The purpose of bilingual education is to take students who speak little or no English and move them as quickly as possible into the educational mainstream, with the ability to read and write English fluently. It is a proven and necessary concept in this country and in this commonwealth as demographics shift and high rates of immigration continue.

However, if students linger too long in bilingual education, or if it becomes in subtle ways a substitute for the education English-speaking children are receiving, then the system needs reforming. As Alfredo Nunez, principal of Boston’s Agassiz Elementary School, says: “The isolation of students within a school perpetuates a second-class-citizen mentality that produces a sort of feeling of being in a ghetto.”

Massachusetts was a pioneer in bilingual education, establishing the nation’s first mandated system in 1970. Since then the system has been allowed to drift, and the results have been disappointing. In some instances bilingual education has become a parallel school system, with students continuing to be taught in foreign languages for six, seven, or even eight years by teachers who are not themselves proficient in English.

Education Commissioner Robert Antonucci, with the unanimous backing of the state Board of Education, has had the courage to do the right thing and loosen up the bureaucratic controls that were becoming stifling. The Legislature would do well to heed Antonucci and the Board’s call for speedy passage of a Weld administration bill to reform bilingual education, at least the sections that would prevent students from staying in native-language courses more than three years.

The reaction of some parents and activists to the reforms has been strong and damning. But Antonucci and the Board are not seeking to dismantle bilingual ecucation but to allow it more flexibility – to “fine-tune it,” Antonucci says.

Yet there is a warning to be heeded in the fears expressed by Virginia Vogel Zanger, past president of the state Association of Bilingual Education, that school districts can sometimes disrespect the needs of minority parents. The Board needs to monitor the reforms closely to make sure that parent participation continues now that the original parent councils are no longer mandatory, and to show flexibility if the new reforms do not reduce the dropout rate or in other ways fail to improve academic results.



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