[Texas:]Bilingual program debated

Go ahead. Tear your hair out. You won’t get lice.
I hear that’s back in fashion too.

"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."

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.

Note also: EVERY DEMOCRAT VOTED FOR THIS.

This is a very bad idea that should be stopped.

“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.

You are welcome! Have fun!

More on bilingual education and its many failures and mistakes:

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

http://mwhodges.home.att.net/bilingual-education.htm

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n17_v11/ai_16862366

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/grads/macswan/KF1.htm
“Reigning bilingual education theory holds that children need to master reading and writing in their native language before moving on to English. In practice, this means that children in California are purposefully held back from learning English as quickly as they can. For instance, a report last year by the Educational Research Cooperative at the University of California, Riverside, concluded that kids who do not speak English need 10 years to achieve native fluency in writing, reading and speaking English. This is absurd. Young children can learn in a year or two. Teenagers take longer, but to say they need ten years is saying that a child who comes to the United States as a freshman needs a decade to graduate from high school. No wonder Hispanic parents are upset. They want their kids to learn English fast.”

I think that it is time to sue the federal government for not enforcing the laws on immigration which we have. Then we need to work on Texas. I teach at a college and many of my Hispanic students fail out because they don't have a grasp of the English language even on a 10th grade level. How is putting English speaking students in with them to learn Spanish going to help? It won't!! It will just give me more students which will fail out due to no command of English. You have to practice English at home to learn it. This is something most illegals are not willing to do!