While flipping through some family albums recently, I ran across one of my old report cards. In it my teacher wrote, “Jorge’s English is improving very rapidly, if not his behavior.”

Beyond the reach of my earliest memories, I attended a bilingual school. According to my parents, Spanish was my first language. Yet as long as I can remember I have always gone to school in and preferred English, even when living in Latin America. It’s hard to imagine myself in a bilingual class. But there in front of me was the proof: I am the product of a bilingual education.

The extent of my bilingual education experience 20 years ago seems to have been one year in kindergarten. This is a far cry from the experience of children in bilingual education classes today. My teachers focused their attention on teaching me English. The program was bilingual in the sense that the teachers could speak Spanish and would occasionally help me in my then-native language. Today, no self-respecting bilingual education proponent would dare classify such a program as “bilingual education.” They might call it “structured immersion,” or even “sink or swim.”

Bilingual education today means three to five years in a program where as much as 90 percent of child’s day is spent in the native language, even if it isn’t his or her native language. I have spoken to many parents and teachers all over the country who all have similar horror stories. Marino De La Cruz, a parent from Brooklyn in New York, speaks both Spanish and English to his children in a bilingual program. “All they teach is Spanish. My son has even been taking math in Spanish for seven years,” complains Mr. De La Cruz.

In March, New York Newsday told the story of another parent in Brooklyn, Dominga Sanchez. Her son, Javier, was put in bilingual classes after two years in all-English classes. Ms. Sanchez, had to help her son with his new bilingual homework because he did not speak Spanish. When she tried to remove her son from the program, the administrator accused her of being ashamed of her heritage. Javier was in for two years of frustration until Ms. Sanchez, and many other Latino parents in Brooklyn, joined forces to fight for better schools and English. They are not opposed to schools teaching some Spanish to their children. They just feel, as my parents and teachers did, that English should be the priority.

Last year the Houston school district discovered that at least 90 foreign bilingual education teachers had falsified teaching credentials, cheated on competency exams, were working illegally in violation of their visas, or could not speak English. Ms. Mary Gwen Hulsey’s principal, who volunteers at a Houston school to help children learn English, still deals with bilingual education teachers who speak virtually no English. “How are children supposed to learn English from teachers who don’t even speak the language?” asked Ms. Hulsey.

“There are many parents who want to remove remove their children from the bilingual program but face a lot of intimidation from school administrators” she said. Ms. Hulsey’s principal, in fact, has been pressuring her to stop making bilingual education waivers available to desperate parents. The small amount of time dedicated each day to English, usually 10 percent to 20 percent, is made to include lunch, physical education and music. Many of the children in these programs were born here and may not even speak Spanish, at least not better than English.

Many bilingual education teachers themselves are not happy with the programs. I have spoken to bilingual teachers from California, like Suzanne Guerrero, who feel that the school districts and the state are forcing them to cheat Latino children out of an education. “Bilingual education is just not working,” she said.

In a surprise reversal of policy in June, the California Teachers Association (CTA), the state’s largest teachers’ union, issued a statement denouncing both people who feel that there is no room for the use of native language instruction and bilingual education avocates who focus on maintaining a child’s native language. According to the Los Angeles Times, CTA charged that programs that focus on the student’s native language, rather than on English, had “crippled the Spanish-speaking child’s educational development.”

Had I been born a few years later, that could have been me stuck in what is euphemistically called bilingual education.

Jorge Amselle is a policy analyst for the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington.



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