal in 1995. This evaluation clearly demonstrates advantages for the immersion approach over the traditional bilingual education (TBE) model.

* The Iowa Test of Basic Skills (in English) results for grades 4 and 5 do show superior performance in all academic areas for students in the immersion program over students in the transitional bilingual program.

* By grade 6, 99 percent of immersion students were mainstreamed; at end of 7th grade, 35 percent of TBE students are still in the bilingual program.

* Well-designed bilingual immersion leads to more rapid, more successful, and increased integration of Latino students into the mainstream, with no detrimental effects in any area of achievement for students who took part in this program. The increased integration may lead to a decrease in high school dropout rates among Hispanic students. Subsequent research is needed to explore the possibility of this effect of immersion programs.

* The major strengths of the bilingual immersion program are its use of contemporary thinking on language acquisition and literacy development and its relatively stress-free approach to the rapid learning of English in the primary grades.

* Teacher questionnaires revealed much greater satisfaction with the early, systematic teaching of English in the immersion program than with the slow introduction of English in the bilingual program.

* Student interviews indicated no significant differences in reactions to the two programs. No evidence emerged, from students, parents, or teachers, that native-language teaching produces a higher level of self-esteem or that early immersion in a second language is more stressful, two of the common beliefs promoted by bilingual education advocates.

Research such as that conducted in El Paso is invaluable in the ongoing debate on program effectiveness. Because the comparison was made between two radically different teaching methods in the same school district with the same population of limited-English students, this study provides incontrovertible proof of the benefits to students of early second-language learning. More recently, the New York City public schools published a report that threw a metaphorical bombshell into the bilingual education camp.

The New York Study

Educational Progress of Students in Bilingual and ESL Programs: A Longitudinal Study, 1990-1994, was published in October 1994 by the Board of Education of the City of New York. New York City invested $ 300 million in 1993 in bilingual programs where the instruction was given in Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, French, Greek, Arabic, and Bengali – an investment that was not only misguided but harmful to the student beneficiaries, as the results of the longitudinal study show.

The New York City study is important because, like the El Paso study, it examines student achievement in basically different programs in large, urban school districts and because it charts student progress over a period of years. The criteria of student success measured included number of years served in a special language program before exiting to a mainstream classroom, reading level in English, and performance in math. The two groups of limited-English students whose achievement was monitored were (1) Spanish speakers and speakers of Haitian Creole who were enrolled in bilingual classrooms where they received mostly native-language instruction in reading, writing, and school subjects, with brief English-language lessons, and (2) students from Russian, Korean, and Chinese language backgrounds who were placed in ESL classes where all instruction is provided through a special English-language curriculum. The study included children who entered school in fall 1990: 11,320 entering kindergarten, 2,053 entering 1st grade, 841 entering 2nd grade, 797 entering 3rd grade, 754 entering 6th grade, and 1,366 entering 9th grade.

As any disinterested observer might have anticipated, there is strong evidence showing that the earlier a second language is introduced, the more rapidly it is learned for academic purposes. Surprising? Not at all, but it flies in the face of the received wisdom of Jim Cummins’s theories that were developed, after the fact, to justify bilingual education: the facilitation theory and the threshold hypothesis. With appropriate teaching, children can learn a new language quickly and can learn subject matter taught in that language. Reading and writing skills can be mastered, and math can be learned successfully in a second language; here are the proofs from thousands of New York City schoolchildren.

The most riveting outcome of this research reported in the New York study is the fact that “at all grade levels, students served in ESL-only programs exited their programs faster than those served in bilingual programs.” The three-year exit rates were as follows: For ESL-only programs, the exit rates were 79.3 percent, 67.5 percent, and 32.7 percent for students who entered school in grades kindergarten, 2, and 6, respectively; for bilingual programs, the exit rates were 51.5 percent, 22.1 percent, and 6.9 percent, respectively.

The three-year exit rates for LEP students who entered kindergarten from different language groups, whether they were in ESL or bilingual programs, was reported as follows: 91.8 percent for Korean, 87.4 percent for Russian, 82.6 percent for Chinese, 58.7 percent for Haitian Creole, and 50.6 percent for Spanish.

Differences among language groups remained steady even for students entering the New York schools in the higher grades. Critics of the study, including Luis O. Reyes of the New York City School Board, allege that Korean, Russian, and Chinese background students are from middle-class families and that the social class difference invalidates the study. Socioeconomic data is not reported in the study. We do not know how many of the children in any of the language groups are from poor, working-class, or middle-class families, and we should not make unwarranted assumptions. One could hazard a guess that most immigrant, migrant, and refugee children attending the New York City public schools do not come from affluent families. The undeniable facts are that children from Spanish and Haitian Creole speaking families are mostly funneled into bilingual classrooms, and children from other language groups are mostly assigned to ESL classrooms. I firmly believe that the type of schooling these children receive makes a large difference in their ability to achieve at their own personal best. I believe, even more firmly, that Haitian and Latino children would succeed in mastering English-language skills better and faster and, therefore, join their English-speaking peers in mainstream classes much sooner than is now the case if they were given the same opportunity given to Russian, Korean, and Chinese students.

Exiting the special program classrooms more expeditiously is not only a cost consideration but a matter of integration and opportunity. Remaining in substantially segregated bilingual classrooms for several years does not equip students to compete in the broader life of the school and community – in fact it has the opposite effect. The New York Study reports the highest success in school achievement for students. who were in the special language programs the shortest amount of time, one or two years:

Students who tested out of LEP-entitlement after one or two years of service generally performed above average on the citywide tests of reading (in English) and mathematics that were given in Spring, 1994. However, there were large differences in performance between those who had been served in ESL-only versus bilingual programs, and between those who exited after one or two years versus those who exited after three or more years.

Even more important than the time element is the performance of LEP students in regular classrooms after they exit a special program, and, once again, we find that students who had been enrolled in ESL classrooms received better scores than those who had been in native-language classrooms in both reading and math. This must be the ultimate measure of program effectiveness: How well are students able to perform, unassisted, in regular classrooms after they have received the special services, for a period of time, of one or another special program? The New York study answers this question most emphatically in favor of intensive English-language programs.

This study substantially refutes the work of Virginia Collier at George Mason University, who flatly asserts that LEP students who are in English-language programs need five to ten years to reach English fluency but only four to seven years if they are in bilingual programs. In her current research, Collier’s criterion for fluency appears to be the ability to score at or above the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test in English. This is an inappropriate standard. Reading ability is not the only indicator of language fluency. Students may be quite fluent in English – they may, in fact be native speakers of the language – and not do well on a reading test.

The latest sequel to the publication of the New York study is the filing of a suit against the State Commissioner of Education by the Bushwick Parents Organization, which represents 150 Brooklyn families. The suit, as reported in the New York Times, makes two major charges: first, that “tens of thousands of immigrant children in New York City have been permitted to ‘languish’ for up to six years in bilingual classes, learning neither English nor other subjects particularly well,” and second, that the State Education Department “routinely [grants] waivers that permit school officials to keep children in classes taught in their native language – usually – beyond the three-year limit allowed by state law.”

As an expert witness in this lawsuit, I have reviewed the affidavits of the petitioners and respondents. The Bushwick Parents Organization specifically alleges that “because the children of its members routinely remain segregated in bilingual education programs in excess of three years, and in some cases in excess of six years, contrary to S 3204(2) of the State Education Law, these children are not receiving adequate instruction in English, the crucial skill that leads to equal opportunity in schooling, jobs, and public life in the United States.” The affidavits of some of the Bushwick parents and educators reveal the unremitting failure of New York State’s education policy and its harmful effects on schoolchildren, as illustrated in the following excerpts:

My grandson was in bilingual education from kindergarten through fifth grade at P.S. 377 in Bushwick. He is now in seventh grade, and cannot read in either English or Spanish…. We and other people we know were pressured into keeping our children in bilingual education by school officials. We were told that because my grandson has a Spanish last name, he should remain in bilingual classes. My grandson attended Head Start in English, and did not speak any Spanish at that time…. I am very frustrated with the failure of the bilingual education program to teach my grandson either English or Spanish. (Ada Jimenez)

My son is eleven years old, and is in sixth grade at I.S. 291 in Bushwick. He participated in a Head Start program in English but has been in the bilingual program for six years…. I have spoken with his teacher to try to switch him into regular English classes…. My son is confused between English and Spanish. I am unhappy with what he has learned in the bilingual education program. (Mariz Cruz)

My son is in Ninth grade at Bushwick High School, and has been in bilingual education since he entered the school system…. My son is confused between Spanish and English. I have never been consulted about whether I wished to remove him from bilingual classes. (Carmen Quinones)

As part of my duties as Assistant Principal, I was required to observe Social Studies class at Eastern District High School. I observed that English was rarely used in the supposedly bilingual classes. The ninth grade classes were generally taught entirely in Spanish, and even by twelfth grade the classes were still conducted approximately 85% in Spanish, with written material and exams in Spanish as well. I attempted many times to withdraw students from the bilingual education program when l thought that they no longer needed to be in all-Spanish classes…. I was never once successful at withdrawing a student from a bilingual education program. In my experience, once a child was in a bilingual education program, he remained in such program and was never mainstreamed into regular English-speaking classes…. many students graduating from Eastern District High School were illiterate in both English and Spanish. (Edwin Selzer, former assistant principal, Eastern District High School, Brooklyn)

Within the last two years, we have spent a great deal of time examining the bilingual program. We have found that children in the bilingual program have not been improving their English skills, as their entire class day is taught in Spanish and only one period each day is devoted to studying English. Many of the children in bilingual classes were born in the United States and attended Head Start programs in English, but were then placed in bilingual programs when they entered the public school setting. Parents… discovered that their children were not advancing in English and, in many cases, their children’s performance on English language tests were declining…. Although many parents are aware of their right to remove their children from bilingual programs, many parents indicate that when they initiate the idea of withdrawing their children from bilingual programs, the individual teachers and principals inform them that the bilingual settings are the best environment for their children…many of the parents are unable to overcome the pressure put on them by these school officials…. Many of these students graduate from school having never fully developed their English language skills, and they are therefore unprepared for higher education or employment in jobs in which English language skills are used. (Sister Kathy Maire, educator and organizer of Bushwick Parents Organization)

The California Study and Others

These statements make abundantly clear what has been observed in school districts from Massachusetts to Texas to California: The temporary assistance needed by limited-English children has evolved into a long-term assignment to segregated classrooms and the denial of parents’ rights to a choice in their children’s educational opportunities. A positive outcome for the Brooklyn parents who are mounting this challenge to the state education bureaucracy is crucial for the city’s students and, one hopes, will embolden parents in other districts.

New York City’s willingness actually to monitor the progress of LEP students and report the results to the public is much to be praised when we survey the lack of accountability in other pans of the country. The State of California, with 1.2 million limited-English students (43 percent of all LEP students in the United States) and a twenty-year history of involvement with bilingual education, commissioned an evaluation of educational programs for these students. Meeting the Challenge of Language Diversity: An Evaluation of Programs for Pupils with Limited Proficiency in English, the published report of a two-year study, 19901992, shows generally poor results for bilingual education programs in California and essentially evades the legislature’s requirement that it provide “information to determine which model for educating LEP pupils is most effective and cost effective.”

Major findings of this study are the following:

1. California public schools do not have valid assessments of the performance for students with limited proficiency in English. Therefore, the state and the public cannot hold schools accountable for LEP students achieving high levels of performance (emphasis added).

2. Many schools do not reclassify students (that is, move them from the bilingual programs with appropriate skills to work in mainstream classrooms), keeping them in native-language classrooms well beyond the time when they are fluent in English. “It is not surprising that many students may wait years to be formally retested for program exit and that many others may never be reclassified, going on to the middle school still bearing the LEP label.”

3. Junior and senior high school LEP students do not have access to core academic subjects through Sheltered English or ESL. Long stays in bilingual programs in elementary schools delay the effective learning of the English-language literacy skills that are so important for secondary school work.

Meeting the Challenge presents a bleak picture of the disappointing results of twenty years of bilingual education in California. When the Chacon-Moscone Bilingual Bicultural Act of 1976 expired in 1987, the California State Department of Education sent notification to each school district that the intent of the act would still be promoted by state regulations, principally, “that the primary goal of all [bilingual] programs is, as effectively and efficiently as possible, to develop in each child fluency in English.” Meeting the Challenge fails to tell us how or if this goal is being properly met but offers a variety of excuses for not fulfilling its mission. The weaknesses in this giant instructional system for limited-English students – one out of every five students in California – are of huge proportions. The fact that the State Department of Education has allowed school districts to evade their responsibility to assess and report on student progress shows an unconscionable lack of accountability by this powerful bureaucracy. If we cannot hold the schools responsible for program outcomes after twenty years, then perhaps the responsibility for this failure rests squarely on the state agency that has forcefully promoted the bilingual education policy.

California’s high school dropout rates reported in June 1995 amounted to a statewide average of 5 percent per year, or a four-year average of 20 percent of students leaving school before graduation. Discouraging as that seems, the dropout rate for Latino students statewide is even higher – 28 percent, compared to 10 percent for Asian students and 12 percent for white students. The four-year dropout rate for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the district enrolling the highest percentage of LEP students in the state, is a shocking 43.6 percent.

In 1993 the Los Angeles Unified School District embarked on a plan to improve its bilingual education programs, partly through expanded teacher training in the native languages of the students (actually, in Spanish only). Clearly, the increased emphasis on native-language instruction has not had any positive effect on the dropout rates for LEP students in the Los Angeles schools. The latest Los Angeles figures on dropout rates by ethnic breakdown, as reported by the State Department of Education in October 1994 for the 1993-1994 school year, are 44.4 percent for Hispanic students, three-fourths of whom are enrolled in bilingual classes in the district.

Robert E. Rossier, in a review of the California study, argues that “young people of limited-English proficiency have the same right as their native English-speaking schoolmates to have their linguistic and academic performance evaluated periodically by measures which clearly indicate to them and to the schools the extent of their progress toward the goals set for all students.” Rossier ends his review with two powerful indictments of the California study and the system that it attempted to evaluate.

While the report presents no statistical data that would shed light on the effectiveness of current programs, it does provide several items of information that, read carefully, point to the conclusion that California’s heavy reliance on native-language teaching has not served LEP students well. The conclusion could be formed that the bilingual programs described as exemplary have instead resulted in delaying the learning of English, delaying the enrollment of LEP students in mainstream classes, and, in many cases denying these students the opportunity to enroll in classes required for high school graduation. Not having access to classes available to their English-speaking classmates, LEP students are, in effect, denied an important civil right: the right to equal educational opportunity.

…Meeting the Challenge has shown – as much by what it has avoided saying as by what it has said – that this opportunity will continue to be withheld from them until we are able to look truthfully at the havoc that the programs of the past twenty years have caused.

Massachusetts Revisited

Ironically, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which passed the first state law mandating native-language teaching in 1971, Chapter 71-A, has an even more dismal record than California in the area of public accountability. Efforts to reform the Transitional Bilingual Education law have been successfully resisted, even though there can hardly be one legislator who has any documented proof for the effectiveness of bilingual education in Massachusetts. A state commission was appointed by Governor Weld to survey the status of bilingual education in the state, and in December 1994 it reported this conclusion:

We do not know, on the basis of measured outcomes, whether TBE programs in Massachusetts produce good results or poor results. There are no comprehensive data that evaluate the performance of TBE pupils compared with pupils from other groups. This specialized program which accounts for 5% of all pupils in Massachusetts public schools and 17% of all pupils in Boston public schools is not held separately accountable for its performance.

Apparently, the commission has recommended that the state department of education develop new guidelines on accountability as soon as suitable tests are developed. As a veteran Massachusetts educator who has seen many a set of “guidelines” arrive with a flourish and disappear without a trace, I reserve judgment on the latest pronouncements.

Massachusetts probably leads the country in zany educational experiments. I reported earlier on the Cape Verdean project to try to encourage the use of a nonstandard dialect as the classroom language of instruction. The Boston public school system, in its infinite wisdom, now maintains a K-12 bilingual program in Kriolu, a dialect of Portuguese spoken in the Cape Verde Islands that has no alphabet, no written language, and no books. Massachusetts is thought to be the only place in the world to have schoolrooms in which Kriolu is the language of instruction, with Kriolu programs in Boston, Brockton, and New Bedford schools. Portuguese is the official language of education in Cape Verde.

Aside from the minor matters of alphabets, a written language, or books, there are these exquisite complications. Cape Verdean students may speak one of many dialects and not understand Kriolu, as explained by a science teacher in the Dearborn School, Boston, who says: “Sometimes a student gets upset because he’s not understanding the Fogo dialect so you have to go back and help him in Kriolu or Portuguese.” Communication between the schools and Cape Verdean parents is not improved either. Massachusetts law requires that all paperwork be sent to parents in the student’s native language. A teacher at the Condon School, Eileen Fonseca, says it frustrates parents to receive a notice written in Kriolu: “When we send home report cards and matriculation papers in Kriolu, parents complain. This is new to them. They have to have it read three times, or they just ask for Portuguese or English, often so it can be read to them by family or friends.” One parent made this comment: “They sent me a letter apparently to tell me something. I never understood what it was trying to say. I called to say that if the intent of the letter is to communicate, it would be better in Portuguese.”

The Kriolu Caper makes an amusing, now-I’ve-heard-everything anecdote, but the enormity of such folly in education policy is no laughing matter. This program neither helps students learn the language or acquire the literacy skills necessary for school achievement, nor does it facilitate communication between school and family. What it does do is foster resentment in the Cape Verdean community, which does not feel respected or understood, a situation similar to the misguided attempt to make black English the language of instruction for African-American schoolchildren two decades ago. The Peoples Republic of Massachusetts is in serious need of a reality check.

Let me conclude with the review of a chapter in The Emperor Has No Clothes: Bilingual Education in Massachusetts by Christine Rossell and Keith Baker that summarizes the major studies on the effectiveness of bilingual education and analyzes those studies that are methodologically acceptable.

Social science research in education is, at best, an approximation of true scientific research. Schoolchildren cannot be isolated in laboratory test tubes and studied under pristine conditions, controlling for minute variables. In the area of bilingual education research, the quality of the product is generally acknowledged to be especially low. The elements of a scientifically valid evaluation of a special effort must include, at the minimum:

* random assignment of subjects to avoid self-selection bias

* a control group to compare with the group receiving the special program (treatment)

* pretesting to establish that students in different groups are starting with the same traits – i.e., that all are limited or non-English speakers – or statistical adjustments to account for pre-treatment differences

* posttesting to determine the effect of different treatments

* assurance that one group does not receive extra benefits, aside from the difference in treatments, such as after-school programs or a longer school day.

In the area of bilingual education research, there is the added problem that the label is applied to a range of educational varieties, from the classic model, in which native language instruction is given 80-90 percent of the school day, to the other extreme, in which the teacher may use a word or two of another language on occasion. This complicates the work of analyzing the effects of bilingual programs.

Rossell and Baker read over five hundred studies, three hundred of which were program evaluations. The authors found seventy-two methodologically acceptable studies, that is, studies that show the effect of transitional bilingual education on English-language learning, reading, and mathematics, compared to (1) “submersion” or doing nothing, (2) English as a Second Language, (3) structured immersion in English, and (4) maintenance bilingual education. The authors’ overall finding, which is of crucial importance as this is the most current, comprehensive analysis of the research, is that “there is still…no consistent research support for transitional bilingual education as a superior instructional practice for improving the English language achievement of limited-English-proficient children” (emphasis added).

Rosalie Pedalino Porter is chairman of the board and acting director of the Research on English Acquisition and Development (READ) Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. For ten years she was director of bilingual and English as a Second Language programs in the Newton, Massachusetts, public schools. She has lectured widely on the subject of bilingualism both here and abroad.



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