Bilingual Education
I am sure that if I was improperly placed in a bilingual program, others have also. How does this happen? What "characteristics" show school officials that a student needs the classes to begin with? These officials seem to think that standardized tests and parent questionnaires will identify who is in need of ESL, but this system allows students who are not really LEP to be placed in the program. And in order to keep the students out of the program, parents have to attend a conference with school officials. At such meetings, parents are often intimidated and criticized about their decisions and so they leave their children in the program.1 And once the student is in, schools keep them in there as long as possible because to them, it means more money. In 1968, advocates of bilingual education started a small, 7.5 million dollar program to educate Hispanic children. By 1996, the program had become a multi-billion dollar industry. The federal program spends seventy-five percent of education tax dollars on bilingual education. Schools that offer bilingual classes get incentives such as federal and state grants. They also receive several hundred extra dollars for each student in a bilingual class.
A typical student spends three to four years in an ESL program, but it could take as long as eight years to be fluent in English. Why is it that Hispanics are wasting time in bilingual classes that are not helping them master the language they desperately want to learn? At the same time, Arab, Asian, and European students go into mainstream classes and achieve higher academic scores and with a lower dropout rate than Hispanics, who after twenty-eight years of bilingual programs, still hold the highest dropout rate and the lowest test scores in the country. In the end, the English immersion program was a huge success. There can be no doubt that Proposition 227 is working and continues to benefit California's language-minority students . If only the other states like Texas, Arizona, and Colorado who still implement bilingual education would learn from California, students nation-wide would be doing as well as those in California. Advocates of bilingual education claim that, according to Jim Cummings, knowledge and skills acquired in the native language-literacy in particular-are transferable to the second language and do not need to be relearned in English so there is no reason to rush students into mainstream classes . Advocates interpret Cummings to mean that students would be best prepared for learning English by first learning their native language proficiently, but in practice, "these notions work against the goals of bilingual education-language mastery and academic achievement in English mainstream classrooms . Cummings' hypothesis also assumes that children in bilingual programs belong there, which in many cases is not true. Even mothers of students who are not English proficient would rather have their children in mainstream classes. In the last ten years, surveys of the parents of limited
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1235
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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