I understand both you and Pertonide's views on this, but right now, we have a serious problem. We have a lot of kids that don't speak English, or are going to grow up in non-English speaking homes, speaking Spanish (or Russian, or Italian, or French, or whatever). These kids were born here, just as many of us were born here, but had parents or grandparents or great-grandparents that didn't exactly have a grasp of the English language. The non-English speaking parents are obviously going to be of no help, and so it's going to fall upon the public school system. My wife has worked both in public and private schools, and has dealt with ESL and bilingual kids. They can't learn English overnight, but many of them can and do learn it by high-school, if they start out early enough.
You can't take a non-English speaking kid and throw them in with the rest of the English speaking kids for two reasons :
1)They don't learn as much, and they will get frustrated when they can't understand what is being done.
2)They will drag down the TAAS (and it's replacement) scores of their schools and their classes if it's English-only, which means there will be hell to pay.
There has to be a mechanism in place to teach them English. I will read the platform more, but I'm hearing people say get rid of it entirely, with no replacement. It's not going to work, unless you want these kids dropping out and ending up pregnant, on drugs, on welfare, etc. (I'm probably a racist now ;-) ). Something has to be done. Like it or not, they are technically (and legally) American citizens. If they don't learn English, chances are their kids won't learn English, and we'll veer away from a melting pot and turn into the type of divided nation the dems would like us to believe exists.
Imagine for a moment that you were forced to move to Montreal, Quebec, and didn't know a word of French. In that province, and Montreal/Quebec City in particular, French is the dominant language, and English is rarely spoken. Some municipalities have ordiances PROHIBITING bi-lingual signs (i.e. signs are in French only). What do you do then, learn the language.
I know of a professional colleague who was sent to Turkey recently on an assignment. He took a three week cram course in Turkish and while not fluent, obtained working knowledge of the language. American go overseas all the time, and they are expected to obtain at least some knowledge of the native tongue. Why should we lower our standards for everyone else?
The families where no English is spoken is a result of our welfare system. People NEVER get off the crutches. Sounds cruel, but I would rather give them English language cassette tapes than continue to spoon feed them. Soon we will have to spoon feed in Italian, Arabic, German, Hebrew, Russian, Creole, Swahili, and Ebonics (don't laugh, there was a recent lawsuit in Oakland, CA regarding Ebonics).
These ESL programs should be used by students on a short term basis, they are being used on a permanent basis for too long in the public schools. Regarding the TAAS test, they have watered it down to a point where soon it will resemble a college football factory test (29/60 correct passes). Sign your name correctly and you will pass.