The early report card is in on Proposition 227, which ended bilingual education in California last year. It gets an A+. In Oceanside, Calif., where implementationhas been immediate and aggressive, and where one-fifth of the students were non-English-speakers, scores on the SAT 9, a nationwide achievement test, have skyrocketed in every subject and grade level.

Oceanside’s seventh grade English-language results are most telling. Last year’s seventh graders scored in the 4th percentile on the test’s reading portion, meaning 96 percent of students nationwide scored better than they did. After less than a year of English immersion, this year’s seventh graders scored in the 23rd percentile, a dramatic improvement. There were similarly startling improvements in math, spelling, and other subjects. Other districts have used a parental-request clause in 227 to slow down the transition to English instruction. They may want to reconsider in light of Oceanside’s achievement.

Conservatives have argued all along that bilingual ed was less about helping non-English-speaking students than about promoting multiculturalism and ethnic separatism. Thus it should come as-no surprise that the state’s education bureaucrats have poor-mouthed Oceanside’s improvement. Some even had the audacity to claim that the increases are the result of students’ previous time in bilingual ed.

As Maria Trejo of the state’s department of education told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Our suspicion in the state is that, yes, many [non-English-speaking] students are going to do well on the SAT 9 because they’ve been in a good [bilingual] program.” Shameless.



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