Whats Wrong With Bilingual Education?
If bilingual education has been a failure in the United States, it is not because of its bilingual nature. A number of foreign countries have done well with bilingual or multilingual education. The Friesians of Holland receive their elementary education in both Friesian and Flemish. That simply means that by the end of high school they will be expected to have mastered four languages instead of three (Flemish, English, and German) like other Netherlanders. Citizens of Luxembourg are educated in their native language, plus French and German. Lebanese schools prepare many students to speak, read, write, and do business in both Arabic and French. Even the supposedly homogeneous Japanese have a form of bilingual education in which dialect-speaking Japanese children receive their earliest years of education from teachers who understand their dialect. The political right has blamed the bilingual education establishment for poor academic performance by Hispanic students. The political left ha
If someone had only read news coverage of the Ron Unz initiative that passed resoundingly on June 2 of this year (the so-called “English for the Children” California ballot proposition which all but mandates the end of bilingual education), one would think that bilingual education was an educationally unsound concept doomed to failure. Yet just in the last few months, three well-regarded reports were released that give a resounding educationally based endorsement of bilingual education. The first was “Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children” by the National Research Council, a respected organization with unassailable research standards that is not given to unfounded pronouncements. In the section on literacy, the NRC’s carefully worded finding on bilingual education states: “Schools have the responsibility to accommodate the linguistic needs of students with limited proficiency in English. … These children should be taught how to read in their native language while acquirin
