In New Jersey, public-school districts with 20 or more students born in the same foreign country must offer bilingual instruction for at least a few hours a week. The good sense of this program should be beyond doubt: Letting a child ask questions about algebra or geography in the language of his birth can speed the transition to a strange new tongue and culture.

But administrators in Paramus and Ridgewood, among other towns, are complaining that it’s too expensive and time-consuming to hire a bilingual instructor to benefit as few as 20 students. Harry A. Galinsky, superintendent of schools in Paramus, is leading a drive to abolish the bilingual requirement or at least to allow county superintendents to exempt certain districts. At the very least, he argues, the bilingual requirement shouldn’t be imposed unless there are 10 foreign-born students in the same grade.

These complaints overlook two important points. First, the state Department of Education has been admirably flexible in letting districts tailor their bilingual programs to their own situations. In Paramus, the state accepted a plan allowing elementary-school students to meet with a Japanese-speaking tutor for half an hour or an hour a week. Ridgewood, Palisades Park, and Tenafly have all been pushed to adopt similar programs by the state law.

Second, this is a dangerous fight to start. The sniping could turn into a full-scale war against bilingual education, which is fiercely opposed by those who think schools should be as aggressively English-only as they were 50 years ago. Hiring a tutor to spend an hour a week helping a confused 8-year-old does not constitute coddling him.

Nor is it an intolerable burden on the district’s finances, especially in a town as wealthy as Paramus.

New Jersey is fitting in nicely with the global economy, benefiting from the foreign companies that locate here. This means, among other things, that we’ve got to start building bridges to the non-English-speaking world. Bilingual education should be as much a part of New Jersey schools as basketball.



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