In 1998, when Californians capped an extraordinarily bitter referendum debate by voting overwhelmingly to replace bilingual education with an English-immersion program, the losers howled in horror: Apocalypse Now! Well, the early numbers are in.

And, to the astonishment of many of those who were screaming the loudest, it turns out that former bilingual students are making dramatic strides forward in reading and math.

Here in New York, educators should be taking careful notice.

California second-grade reading scores of students with limited proficiency in English jumped 9 percentage points; in math, the increase was 14 points.

In the city of Oceanside, where officials took a hard line in enforcing the law – refusing, unlike neighboring districts, to issue waivers to resistant students – reading scores soared by an astounding 19 percent.

In nearby Vista, where waivers were granted to any student who wanted out of English immersion, increases were either nonexistent or, at best, less than half of those in Oceanside.

That made a believer of Ken Noonan, Oceanside’s superintendent of schools and a veteran of bilingual education.

“I thought it would hurt kids,” Noonan told The New York Times. “The exact reverse occurred, totally unexpected by me. The kids began to learn – not pick up, but learn – formal English, oral and written.”

Actually, there shouldn’t have been much surprise. This is exactly what opponents of bilingual ed have been arguing for years – and explains why California’s Proposition 187 received strong support from Latino voters.

For years, it’s been painfully obvious that bilingual programs do almost nothing to prepare students to survive in an

English-speaking environment.

In New York, it meant institutions like CUNY’s Hostos Community College, which routinely turned out “graduates” who couldn’t handle even fifth-grade English.

Last year, city Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s auditors discovered that the Board of Ed had no clue as to whether its bilingual programs were actually working: It didn’t monitor students individually or its programs as a whole.

No wonder – bilingual-ed programs nationwide have become a permanent trap: Once enrolled, it’s almost impossible to get out.

The bottom line: Students never learn to speak English, subjecting them to lifelong economic marginalization and a permanent place at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Diehard supporters of bilingual ed point to other factors which may have influenced California’s results: Class size has been shrunk, for example, and some districts are openly teaching to the exams.

Moreover, in the cases of some intransigent students, teachers are abandoning the whole-language approach that stresses context in favor of rote-style phonics.

But even while refusing to admit that English-immersion alone is responsible for these gains, supporters of bilingual ed concede that their predictions of educational catastrophe were totally unwarranted.

Locally, educational reformers like CUNY Chairman Herman Badillo and state Education Commissioner Richard Mills have pressed for a drastic revision – if not total elimination – of what has become a patronizingly paternalistic program with pernicious results.

The early results from California provide powerful ammunition to those efforts.



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