The Nation: Learning Curve

In American Education, Bilingual Means 'Learn English'

AFTER studying Spanish for two years in high school and another year in college, Warren Brown had little to show for his efforts.

“I could barely hold a basic conversation,” said Mr. Brown, now 33. “I did not want my children to have that shortcoming.”

And so Mr. Brown, a consultant on youth and gang issues, enrolled his two children in a dual-language program at an elementary school near his home in Phoenix, an innovative program in which instruction is balanced between English and Spanish, as are the backgrounds of the students themselves.

But last month, Mr. Brown’s younger son, who is 7, became an unanticipated casualty of an initiative to eliminate more traditional, segregated bilingual education programs in Arizona, which voters approved by a margin of two to one.

The measure, designed to insure that Spanish-speaking children learn English, mandates that children under 10 be taught almost exclusively in English beginning next fall — even children like Mr. Brown’s son, LeBraxton.

“It’s an absolute shame,” said Mr. Brown.

It is not, however, surprising. For while the United States has experimented for more than three decades with bilingual education for immigrant children, it has never fully embraced bilingualism or multilingualism as an educational priority.

Rather than help students from other countries retain their native languages, traditional bilingual programs have strived to wean them from those languages. And though millions of English-speaking American students study a foreign language in high school each year, their reasons are often pragmatic and short-lived, rooted in the requirements of many colleges that they have two years of foreign language on their transcripts.

“I don’t think there’s ever been an idea of bilingualism in American society,” said Charles L. Glenn, a professor of educational policy at Boston University. “We have neither attempted to help the immigrant maintain a home language, nor have we sought to make English-only kids be at all proficient in any other language.”

The referendum in Arizona and the two-year-old California law on which it was modeled have prompted a fierce debate over whether the nation has gotten its money’s worth from its bilingual education programs, on which billions of dollars have been spent and through which hundreds of thousands of children have passed.

Statistics show that the small number of students who graduate from bilingual programs can do well. For instance, New York City surveys show that such students do better on the English Regents exam than all other students, and that they have a higher graduation rate (77.4 percent) than students who receive a mainstream education (66.1 percent). But such figures have been counterbalanced by other data that show many students taking six years or more to exit bilingual programs, which were intended to be temporary way stations on the road toward English fluency. In fact, some students never leave the programs at all.

Last week, the New York City schools chancellor, Harold O. Levy, proposed that limited-English speakers in city public schools no longer be assigned automatically to bilingual or English-as-a-second-language classes. Instead, their parents will choose from a menu that includes those classes, as well as intensive courses in English, known as immersion, and fledgling dual-language programs, like those in which Mr. Brown’s children are enrolled in Arizona.

But regardless of how the pendulum of this debate swings, the result will likely remain the same: few students will emerge fluent in both English and a second language.

“I don’t want to judge another country, to sound arrogant, but English is so important throughout the world and Americans know it,” said Ghislaine Hudson, a native of North Africa who is the principal of Lycee Francais de New York, a private academy on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that teaches English and French simultaneously to students of both backgrounds.

“So the learning of other languages here,” she said, “is not a priority.”

Though Ms. Hudson acknowledges that the French are often no more enlightened than Americans about promoting fluency in second languages, other European countries are.

Professor Glenn is the author of a book, “Educating Immigrant Children: Schools and Language Minorities in 12 Nations” (Garland, 1996), that notes that Sweden, Germany and Australia, among others, work hard to preserve the native languages of immigrants while immersing them in the mainstream.

“Language-minority children are offered the option of, say, two or three hours a week of separate instruction in their home language, be it Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Moroccan or Arabic,” Professor Glenn said.

In Sweden, where most children learn English from Swedish teachers with a British accent, American children are entitled by law to several hours of “American lessons,” the professor said, adding: “It means they have an American teacher and learn about American culture.”

BY contrast, consider the experience of Gabriella Diaz, 8, who once spoke Spanish effortlessly.

The daughter of a Mexican-born mother now living in Oceanside, Calif., Gabriella has received so much concentrated English over the last two years, under the anti-bilingual law in California, that she struggles to converse with friends from Mexico. “I don’t understand what they’re saying,” Gabriella said.

Professor Glenn, who led the statewide bilingual education program in Massachusetts during the early 1970’s, as director of urban education and civil rights, says he now opposes more traditional, transitional bilingual education classes, which are largely segregated.

Instead, he believes states and districts should embrace dual-language programs, in which a mixed classroom of students and teachers toggle repeatedly between English and another language. Among the 260 American schools that have adopted such programs is the Rafael Hernandez School in Roxbury, to which Professor Glenn has sent five of his seven children.

Professor Glenn also practices what he preaches. Having attained fluency in French, Spanish, German and Dutch, he is currently learning Italian.

“I carry around little flash cards with me and I have a Walkman where I’m listening to the New Testament in Italian,” he said. “If you want to learn a language, you have to work at it.”



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