In the latest in our Book Marked series, we take a look back at Editor Emeritus Marilyn Gilroy’s article on bilingual education—a topic just as relevant today as it was back in 2001.
Bilingual Education Advantages And Disadvantages
Bilingual Education
In the latest in our Book Marked series, we take a look back at Editor Emeritus Marilyn Gilroy’s article on bilingual education—a topic just as relevant today as it was back in 2001.
Bilingual Education Under the Microscope: Researching What Works and What Doesn't
by Marilyn Gilroy
The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, Oct 22, 2001
It has been credited with being extremely successful and a dismal failure. Some parents of school-age children have shunned it while other parents embrace it passionately as a means of ensuring their child's academic success.
It is a hot potato, which state and federal governments toss at each other in hope of avoiding political fallout.
It is bilingual education, an issue that will not go away and cannot be easily settled, despite initiatives at the ballot box in California and Arizona and new federal legislation mandating accountability through performance measures.
Sorting out the pluses and minuses of bilingual education and assessing what works and what doesn't is no simple task, especially when parents, educators, and politicians disagree. It is easy to find sincere and knowledgeable spokespersons for various points of view. Perhaps The New York Times summed it up best in its headline for an article last spring, "One Size Doesn't Fit All in Bilingual Education."
However, as the debate lingers, the methodologies and practices of bilingual education have come under scrutiny. Several organizations have emerged as advocates on one side or the other, each providing opinions, anecdotes, and conflicting research.
As might be expected, California is leading the pack in terms of research as it grapples with the aftermath of Proposition 227, the voter initiative mandating English immersion (often referred to as the sink-or-swim approach) for the state's English Learner population. The measure was passed by 61 percent of the California electorate in June of 1998.
And that's where UC LMRI comes in -- the University of California's Linguistic Minority Research Institute. Now in its 16th year, the Institute is playing an important role in the current issues surrounding California education, according to Russell Rumberger, director of the Institute.
"When the center was established, there were 487,800 English Learners (ELs) in California, about 12 percent of all California students," noted Rumberger in the UC LMRI annual report. "Last year, there were more than 1.4 million ELs in California, representing 25 percent of total students."
The Institute was created in 1984 in response to the California Legislature's request that the university pursue research applicable to language minority students' academic achievement and knowledge, including their access to the University of California and other institutions of higher education. Now a multi-campus unit, it provides funding and training for research throughout the nine campuses of the UC system.
One of the ways in which the UC LMRI achieves its mission is by conducting research that will help improve the academic achievement of language minority youth by increasing understanding of the problems they face and developing strategies for intervention.
The Institute is governed by a director and a faculty steering committee, which are appointed by the UC president. The system-wide headquarters are located at UC Santa Barbara and the Education Policy Center is at UC Davis. It distributes research through newsletters, conferences, and its Web site lmri.ucsb.edu, where copies of most studies are available.
The institute has commissioned several important studies on bilingual education and the impact of 227. One report by Kenji Hakuta -- "How long does it take English language learners to become proficient?" -- found that oral proficiency takes three to five years and that academic English proficiency can take four to seven years. According to the author, these results show that the rapid acquisition of English as required by the immersion provision of Proposition 227 is "wildly unrealistic."
Patricia Gándara, associate director of UC LMRI, led a study of 16 school districts, which yielded insights into the early impact of 227. It showed that there was still "considerable confusion" about implementation of English immersion. The report also found frustration on the part of bilingual teachers who could not use the full range of skills they possess to instruct English learners.
Of course, none of this seems to faze critics of traditional bilingual programs. They point to evidence revealing that Latinos, Hispanics, and Chicanos taught in bilingual programs test behind peers taught in English-only classrooms, drop out of school at a high rate, and are trapped in low-skilled, low-paying jobs. It was the persuasiveness of these arguments and the public feeling that bilingual education is a compensatory program that led the passage of 227.
The irony is that critics and supporters of bilingual education have a common goal, that of helping students who speak a language other than English become fluent in English. But they disagree profoundly on how to reach that goal.
Part of the problem has been the way bilingual programs are implemented. As Stephen Krashen, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, points out, "Many people who say they are opposed to bilingual education are actually opposed to certain practices, for example, inappropriate placement of children. Or they are opposed to regulation connected to bilingual education, such as forcing teachers to acquire another language to keep their jobs."
Dr. Norm Gold, an educational consultant in California, has looked at schools using immersion and compared them to schools using traditional bilingual education, still permitted through parental waivers as authorized in 227.
"We took a look at some of the high flyers in English immersion and put them head-to-head with bilingual instruction," said Gold. "The study showed that both groups of schools made progress on California's achievement tests."
Gold's research indicates that bilingual schools exceeded their growth targets for Hispanic students by almost five times while the comparison schools exceeded their targets by only four times. The growth targets are state-mandated accountability gains. In other words, bilingual education has not been a barrier to academic achievement for Hispanic students in English; in fact, it has contributed to higher scores on the California tests.
"We believe we have shown that over time, these bilingual schools are serving students," said Gold. "Our evidence shows that parents are making the right choice when they put their children in well-managed bilingual programs."
Parental choice is exactly what many bilingual education advocates would like to see. It is at the heart of the matter as debate on the issue heats up on the East Coast, especially in New York.
Last summer, New York City School Chancellor Harold Levy floated a proposal to have parents decide in which language program they would like their children placed, a choice that is traditionally made by administrators. An NYC Board of Education study showed that just 45 percent of the students who entered bilingual education programs in middle school and 15 percent of those who entered in high school developed sufficient English proficiency to leave those classes during their school careers. Students in New York must pass state and city exams to advance to the next grade. Parents have been frustrated because sometimes their children have remained in these classes for more than seven years.
Many parents believe that instruction given in a native language only impedes learning English; others, who themselves have experienced bilingual education, feel that the way to become fluent in English is through a combination of Spanish and English instruction. Then there are some parents who are adamant that their children keep up with Spanish. When parents were interviewed on the issue, their responses about the type of programs they wanted varied based on family dynamics, loyalty and proximity to native country, and whether or not there are frequent visits.
"I go back and forth to my country, and I want my daughter to be able to communicate with relatives back home," said Sandra Almanzar, of the Dominican Republic, in a New York Times interview. She chose a dual-language program for her child.
But other parents interviewed by the media said they expected their children to learn English quickly in school and only expected them to speak their native language at home.
Faced with such disparities and pressure to dismantle bilingual education from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Chancellor Levy spent last year working with politicians, Hispanic leaders, and educators to develop a consensus on the city's bilingual education. They came up with the following four choices for parents: traditional bilingual education; English as a second language classes (ESL) in which English is dominant; a more intensive ESL program; or dual language, a program in which students may be taught in Spanish one day and English the next. However, the new policies carried a price tag of $50 million, and the funds were not forthcoming from the city or the state. The city already spends about $170 million on bilingual education.
As politicians, parents, and pundits try to re-shape bilingual education, it is teachers who must translate policies into classroom practice. Understanding the influence of California Proposition 227 on teachers' work and literacy instruction was the focus of a yearlong ethnographic study by UC LMRI researcher Thomas Stritikus. He examined the effect of the new law by studying two schools that reacted to it in different ways. One school pursued parental waivers and continued its bilingual education program and the second school embraced the English-only concept. His study found that the individual qualities of teachers played a large role in carrying out the mandates of Proposition 227 and that the proposition did little to help teachers in the struggle to resolve instructional dilemmas related to education in the English language.
The bilingual education quandary is even more complicated when the teachers themselves have poor English and teaching skills. According to The New York Times, nearly one-third of the city's bilingual teachers are uncertified.
"Of course, teaching makes a difference. Good teaching is good teaching," said Norm Gold. "I have been in bad schools using bilingualeducation, and I have been in bad schools using language immersion."
"You can't just hang a label on these school programs and say `this is it,"' said Gold. "So many of the federal and state programs try to do this. No matter what happens, these programs have to be faithfully implemented."
And just to add one more wrinkle to the whole issue of bilingual education, some researchers say that maybe all this talk about immersion, program time limits, and test results misses the point. Claude Goldenberg, from California State University at Long Beach, says that we are missing an opportunity to "take the discussion about bilingual education to another level."
Goldenberg says that we should consider the growing support for two-way bilingual education, often referred to as biliteracy. The goal of this program is bilingualism for all students, those who are learning English and those who already know English. There are more than 250 such programs in the U.S., but this is a small proportion of all bilingual programs. Goldenberg believes that these programs could add "a new and important dimension to our educational system." After all, Goldenberg says in a UC LMRI newsletter essay, people who speak two languages fluently often have better job prospects and are more appreciative of various cultures. He offers yet another study that shows children in biliteracy programs have better attitudes because of increased "communicative competence." These children may also have greater cognitive flexibility than children who grow up monolingual.
Critics counter that our educational system is not accomplishing what is already on its agenda. If schools cannot handle their current responsibilities, why add one more?
But as questions about biliteracy, English immersion, performance-based standards, time limit mandates for English fluency, and funding for these programs continue to be debated, there are no clear answers in the conflicting research. As Norm Gold says, maybe we have to ask different questions.
"Maybe it's time to ask the underlying question: Can schools do a good job with immigrant children?"
Hispanic Outlook is an education magazine in the US available both in print and digital form. Visit https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/education-magazine for information about our latest issue.