Bilingual Double Talk

Here’s a shocker: The Board of Education has no clue as to whether or not its bilingual programs are actually teaching kids how to speak English.

City Comptroller Alan Hevesi has conducted an audit of bilingual-education programs in the city schools and found that the board’s approach is seriously lacking.

Key among the findings is that the board does not have sufficient methods for measuring a bilingual student’s progress with the English language or with subjects taught in both English and his first language. Not only does the board not measure students closely enough, it does not monitor the success of the programs on the whole.

Says Hevesi: “It is not enough to say that the goal of the bilingual program is to make students proficient in English. That overall goal has to be translated into specific objectives that can be measured to determine if the program is successfully teaching students.” Translation: No one’s watching.



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