Is Bilingual Education Still an Issue?

Whatever happened to the controversy over bilingual education? I don’t mean that the topic has gone away or been resolved. However, with all the hysteria over immigration and assimilation and undocumented Latinos stealing our jobs … well, it just seems like the debate over the best way to educate immigrant children with poor English skills has been rendered quaint.

Perhaps this is because English-immersion appears to be the de facto winner. Teaching immigrant kids in their native language seems to be a 1970s concept — like gun control and no-nuke rallies — that failed to accomplish much.

As LA Weekly points out, California was among the first to adopt “a costly, many say tragic, experiment” that ignored “Europe's multilingual success with immigrants, which is achieved by immersing newcomers in … the host-country language.” LA Weekly called the results of bilingual education “a disaster.” And that assessment comes from a liberal newspaper – yikes!

Still, looking at California’s experiences seems to back up this opinion. Test scores in English have gone up since the state adopted more of an immersion program, earlier this decade.

But of course, the debate has cooled but never really stopped. Many educators still insist that English-immersion is misguided.

No doubt, much of the animosity toward this approach comes from the fact that it is the preferred method of nativists. Such individuals insist that they’re deeply concerned about what’s best for the children, but they’re really just freaked out about anything that seems helpful to immigrants (for them, the Onion has an innovative solution).

But can even jerks be correct — albeit for the wrong reasons – about something?

Conversely, is it possible that people who advocated for bilingual education allowed their politics to get in the way? After all, one of the primary motivations for teaching immigrant children in the language of their parents was the fear that the kids would lose touch with their culture. Yet, it’s clear that kids born and/or raised in America are going to adopt the social mores of this culture. They will inevitably have less of a connection to their parents’ homeland. The only question is how well educated will they be while becoming Americanized.

In addition, just because one relegates Spanish to second place doesn’t mean that the person is rejecting all things Hispanic. On a personal note, I’ll mention that my Spanish is weak, but I don’t feel completely disengaged from the Latino experience (I hope not; I write about it enough).

So what is the future, if any, of bilingual education? Well, the new trend seems to be immersing kids in English while teaching them a second language — frequently Spanish. The catch is that this approach is applied to all U.S. children, not just the offspring of immigrants. The goal is to eliminate the embarrassment of the monolingual American.

In the ultimate irony, this program has been successful in some Mexican schools. The kids are taught in their native Spanish, but they spend a lot of time conversing in another language. That’s right: the kids speak Mandarin Chinese.

Photo Credit: Knitty Marie