In 1998, after California’s voters approved a referendum rejecting the state’s 30-year experiment in bilingual education – teaching regular subjects to non-English-speaking children in their own tongue – some Hispanic leaders characterized the result as a slap to immigrants. The Post-Gazette took a different view.
Noting that exit polls showed that the ballot question was supported by 37 percent of Hispanic voters, we suggested that the results might better be interpreted as evidence that voters of all backgrounds have faith that the traditional American immersion experience is more effective in assimilating immigrants than programs that isolate them from the mainstream.
That faith seems to have been justified in the implementation of the California referendum. The New York Times reported this week that, according to recently released standardized test scores, California’s Spanish-speaking children are making dramatic gains in reading and other subjects.
For example, the average reading score for second-graders classified as “limited in English” increased 9 percentage points over the last two years, to the 28th percentile from the 19th percentile in national rankings.
Such scores produced a St. Paul-like conversion in one former champion of bilingual education, Ken Noonan, the superintendent of schools in Oceanside, Calif., near San Diego. A founder 30 years ago of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, Mr. Noonan told the Times: “I thought (the referendum) would hurt kids. The exact reverse occurred, totally unexpected by me. The kids began to learn – not pick up, but learn – formal English, oral and written, far more quickly than I ever thought they would.”
The hopeful statistics that produced this turnaround will be scrutinized by educators. It may be that the improved scores reflect other factors in addition to the replacement of traditional bilingual education with immersion in English classes. It is also possible that older non-English-speaking students studying advanced subjects might still require transitional bilingual education.
What is most significant about the California story is that it places the bilingual-education debate in the proper educational context. Too much of that debate, on both sides, has been about other agendas. For proponents and opponents alike, the bilingualism debate became a kind of proxy for a cultural argument over whether not speaking English is an acceptable and even desirable part of the diversity of this country. For teachers’ unions in some districts, a system of dual classes had the additional economic attraction of providing job opportunities.
Obviously, bilingual education can’t be justified as a jobs program for teachers. The debate over social bilingualism, on the other hand, is an important one, and we believe it should be resolved in favor of encouraging everyone in this country to be proficient in English, even if they continue to speak another language at home, in church or in cultural settings.
But the debate over bilingual education should be first and foremost a debate about education – that is, about what is the best way to prepare children to participate fully in American social, educational and economic life.
Indeed, eventual assimilation of non-English-speaking children was the original justification for bilingual education, and that is the standard against which bilingual education must be measured alongside other techniques, like intense immersion in English. The results in California suggest powerfully that, at least where young children are concerned, bilingualism isn’t best.
(For news and information about Pittsburgh visit
http://www.post-gazette.com/. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
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