This fall Colorado voters will be asked to decide whether individual school districts will retain the freedom to experiment with different approaches to bilingual education, or will instead be required to implement English immersion-style programs along the lines of those already legally mandated in California and Arizona. The man behind the English-only initiative movement, Ron Unz, believes that when it comes to reforming bilingual education neither local control nor representative democracy is likely to work.

As he explained to me last summer, what he sees as the invidious power of the bilingual education establishment prevents both school districts and legislatures from implementing reforms to ensure that those children whose first language is not English become proficient English speakers. And, although the data on this question remains somewhat equivocal, only the most hidebound defender of traditional bilingual education would deny that Unz has a point.

Many traditional bilingual programs have compiled a dismal record of failure. Many non-native speakers spent years in school learning little or no English, wasting the precious elementary school window of opportunity, when acquiring a second language is generally far easier than at any other time in a person’s life.

A letter I received recently from a well-known scholar of the subject hints at the degree of blindness that much of the bilingual education establishment has developed toward the depth of their own failure. In it, he defended traditional bilingual education in California by citing a study that claimed “only” 20 percent of non-native speakers ended up spending more than five years (!) in classes designed for students whose English language skills were not yet good enough to allow them to enter the English-language curriculum. If this is success, one can only wonder what the professor would define as failure.

Still, the failure of many traditional bilingual education programs does not prove that requiring English immersion programs to the exclusion of other approaches is a good idea. In particular the dual-immersion approach to second language acquisition, in which students attend classes that are divided between native English speakers and native speakers of another language (usually Spanish), has shown great promise. Such schools usually divide the entire curriculum more or less equally between classes in English and those in the second language. From the first, the non-native speakers are not segregated in a foreign language ghetto, and the English-speaking children are exposed to a second language for several hours on a daily basis. My 7-year-old daughter attends such a school (Pioneer Elementary in Lafayette), and I have seen for myself the remarkable progress made by both the native English- and Spanish-speaking children toward becoming truly fluent in both languages.

At present there are approximately 270 dual-immersion schools in America, while a larger number of schools offer at least a partial dual-immersion program of some kind. The evidence so far indicates that dual immersion actually produces what neither traditional bilingual education nor English-immersion programs have managed to produce with any consistency: children who can speak, read and write more than one language. The apparently radical idea that drives the dual-immersion movement is that bilingual education should produce bilingual students.

Unz’s objection to the dual-immersion approach is that it is “too expensive” and “impractical.” Those concerns are not without merit, but they are precisely the sorts of considerations that should be left up to individual school districts. To date, billions of dollars have been poured into traditional “bilingual education,” so called, while very little money has been spent on dual immersion. Before we outlaw bilingual education, we might want to consider the option of actually trying it first.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be contacted at [email protected].



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