Cost Of Bilingual Education Essay

Over the years, bilingual education has involved teaching children academics in two different languages so they may become competent learners and be successful at acquiring English. This type of education has been a hot topic that federal governments have debated whether to keep in the curriculum of schools. Studies have shown there are benefits that range from cognitive ability, educational advancement, to employment opportunities with a bilingual education, while the critics label it as a “failed experiment” that costed a whole lot of money and years to maintain a basic foundation in the second language. Although the cost is hefty for this exploration of a new language and is time consuming, the cognitive abilities, educational advancement,
and employment opportunities greatly outweigh these opposing factors.
Bilingual education has been long criticized as an avenue of incorporating a second language that’s just a “costly” waste of taxpayer’s money down the drain.
In 2010, the fiscal budget for the Office of English Language Acquisition, a U.S. department that helps to ensure English learners and immigrant students can acquire English and achieve academic success, totaled $750 million and an expected budget for the following year to increase up to $800 million (U.S. Department of Education). Huge amounts of money are going into these bilingual education programs only to get feedback on students falling behind to their English-speaking peers, never seeming to catch up (Peek). Boston University’s Christine Rossell, found that “Texas schools with a bilingual program spend $402 more per student than schools without a bilingual program. Other studies find that bilingual education cost $200 to $700 more per pupil than alternative approaches.” The money talk surrounding bilingual education has already taken dual-language programs in Florida, Texas, and California. The students that depended on their bilingual education in those states were ripped from an education that would have helped them adapt better and faster in school and the culture around them. Money talks, so they say, but to the critics and the federal government it screams
volumes.
Besides the hefty cost, bilingual education can take years of teaching, but there is another approach in the midst. In Liz Peek’s, “Bilingual Education: Toss It and Teach Kids English” Peek brings up Dr. Rosaline Porter’s “structured immersion” as the more advantageous approach to learn English. Dr. Rosalind Porter, former head of the Institute for Research in English Acquisition and Development, describes bilingual education as a “wrong-headed theory” that does not work. Instead, she believes in an approach called, ‘“structured immersion,” where children initially are taught English in separate classrooms for part of the day, along with others who grow up speaking a different language at home, but are quickly thrust into classrooms where the teaching is in English.’ According to Porter, “most children in structured immersion can get up to speed in two years; with bilingual education, we’ve seen that it takes kids three to six years to mainstream.”
It’s no secret that knowing more than one language comes with numerous advantages.
Becoming bilingual allows students to experience the world from a different perspective, and communicate with an entirely new community of the population. When comparing bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ performance on several different mathematical tasks designed to assess creativity, indeed the bilinguals not only solved arithmetic problems more successfully, but also did so more creatively (BBC Glasgow & Scotland). Students enhance their brain flexibility not only in the areas of mathematics, but in logic, reasoning, and problem solving (Benson). Although it may take several years to acquire academic English, if a student is not taught in a type of bilingual education they are more prone to miss critical instruction from their inability to process content presented in English; thus it is crucial for their educational advancement (Benson). These benefits improve students’ future lives by equipping them and making them candidates who stand out against prospective employers in many international companies
(Bonfiglio).
So, is a bilingual education worth the splurge? Most certainly. The cognitive abilities, educational advancement, and employment opportunities are just some of the many advantages of learning and educating in two languages outweigh its cost and time consumption. And, to the critics who still think this type of education is expensive, try ignorance.