As an ESL Phoenix high school teacher, I am following your English for the Children movement with great interest. The year before bilingual education came to my district (1989-90), my students who were enrolled in sheltered-English content classes were already complaining that their classes were too easy for them. I took a vote to discover that all my Hispanic students except for one found school more challenging in Mexico than in Phoenix! The one student was from a rural community and said that both systems were about the same in difficulty.

My students at the transitional level (highest ESL level before mainstreaming) told me that they had found immersion effective for them and could not imagine learning English as long as the classes were taught in Spanish. They claimed that it had taken them about six months to understand English and another six months to be able to respond in English. Of course mastery of reading and writing was taking much longer. With that in mind, I questioned the sense of bringing bilingual instruction to our Hispanic students. I was assured that the bilingual classes would be exclusively for new arrivals from Mexico and that those students would be quickly advanced into sheltered-English classes and then mainstreamed.

The following year proved disastrous. I had a high number of ESL students who had lived in the U.S. several years and were fluent in English. I was told that they were still in ESL because of their poor writing. However, I was shocked to discover that most of them were in blingual content area classes. Thinking that a mistake had been made by accident, I requested that the head counselor review several students' records and consider moving them to sheltered-English content area classes. Nothing happened. When I asked the head counselor for an explanation, she replied that those students were needed in the bilingual classes to justify the program!

Unfortunately, since that time, I have discovered that most decisions are made with the explicit purpose of protecting the program rather than serving the individual students. Such self-serving behavior is shameful, pernicious, and educationally unsound.

I appreciate what you are doing with my entire being. I am tired of seeing Hispanic children deprived of a decent education.

Johanna Haver