Bilingual Education In America

The ethnic composition of the United States is slowly trending towards a greater percentage of minorities, and among those ethnic groups there are thousands and thousands of immigrants, each of whom brings with them their own cultural experience and language. Correlating with that trend, the number of language immersion schools in the United States has increased from 50 in 1985 to 448 in 2011 (“Growth of Language Immersion in the United States 1971-2011”), a marked growth that can be attributed in part to the great influx of immigrants from South and Central America. The struggle to assimilate into American communities presents great difficulty to these people, especially children; for those children who lack proficient English skills, it is
critical to seek language education so that they may grow up to lead content and productive lives (Jordan, “Limited English Limits Job Prospects”).

In school systems throughout the country there exist primarily two such language education programs: Bilingual Education (BE), wherein students engage in classroom activities while speaking their native language, with minimal attention to English (Medina, "Introduction to Bilingual Education: At Issue"); and Structured English Immersion (SEI), wherein the prime focus is mastering the English language quickly from a young age by teaching solely English in the classroom. In practice, their differences clearly reveal SEI as the right choice for schools with many ELLs (English-language learners). SEI has proven itself the superior language-learning program by enforcing exclusive English instruction from a young age, thereby better preparing students for middle school- and high school-level courses that are on par with those of their native English-speaking peers. SEI closes the learning gap between ELLs and their native English-speaking peers; conversely, BE adversely teaches students to remain dependent on their native language so that they do not become English-proficient, resulting in low test scores and high drop-out rates. The biggest issue with BE is its slow learning pace, in that students are not pushed to learn the essential English speaking and writing skills in time for middle school, and instead are instructed to complete core curriculums such as mathematics and reading in their native language (Collins, “Bilingual Education Does Not Help Students”).
This focus on keeping up with English-speaking peers with regard to coursework distracts from the most important objective: mastering English. Delaying the development of English language skills resolves to excessive time spent in BE programs, as a symptom of the untreated dependency of students on their native language. For instance, the public school system of Brooklyn, New York faced a lawsuit from 150 parents, claiming that their children had been segregated into BE programs for as many as six years (Porter, “The Case against Bilingual Education”). This is the serious and worrying problem that BE presents to our immigrants and ELLs. Continued segregation will result in lower and lower performance in school SEI programs provide radically different results: A Washington Post study revealed that many immigrant children participating in SEI programs are at the top of their classes after only a few years (Geyer, “Schools Should Not Employ Bilingual Education”). As seen time and time again, the SEI program's early focus on learning English yields superior results, accelerating the language development of ELLs nationwide, while the BE program
impedes this progress. The use of standardized English testing remains an upheld method for determining student language development skills on a large scale. Not surprisingly, there is a visible disparity between the test results of students in BE programs and SEI. One notable test that is applied to all school districts in California is called the STAR test, which measures knowledge and understanding of core subjects (California Dept. of Education, “Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR)”). From 1998–2000, Santa Barbara ESD, a California school district that enthusiastically employs SEI, and San José USD, a district that strictly employs BE, had an average STAR test score difference of 39% in favor of Santa Barbara; reading elsewhere on the statistics page yields the same pattern of SEI superiority (onenation.org, “English for the Children Initiative”). Interestingly, however, there is another difference between scores of the BE students and SEI students: a much smaller percentage of BE students are administered the tests than of SEI students. Advocates of BE programs attest that this behavior is justified by the fact that BE students are still learning their native language, therefore it would be unreasonable to administer tests that gauge English-language proficiency (Rossell, “The near end of bilingual: Prop 227 was supposed to eliminate bilingual education from California's schools. For the most part, it succeeded--and student performance is climbing slowly upward”). Proponents of BE also use a tactic of retaining the lowest test scores of their students so that the system appears more practical than it is (Rossell, “Bilingual Education is Ineffective”). This sort of subversive political action betrays the desperation to maintain BE’s standing in the field of education.
Low scores can also be attributed to the lack of bilingual teachers available for work, which raises suspicion of existing programs. While the shortage of qualified teachers remains a problem, school administrators attempt to relieve it by waiving certain job requirements for incoming employees. This results in a large pool of unqualified teachers, who often come from outside the United States; not only do they lack qualifications, but they often have trouble speaking English themselves.
This ongoing embarrassment to the BE institution has not yet opened the eyes of its proponents, nor has the disastrous statistics with regard to the high-school dropout rate for Hispanic teenagers, which stands at a whopping 30 percent. This is another example of the damage that BE’s inherent segregation policies have caused to the psyche and motivation of the children who are confined to Spanish-only classrooms.