An unfortunate side effect of the collapse of Linda Chavez’s candidacy for a cabinet post is that it eliminates an opportunity for a much-needed national debate on bilingual education.
One of Chavez’s more controversial acts has been to spearhead an effort to eliminate traditional bilingual education in Colorado’s public schools. Chavez wants to replace traditional bilingual education with an English immersion model, similar to the one adopted two years ago in California.
The idea behind the English immersion model is to immediately place those students for whom English is a second language, and who are not yet proficient in English (ESL students), in intensive English-acquisition courses. Ideally, such courses will allow ESL students to be “mainstreamed” into the regular English-language curriculum no more than a year after their entry into the immersion program.
A legitimate objection to traditional bilingual education has been that it has sometimes led to ESL students languishing within a segregated curriculum for as long as six or seven years, thereby depriving those students of a significant part of the educational experience available to their English-proficient peers. Such data has provided the political fuel for the efforts of Chavez and other critics of traditional bilingual education.
Yet what such efforts ignore is that a promising alternative to traditional bilingual education is already being pursued in more than 250 schools across the nation. So-called dual language immersion programs are designed to make all students within a school proficient in both English and a second language.
My daughter is a kindergarten student at Pioneer Elementary in Lafayette, Colo., which last fall became one of three schools in the Boulder Valley School District to offer a dual immersion program. Roughly 80 per cent of her school day is conducted wholly in Spanish, within a classroom that is equally divided between students who use English and Spanish as their respective first languages.
>From first grade on, the proportion of instruction conducted in each language will be approximately equal. In recent years, similar programs around the country have resulted in entire schools of students who are genuinely proficient in two languages by the time students reach the fifth grade. Unlike the programs that have traditionally carried that label, this is true bilingual education.
As Charles Glenn, a professor of educational policy at Boston University points out, in America “we have neither attempted to help the immigrant maintain a home language, nor have we sought to make English-only kids be at all proficient in any other language.” In this regard, the American educational system compares very poorly to much of the rest of the world, in which teaching young schoolchildren a second language (when they are at the ideal age to absorb the benefits of such a program) is a central feature of the standard school day.
After years of experience with traditional bilingual education, Glenn is now an opponent of programs that segregate and isolate ESL students. Rather, he is a strong supporter of dual immersion programs, which allow both native English speakers and ESL students to benefit from each other’s presence in the same classroom.
Few if any educational experiences are more valuable than achieving proficiency in more than one language. Leaving aside purely practical considerations, a multilingual person has a concrete sense of both the immense power and the inherent contingency of any particular language, a sense that must remain little more than an abstraction for the monolingual individual.
It has been said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” As someone who spoke no English when he began elementary school, I fear that those who have never had the opportunity to experience the essential truth of that aphorism are missing out on what should be a central part of every person’s education.
(Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be contacted at [email protected].)
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