Bilingual education tested

Vote could end what some call a valuable tool

Maurice Downey couldn’t help but chuckle as he sat in the back of Mrs. Barstow’s fifth-grade science classs. Some students were nearly falling out of their seats in excitement as they raised their hands to show off their knowledge about the organisms and their biological categories.

Downey, principal of Brophy Elementary School in Framingham, admitted that he could not classify these organisms correctly, but was clearly proud that his students could. What especially pleased him was that half of these students were nonnative English speakers and were learning the language through the district’s bilingual education program.

”See, that’s the beauty of it all,” Downey said. ”You can’t tell who started out speaking Spanish or who started out speaking English. They are really good at both.”

Downey, who has watched his students master English through bilingual education, fears the day when such programs might end. It is a looming possibility if a referendum on bilingual education passes in November 2002.

Ron Unz, a California entrepreneur who has successfully campaigned to get his intiative on ballots in several states, argues that bilingual education has been a colossal failure in many states and disserves thousands of immigrant children. Unz’s efforts ended such programs in California and Arizona and replaced them with yearlong English-immersion programs; he hopes to accomplish the same in Massachusetts.

But for Framingham educators, the initiative is a threat to what they believe is a program that works well. As debate over the merits of bilingual education heats up across the state, an increasing number of its supporters are pointing to Framingham as one of the country’s most successful models.

Superintendent Mark C. Smith said students who have been taught in bilingual classes and then moved into a standard curriculum have generally performed on par with their native English-speaking counterparts. And, he said, a large majority of those students have passed standardized state exams. About 92 percent of Framingham’s third-graders in the bilingual and ESL programs passed the MCAS this year, compared with 93 percent of all students statewide.

Smith also said some of the high school’s most successful students were former students in the bilingual program. One recent valedictorian was a Russian immigrant who came to the United States when she was 14 and mastered English through the program.

The district benefits greatly from the diversity of its student population and community support, but revising the program to match its changing student population is one of the town’s keys to success, said school officials.

What started out more than 30 years ago as a series of community English classes for immigrant residents has evolved into one of the most comprehensive bilingual-education programs in the country, tailored to individual students at different levels of English proficiency, according to the schools’ bilingual education director, Susan McGilvray-Rivet.

”What works for some students doesn’t always work for others,” McGilvray-Rivet said. ”We recognize that as fact. Our primary goal here is to teach our students English so that they can succeed in a standard curriculum with native English-speakers. How we get them there is different with each student.”

Framingham offers three types of bilingual education programs. The general program offered in Portuguese and Spanish targets the largest immigrant populations, students from Brazil or various Spanish-speaking countries. The classes are first taught in both the native language and English early on; then, as students grasp more English, more of it is introduced into their classes.

The schools also offer an English as a second language program, which includes classes taught almost entirely in English. Primarily designed for students who come from a language background other than Portuguese or Spanish, the ESL program has six different levels.

Twelve years ago, the district introduced the Two Way bilingual program, where native English and native Spanish speakers are taught the curriculum in both English and Spanish from kindergarten through 12th grade. The goal is for students to become fluent in both languages by the time they graduate from high school. Students are selected by lottery just before they enter kindergarten, and the program has been so popular that each year there is a waiting list.

Students are tested to measure their proficiency in English before placing them into a particular bilingual program. The school will make recommendations to the parents, and a large majority heed its advice, McGilvray-Rivet said, but the school will ultimately defer to parents’ wishes.

”It takes more than a year or even two years to be academically competent in a language,” said Carol Bearse, the bilingual curriculum specialist at Fuller Middle School. ”If you are trying to help them compete with other students, you have to give them all the tools they need.”

Bilingual education is of particular importance to a town such as Framingham, where nearly a third of its 8,739 students speak a first language other than English, and about 1,500 of them are enrolled in some sort of bilingual education, which includes an English-immersion program.

Minerva Gonzalez, principal of the Barbieri Elementary School, said the programs give the students an added advantage.

”The goal is to teach these students English, but we think they will be more successful if they can also retain their native language,” Gonzalez said. ”You can’t look at these students and see what they’ve accomplished and tell me that they are not learning English. They are, but because they’ve been taught both at the same time, they are also fluent in their native tongue.”

Some students currently or formerly in the programs are also uneasy at the thought of the various programs’ disappearing in a heavily immigrant town such as Framingham through a simple majority vote on a state referendum.

Sophia Paredes, 11, a sixth-grader at Fuller Middle School, said she is now fluent in English and Spanish but thinks she would have lagged behind other students had she been placed immediately into an English-only classroom.

Although she was born in the United States, Sophia grew up speaking primarily Spanish with her parents, who are from Guatemala. By the time she entered kindergarten, she knew how to communicate with her friends in English but had trouble following a standard curriculum because of her limited vocabulary. A student like Sophia, with speaking fluency in English, would probably be placed into a standard-curriculum classroom under the Unz initiative if her parents did not request a waiver to have her placed in an ESL or immersion program.

”It wouldn’t really be fair to us,” she said. ”I could say a lot of stuff in English, but I didn’t know a lot of vocabulary. In the program, we learned a lot more words to help us. Now reading is one of my favorite things to do.”

Carolyn Hine, an ESL teacher at the Fuller Middle School, cited one of her students as an example of why immersion programs do not work for everyone. The girl moved to Framingham from Mexico a little more than a year ago, with no previous knowledge of English; her family requested that she be placed into a one-year English immersion program.

That year the student failed nearly all of her courses, rarely spoke in public, and was afraid to attend some classes, Hine said.

”She is an absolutely intelligent girl, but she needed more support than just that one year,” Hine said. ”It was just heartbreaking, because you could tell that she wanted to follow the material but her heart wasn’t in it.”

At the end of the school year in June, school officials and the girl’s family struck a compromise. Instead of placing her into a standard English curriculum, the school agreed to put her in an advanced ESL class, where she would receive all of her instruction in English but still have the support of a specially trained bilingual teacher and other limited-English students.

Unz has said the goal of the initiative is not to target the successful programs, but to weed out the failing ones and bolster English-immersion programs in school districts where such programs are lacking. He said his survey of bilingual education in Massachusetts showed that an overwhelming majority of such programs were failures, and it will take more than just anecdotal evidence from Framingham to convince him of the school district’s success.

”It is possible that Framingham is as successful as they claim to be,” said Unz. ”If their claims are true, then they would be the remarkable exception to the rule.”

Lincoln Tamayo, the former principal of Chelsea and in-state leader for the Unz initiative, said that even in a school district like Framingham’s, where officials tout the success, students could have learned English faster in immersion programs.

”I am no different than the students in Framingham,” Tamayo said, citing his own experience as a young Cuban immigrant who learned English quickly through an immersion program while maintaining fluency in Spanish. ”My brain is no better than their brain, and I know they will be able to master the language much faster through immersion.”

Downey, who headed similar programs in Boston and is a self-professed ”bilingual education convert,” said he has no doubts about the success of English-immersion programs, but also said working with children with limited English proficiency has made him realize that it is not the only way to teach English.

He said his experience in Framingham has taught him that bilingual education, with the appropriate amount of teaching in English and in the student’s native language, can be successful.



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