[Texas:]Bilingual program debated

AUSTIN — Put young children who struggle with English in a classroom with English-speaking students and teach in two languages.

Soon, both groups of children will become bilingual and bi-literate with the youngsters helping each other develop two languages, say supporters of such dual-language immersion.

But others are balking at the experiment that Texas lawmakers approved this spring, contending it's turning children into guinea pigs.

With House Bill 2814, legislators created a six-year pilot program that will test a dual-language program in up to 10 Texas public school districts and 30 campuses.

English was not the first language of more than 731,000 children attending Texas public schools last school year. Those children, identified as "limited English proficient" students, spoke more than 100 foreign languages, although the most common by far was Spanish — spoken by 92 percent of the non-English speakers.

"We know that dual language works, but we have failed to articulate the benefits of placing native English speakers in dual-language programs," said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, sponsor of the Senate version of the bill. "They will learn Spanish or some other language, becoming bilingual and bi-literate. When they are little, you can do that."

• House Bill 2814 establishes a dual-language education pilot program to study the effectiveness of dual-language education by placing both native English-speaking and non-English-speaking students together in the same classroom.

• The commissioner of education will choose up to 10 school districts and 30 schools to participate in the project.

• The first year of the project is limited to hiring and training teachers and establishing parental and community support for the program.

• The Texas Education Agency must submit an interim report to the Legislature by Jan. 1, 2011, and a final report by Jan. 1, 2013. The reports must show the effect of the project on grade-level completion rates and high school graduation rates.

Learning multiple languages should always be encouraged, said Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, although she opposes the pilot project approach.

"I think the purpose behind this is to help bring up to speed Spanish-speaking kids and turning other kids into guinea pigs," she said.

House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said, "The bottom line of life is that we don't all speak the same language." He acknowledged that national debate over immigration has triggered "deep-seated antagonism."

The dual-language method will benefit English-speaking children by giving them a second language, and children will have "built-in tutors sitting next to them," he said. "The kids will teach each other."

The Senate voted 28-2 for the dual-language immersion pilot project, and the House approved the measure 106-34. No Democrat opposed the bill. Among Bexar County lawmakers, only Rep. Frank Corte voted against the bill. He could not be reached for comment.

Riddle said she fears the project will dilute the need for students to master English, which is the international language of aviation and a requirement if children want to become lawyers or physicians.

"I think we are worshipping at the feet of diversity," Riddle said. "There's nothing wrong with diversity, but to minimize English as the primary language of this nation is a mistake, and I think it's a mistake for our kids. Kids need to master the English language, period.

"When you lose the language of a country, then you lose the culture and you lose everything. If we want to keep our country, we need to all be speaking the same language. That language is English."

The issue should not focus on immigration because the law requires Texas to educate all children living here, said Jesse Romero, a San Antonio-based legislative consultant for the Texas Association For Bilingual Education.

"If they are going to be educated, let's do it the right way," Romero said. "If we don't educate the children, we're not going to have a viable work force, and if we don't have a viable and educated work force, we're not going to be attractive to the economic development that our state leaders continue to say that Texas is all about."

Eissler said opponents of his bill believe "immigrants need to bend to us rather than us to them."

"The more you know, the better off you are, is my theory of life. The more we can teach our kids, the better off we're going to be," Eissler said. "The younger you are, the more adept you are in learning another language, so why do we wait (until) high school to teach language?"

Studies have shown that it costs about 40 percent more to educate limited English students. Texas gives school districts an extra 10 percent of state funding for such students.

Only 8 percent of limited English proficient 10th-graders passed all parts of the state's assessment test in the 2005-06 school year, according to the Texas Education Agency.

And the number of limited English children is increasing. While they made up about 16 percent of all public school children last year, they made up 27 percent of first-graders.

More than 40 percent of the first-grade children in the state's largest urban school districts — Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth — were limited English proficient.

"These school districts do represent a growing statewide trend, and it does pose a significant challenge to our educators," Van de Putte said. "The reality is that the numbers are increasing. We can wring our hands and say the federal government needs to take care of this. But that doesn't help us with outcomes."

Elena Izquierdo, president of the Texas Association for Bilingual Education, is optimistic about the pilot project.

"I think if done the way it should be, if it's well developed with training and well implemented, supervised and monitored, I think they will have some of the top scores in two languages, not just one," said Izquierdo, an associate professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas at El Paso. "It's way overdue that we do this."

Research shows children who learn two languages at an early age outscore students in traditional monolingual classrooms, she said.

"When you are young, you develop a proficiency in sounding like a native speaker of that language, which is why it's a win-win situation for your English-speaking child."

Most Texans probably are not aware of the challenges facing educators with large numbers of limited English proficient students, she said.

Under the program, half of each class where possible would consist of English-speaking children.

Riddle said children should study foreign languages in a separate course and that schools should not force them to learn academic subjects in two languages.

She also believes Spanish-speaking children should learn English by being immersed in English. Some believe that English immersion is the most effective approach.

Izquierdo disagreed. "English immersion is not as positive. It's saying you are broken, and we have to fix you. Teachers are not trained. I call them submersion programs."

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This is a dreadful idea that is abusing children.

Bilingual education has been an utter disaster, but educators are pushing agendas not what is best for children. Hispanic children have poor scores in Texas schools, and it is mostly about lack of literacy, lack of ENglish knowledge and lack of skill in learning other subjects due to to that lack.

Bilingual education actually *disables* children from getting up to speed on English and learning effectively in the same language with other children.

So this idea is absoluately absurd ... putting English and non-English speaking children today - great. ... BUT HAVE THEM ALL LEARN ENGLISH! There is no need for bilingual education ... THAT WILL SLOW LEARNING IN ALL SUBJECTS BY A FACTOR OF TWO!

Riddle said children should study foreign languages in a separate course and that schools should not force them to learn academic subjects in two languages. She also believes Spanish-speaking children should learn English by being immersed in English. Some believe that English immersion is the most effective approach.

This is correct. Arizona and Cali have moved to immersion and gone away from bilingual education - TEXAS NEEDS TO DO THE SAME.

Izquierdo disagreed. "English immersion is not as positive. It's saying you are broken, and we have to fix you. Teachers are not trained. I call them submersion programs."

What an idiot. No, you are not 'broken' if you don't know English, you are just incapable of learning properly in American schools!!!

Immersion is proven to be the most effective program. This spread of bilingual education to english-speakers is a dreadful idea that is attempting to turn all of Texas into a Spanglish State.

“WHAT? Bilingual education (normal in most of the world) is seen as making better students...”

Bilingual education” IS NOT the same as being fluent in two languages ... it’s about keeping children TOO CRIPPLED IN ENGLISH TO LEARN IN REGULAR ENGLISH CLASSROOMS!

Don’t get fooled by the usual mis-direction of Liberal terms.

Real ‘bilingual education’ would get kids knowin English fluently asap, since they already know another language.

” and there is plenty of evidence that children educated in two languages maintain intellectual capacity well into adulthood.”

AGAIN, THAT IS NOT THE RESULT OF “BILINGUAL EDUCATION”!

http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/pop_billing.html

Som Sak spoke English as well as any 5-year-old growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts. He also spoke the Khmer language of his Cambodian family. When his father took him to school to enroll him in kindergarten, he was given an English test. The child was shy and frightened and would not talk. His father said, “The lady and the man who give the test, they ask the kid, like do something. Pick up the pen on the floor. My son know the answer, but he scared, he not talk. When my kid not answer, they put in bilingual.”1

In 1996, 95% of the kindergartners in the Cambodian bilingual classes were born in the U.S. and already spoke English. These children are being taught in Khmer most of the school day, with a half-hour or so of English.

* * *

“My grandson was in bilingual education from kindergarten through fifth grade...He is now in seventh grade and cannot read in either English or Spanish...We were told that because my grandson has a Spanish last name, he should remain in bilingual classes.”2

- Ada Jimenez, Bushwick Parents Organization, Brooklyn, New York.

* * *

The Reverend Alice Callaghan, Episcopal Priest, organized an after-school day care center for the children of Mexican immigrant garment workers in East Los Angeles. “What we know is the bilingual system was intended to help children learn another language and maybe it works in some places, but we know our children are not learning to read and write in English...And poor kids don’t have the luxury of catching up later on.” 3

“For five years I worked as a Spanish bilingual teacher in an elementary school in the Puerto Rican community of Springfield, Massachusetts, while pursuing graduate studies. I discovered very early that the theories being pronounced as “gospel” at the University of Massachusetts did not match the reality of the classroom. It was not a lack of resources that accounted for the poor results in student achievement in my schoolthere was no serious shortage of Spanish/English bilingual teachers, and we had a curriculum developed by the staff, as well as textbooks in Spanish provided to all bilingual classrooms. My students were not “learning disabled”in every class there was a whole range of abilities from the few who were slow learners to the very bright. Finally, I could not escape the conclusion that it was the basic idea of bilingual education that was seriously flawed.

What I learned in one Springfield school has been confirmed by thousands of teachers across the country and by the research reports of the past twenty years. To embrace Transitional Bilingual Education wholeheartedly, one must make the proverbial leap of faith, a willing suspension of disbelief. Everything we have learned from 2,000 years of experience in teaching languagesbeginning with Roman children studying Greekmust be denied. Bilingual education denies that children learn a second language most naturally and effectively if they begin at an early age, even though there is overwhelming proof in linguistic and cognitive research. Just one quote from neurophysiologist William H. Calvin in How Brains Think (1996) makes the point: “Asian immigrants who learn English as adults succeed with vocabulary and basic-word-order sentences but have great difficulty with other [language] taskstasks that those who arrived as children easily master.”

Another settled fact that bilingual education denies is the “time-on-task” principle, i.e., the more time spent studying a subject, the better that subject will be learned. Clearly, a child who is taught mathematics one hour a day will learn more math than the student who receives only 30 minutes of relevant instruction a day. Bilingual education advocates insist that children who are taught in some other language most of the school day for several years will become completely fluent and literate in English when they are olderan idea that not only defies reason but, in fact, is now proven false.”

” e National Center on Education Statistics report on the dropout situation (July 1997) concludes that it is not the fact of speaking Spanish at home that accounts for youths dropping out of high school but whether or not they had acquired English language ability for schoolwork. The report states: “For those youths that spoke Spanish at home, English speaking ability was related to their success in school....Young Hispanics reported to speak English `well’ or `very well’ had a dropout rate of 19.2 percent, comparable to the rate of 17.5 percent for Hispanic youths who spoke only English at home.” That is a tremendous gain over the 30% national dropout rate for this population.

Bilingual Education Research - 1968-1998

Thirty years of research and experience yield a truly disappointing but emphatic “No” in answer to the question, “Are bilingual programs superior to other teaching approaches?” In the first ten years of practicing the bilingual education approach described earlier, it was understandable that judgments should not be hasty. Any new teaching method should be tried for several years by a large enough number of students to yield reliable results before it is judged successful or not. With bilingual education, it was necessary to start teacher training programs, recruit qualified teachers, write curricula, find suitable textbooksstart up a whole new industry, in effect.”

“We reach the very heart of the controversy over bilingual education when we ask ourselves, finally, “What good has the expenditure of all this time, effort and tax money actually done for our students, the children who enter our schools without fluency in the common language, generally from families of poverty, who genuinely need help?” The accumulated research of the past 30 years reveals an almost complete lack of justification for teaching children in their native language, either for learning English or for learning of school subjects—and these are the twin objectives of all legislation and court decisions in this field. A close reading of the reliable studies also reveals that there is no higher level of self-esteem among limited-English students who are taught in their native language or in English, and no higher level of stress among children who are introduced to English from the first day of school—yet these are the factors most often cited by advocates of bilingual teaching.”

“It is abundantly clear that there has been an almost total lack of accountability in the case of language minority children. Massachusetts and California, the former having initiated Transitional Bilingual Education and the latter containing 43 percent of the limited-English students in the U.S, have the most wretched reocrds of failure. California tolerates a success rate of only 5 perscent of its limited-English students “graduating” out of bilingual classrooms each year and does not consistently collect data on bilingual student progress. Massachusetts, whose state law has required the collection of data on bilingual student progress annually since 1971, has never done it. Its Department of Education monitors schools to see how many hours of the school day students are taught in the native language, how many bilingual teachers are employed , and so on. Yet, curiously, no information has been collected for 27 years on what progress in academic learning is taking place for bilingual children!”

.... SO “BILINGUAL EDUCATION” IS THE OPPOSITE OF LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES! IT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT KEEPING KIDS IN THEIR ORIGINAL LANGUAGE WITHOUT GIVING THEM THE FULL 100% OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN ENGLISH AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.

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