Cripes. Give us a break. I remember Italian kids who could not speak English being immersed in English speaking classes. There was no concept of bilingual education. This is the 1950's. After a couple of months I could talk with the Italian kid.
We had an Italian kid show up in the fifties ... maybe 4th or 5th grade, and one of my classmates showed off his ability to speak Italian by asking,
"You lack'a d' scala ?"
I'm not kidding and all us English and profanity speakers were in awe at his command of Italian.
A different world. I suspect most of the kids at your school spoke English.
In England today, largely because of 'multiculturalism', there are 600 primary schools where more than 70% of the children speak another language other than English. Across the entire country as a whole, one in seven children's first language is not English.
Imagine a classroom of 24 kids where only half the children speak English as their primary language, and there are six other languages represented in the classroom and the issues that poses - and how important it is to get those kids speaking English as fast as possible, if you want effective education of all the children, rather than spending large amounts of time dealing with language issues rather than teaching the children who do speak English. And the ESL kids don't really have the same incentive to learn English that they used to. That type of scenario is all too common in schools now.