Bilingual Classes

In the Spring of 1986, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett announced a change in Department funding policies, whereby local school districts were no longer obliged to provide bilingual education programs to limited English proficient (LEP) children. Instead, he said, one could substitute English as a Second Language (ESL) or immersion programs.

In October of 1986, Governor George Deukmejian of California vetoed an extension of the state's bilingual-education law, citing fiscal constraints.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in June of 1986 asked the question: "In parts of this country where many people speak a language other than English, should state and local governments conduct business in that language as well as English, or should they use only English?"

A majority or all groups polled, except Blacks and Hispanics, answered "only English." The proportion of "only English" responses was greater for Republicans than for Democrats, for Westerners than for those in other regions of the country, and increased with both age and education level of the respondent.

Is the emergence of support for groups such as U.S.English, which proposes to make English the official language of the United States, and the associated decline of both public and private support for bilingual education symptomatic of a newly emerging xenophobia among mainstream Americans? Or is it a reaction to a genuine threat that the presence of a large Spanish-speaking minority could endanger the unity of the States and the American identity of its citizens?

The debate which pits the demands of U.S.English against the supporters of bilingual education is, in fact, a manufactured one. The best reason to support, strengthen, and even expand bilingual education programs is that they promote competence in English of the children in the programs, thereby ensuring those children the opportunity to achieve at a higher level in school.

The specter raised by the proponents of U.S.English of a United States in which a large minority of people are totally unable to function in English, thereby constituting a separate political and social force, is no more real than ghosts stalking the halls on Halloween.

The United States of America is a staunchly English-speaking country, in which one of the greatest educational problems we face is to train students to any level of competence in languages other than English. The U.S. is less succesful in teaching foreign languages to high school students than any developed and many developing nations.

Demographic data make very clear that familial languages disappear by the third generation in almost every case under the onslaught of the overwhelming monolingualism of the American society. There is little real danger, in the long run, that the U.S. will be anything but English speaking.

There is, however, considerable danger that a generation of children from non-English speaking homes will lose their chance for educational success if the public paranoia about the dangers of Spanish affects the availability of the optimal early education programs for those children.

On what basis can one claim that bilingual programs are optimal? Evaluations of bilingual programs, which compare them to immersion programs (in which the children simply are immersed in an English-speaking curriculum) show that bilingual programs produce higher achievement in English, in reading, and in the content areas than immersion programs do.

Good bilingual programs, not surprisingly, produce students with higher achievement levels than programs of lower quality. This suggests that we should, as a nation, be spending more money, not less, on bilingual education programs.

Nor is it difficult to understand why bilingual programs produce better results; they enable the children in them to start learning the sorts of things they are supposed to be learning in school from their first day in school, such as to add and subtract, to read and understand stories and to write.

Immersion programs leave children learning nothing for several weeks of months, while they do not understand what the teacher is saying. By the time they do understand some English, they are behind other children--both those children in bilingual programs and those who arrived at school speaking English--in content learning.

Why should we let children slip behind when we could be teaching them in their native language? People who object to this obvious solution seem to think that what is learned in Spanish or Vietnamese does not transfer to English, but they are obviously wrong.

The crucial thing is to make sure children are learning while they are in school; they must learn English in order to become fully competent citizens in this society. But learning other things at the same time will not impede their acquisition of English, and it will make them better students who know more in the long run.

Bilingual education is designed to produce competent scholars who can achieve in English language classrooms, and the evidence suggests it succeeds in this goal. Many of us believe that a slightly more ambitious goal--that of producing bilinguals, or children with competence in English and their native language--would be appropriate and desireable.

But public policy in most states of the union restricts the reach of the elementary programs by mandating "transitional" bilingualism.

In an immigrant society such as this one, the bilingualism one most frequently encounters is "folk bilingualism"--associated with the working classes, thus undesirable and undervalued. Members of recent immigrant groups are induced to abandon their traditional languages in order to become "good Americans", while upper middle class high school juniors are sent off to Europe or to Latin America to acquire a second language.

Elite bilingualism--that acquired in foreign language classrooms, on university exchange programs, or by having a French governess--is clearly a good thing. Somehow, in the mind of the viewer, it is of greater value than the bilingualism acquired inevitably by the child growing up in Spanish Harlem or in Brownsville, Texas.

In their ultimate value to the society, however, and in terms of the cognitive accomplishment they represent, the two kinds of bilingualism are indistinguishable. By supporting bilingual education, we are not subverting the goal of a unified United States in which everyone speaks English. We are affirming that goal, and affirming its relevance to all sectors of the society.

At the same time as we are selecting the educational programs that best help limited English proficient children learn English, we should strive toward a society in which bilingualism is not confined to the lowest classes, but one in which all children have as much right to be bilingual as they have to speak English well.

CATHERINE E. SNOW is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education. She has taught at the Institute for General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam, where she conducted research on the learning of Dutch by both English speakers and by the children of "guest workers." She is currently carrying out research with non-English speaking children in English classrooms at the United Nations International School and in New Haven, Conn. public schools.