Bilingual Elementary Charter School Pushed

Group here backs "two-way" English-Spanish approach

It’s time to start taking seriously the education of children whose native language is not English, says a group of Madison educators. They hope to establish a bilingual elementary charter school here within the next few years.

“Bilingualism and biculturalism is a positive thing,” says Brian Grau, a teacher at La Follette High School and a member of the Madison Bilingual Charter School Committee.

The committee is working to create a charter school with a student population evenly divided between native speakers of English and native Spanish speakers.

Charter schools receive public money, but have more leeway in setting up their curriculum and class sizes than do public schools. Madison now has one charter school, Wright Middle School.

The kind of bilingual program the committee envisions differs substantially from bilingual classes already in place in Madison public schools because it is not only geared toward Spanish speakers.

It is called a “two-way” bilingual approach and has the best track record among bilingual programs in the United States in terms of building language fluency and academic skills, said Janna Heiligenstein, English as a second language coordinator for the Madison Metropolitan School District.

The group formed in July, two months after the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released a report that criticized the Madison district for the low test scores and high dropout rates of non-native English speakers.

“It doesn’t do a really good job right now at educating people who come into the school speaking a native language other than English,” said Grau, who taught in a bilingual classroom in Los Angeles for four years.

The charter school would be a place “where students will become proficient speakers in their native language and either Spanish or English” and succeed academically, he said.

In its first year, it would teach kindergarten through second grade, and then it would add a grade each year for the next few years to become a full elementary school.

“Those ages are really key stages in language development,” Grau said.

The group will be meeting over the next year to flesh out its plans and build community support. It hopes to be ready to present a proposal to the School Board by the beginning of the next school year.

Organizations that are helping in planning include Madison’s Latinos United for Change and Advancement (LUChA) and Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national organization that supports vouchers, charter schools and other nontraditional innovations in an attempt to improve the performance of minority students. BAEO’s executive director, Kaleem Caire, said that helping out with the bilingual school effort is a natural fit for his organization.

“Instead of being mired in this racial dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere, we support efforts in the Latino community, for poor whites, people in poverty,” he said.

And he said African-American families who are frustrated with the public schools may be interested in sending their children to a school that uses a different method of teaching and that “provides families with a unique option.”

Caire, a Madison native who ran unsuccessfully for the School Board in 1998, is confident that a solid proposal would win the board’s approval. “I don’t think they have a choice not to support it,” he said, “because it will bring a renewed interest of parents and the general community.”



Comments are closed.