Responsible educators must pay heed to the needs of students and the practical demands of the historical moment. Perhaps the best way to do that is to exalt the first principles of teaching. In this regard, “time on task” says that the more time a student spends on a particular subject, the better that student will tend to do in mastering that subject.

Federal and state laws require that school districts provide special language programs in any school district where 20 or more students in a grade level don’t speak English. Because the overwhelming majority of bilingual education students in the Dallas public schools speak Spanish _ a language whose alphabet and phonetics are similar to English _ building upon the language abilities that limited-English-proficient students already possess has been identified as an effective springboard to learning English.

Those are good reasons why bilingual education shouldn’t be abandoned outright. A credible argument can be made that seriously reforming existing bilingual education programs is the most reasonable and effective answer for the majority of non-English-speaking students in the Dallas schools.

California disagrees. It finally opted for a one-year immersion program in June, after 30 years of bilingual education. But Texas Gov. George W. Bush grasped a critical nuance when he recently told the annual meeting of the League of United Latin American Citizens in Dallas that Texas should change or abandon those bilingual education programs that don’t work, and promote those that do. But the gulf between good politics and good policy is created by the specifics.

There has long been a sense that some programs lag because they stress the maintenance of a language other than English. That approach flies in the face of “time on task.” But there is a difference between blatantly spending too much time on native language maintenance and capitalizing upon the student’s existing fluency in another language as a path to learning English _ through, say, the common bonds of a similar alphabet and phonetics.

As Dallas school trustee Kathleen Leos says, “We need a program that is neither a six-year maintenance program nor a one-year immersion program. We need an effective compromise.”

The Dallas public schools have fallen very far behind in meeting the needs of limited-English-proficient students. The schools have too often ignored the need for honestly assessing their linguistic and other scholastic abilities. Too often schools have ignored benchmarks to measure progress. And too often they have failed to provide enough bilingual education teachers.

As the challenge snowballs, obtaining state noncompliance waivers is an option. Use the full three years’ worth of waivers allowed by law if the district can implement an effective plan to come into compliance with state laws relating to special language instruction. That’s fair. But the Dallas schools are now in their eighth year of waivers, and that is a travesty. A continued failure to abide by the law could yield a loss of accreditation and federal dollars.

The Dallas Independent School District needs to stand and deliver. It should reconfigure bilingual education programs, continue to reassign additional bilingual education teachers to preschool through second grade, ensure that funding gets to targeted classrooms, emphasize honest assessment of student progress and provide sufficient teachers.

Sham reforms and stopgap measures will only invite the worst-case scenario: a visceral political reaction against all bilingual education, spiraling tension over growing demands and dwindling resources among different ethnic and racial groups, and an ever-widening gulf between Dallas’ haves and have-nots.

That kind of situation spells trouble in any language.

Second of six parts



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