We live in a country where immigrants are prevalent and they have come here from all over the world, it makes sense that our government would want to accommodate them and their needs particularly when dealing with their offspring. Bilingual education was created with their needs in mind to help immigrant children to be able to learn and understand English a lot faster.

Many people disagree as to how the program should function and many feel that it's not much help at all. As with most issues, there are two sides to every story and this one is no exception, on one side there are people who praise bilingual education as being essential in helping children of immigrants to become fluent in English while on the other side there are those that consider bilingual education a dismal failure and deem it unnecessary. If bilingual education is a failure in accomplishing its intended purpose (which was to help immigrant children learn English by teaching them in their native language) then does the program need to be revised in order to benefit the children it was designed to help?

On those who oppose bilingual education Linda Chavez reasons why Latinos should oppose bilingual educ

The majority of the school districts in California dragged their feet when it came time to implement the new law while Oceanside school district decided to embrace the English immersion program rapidly, despite some trepidation on the part of some of the schools administrators, the teachers in Oceanside began teaching entirely in English, while at the same time "using Spanish only if a student had trouble understanding a concept or was emotionally distressed and needed comforting or counseling" (Chavez 106). Two years after the English immersion program was implemented in California in 1998, test scores have risen dramatically district wide and data from other districts reflect the same way with scores being higher, in Santa Barbara district (a more affluent school district) scores also went up even higher on some tests. Reading scores for immigrant second-graders went from the 14th to the 39th percentile and language scores also went up from the 13th to the 34th percentile. In yet another school district Ceres Unified, immigrant third-graders improved their math scores from the 15th to the 49th percentile which is a remarkable achievement that took only two years to accomplish. (Chavez 106)

As the debate over bilingual education continues and its practices come under scrutiny, several organizations have emerged as advocates on one side or the other side of the issue, with each of the groups providing opinions, anecdotes and conflicting research. California is the leader of the pack in research as it deals with the aftermath of Proposition 227, the voter initiative which mandated English immersion (this program is referred to as being the "sink or swim" approach) to be used for the state's English-learner population, this is where the University of California's Linguistic Minority Research Institute comes in. This Institute plays an important role in the issues surrounding California's education, it was created in 1984 in response to the California legislature's request that the University of California pursue research which would be applicable to language-minority students academic achievement and knowledge. (Gilroy 50-56).

ation, she states "Nationwide, about 3.5 million public school students don't know English well enough to succeed in a regular classroom. Some school districts must accommodate children from 60 or more language groups, many who are five or six years old and entering school for the first time, others are older and may or may not have attended school in their homeland. In the early twentieth century, such children would have been expected to learn English without much special help, sinking or swimming on their own. Of course, millions of children did learn this way, but many

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