What is effective in bilingual education?

Do non-English-speaking kids in the earliest grades need to be taught the grammar and alphabet of their parents’ native language as a prerequisite to learning English? The idea may sound counterintuitive, but increasingly the question may be how long, rather than whether.

The use of Spanish to teach English was not the sole question addressed recently by experts at a meeting of the Education Writers Association in Dallas. Yet this, one of the most basic queries in the never-ending debate over bilingual education, was discussed during the two-day session.

In listening to bilingual education teachers at the meeting and in the public school classrooms I visited in Dallas this year, I was struck by their commitment to the notion that teaching at least some Spanish is highly useful. One retired bilingual education teacher insists that similarities between the two languages in alphabet and phonetics can and do serve as effective springboards for the children as they articulate their first words in the language of William Shakespeare.

But even as the Dallas Independent School District clings to this belief, administrators are emphasizing the transition to English as never before. Bilingual teachers are being shifted from higher grades in order to fully staff pre-kindergarten through second grade.

Getting it right at the earliest stage of a child’s academic career is critical. Since the passage in 1968 of federal bilingual education legislation authored by the late Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a Texas Democrat, the stated goal of bilingual education has generally been to facilitate and expedite the transition of children from their native languages to English.

At the time, Mr. Yarborough specifically promised that the legislation was not intended to keep certain languages alive or to develop linguistic enclaves. But with the passage of time, bilingual education bureaucrats forgot Mr. Yarborough’s premise, and began emphasizing Spanish over English. Sometimes they kept kids in special instructional programs longer than it took Miguel de Cervantes to write Italic Don Quixote.

Thirty years later, the answer seems to be murkier than ever. Consider the June newsletter of the National Association of Bilingual Educators. In answering the enormous setback represented by the approval in early June of California’s Proposition 227, which mandates an end to bilingual education in the nation’s most populous state, the newsletter’s lead article pointedly reflected the organization’s fundamental message: “Study Documents Benefits of Bilingual Education on English Reading Skills.”

Standing up at the Education Writers Association seminar, Rosalie Porter expressed a different view. The renowned bilingual education opponent says there is “virtually no evidence” that teaching a child in his or her native language facilitates the learning of English, but she acknowledged that circumstances were different from ethnic group to ethnic group.

Mexican immigrants live next door to their country of origin. Asians live an ocean away.

While some Spanish-speaking parents are leery of bilingual education, other Mexican immigrants may tend to see the Southwest as a part of “greater” Mexico. They may therefore see bilingual education as a right.

Asians tend to be more unequivocally committed to having the public schools teach their children English first and foremost. They also have a long-standing tradition of sending their children to native language and culture classes on weekends.

The teaching of a foreign language such as Spanish, so that it can be used as a pathway to English, may not make sense for every linguistic group, but it does for some. Yet even when it does, policy-makers should not forget that, taken to extremes, the strategy can undermine the goal of mainstreaming students of limited English proficiency.

Bilingual education when practiced by self-interested ideologues or careerists has failed. California in particular went too far, too long. Perhaps in hashing out the consequences of a backlash, both sides of the debate can begin to grasp all-important nuances. Even in California, the issue of waivers from Proposition 227 may yield a better system.

Reformed bilingual education deserves a chance. It should emphasize good pedagogy, respect the legitimate needs of the civic culture and take into consideration the disparate circumstances of different newcomer groups. If the nation’s schools do that, teaching Spanish to learn English may finally translate into an unqualified success.

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Richard Estrada is an associate editor of The Dallas Morning News editorial page.



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