Bilingual Education

I am interested in education and how we, as a country, can do better. One of the tricky problems is how to handle children who do not understand English, but are in a school system (and country) where English is the primary language.

Do you teach children in their original language without any English instruction? Do you teach them in their original language while trying to teach English ASAP? Do you do true bilingual education* where they are taught in both languages, perhaps one in the morning and the other in the afternoon (and, perhaps, right alongside native English speakers)? Do you teach them in English with a translator helping them? Do you teach only in English and hope that, through immersion, they pick it up and then can catch up?

Each of these has its own pros and cons. But I won't go through them right now as the possibilities are not as relevent as the actualities.

The most common primary language for students in the US who do not speak English is Spanish. In many areas, these children are put in 'bilingual classes' where the philosopy is to teach them in Spanish while teaching them English so that they do not fall behind in areas such as math and science while they are learning a second language. These programs are usually dismal failures. The number of students graduating from these programs into English mainstream is abysmally low nor do the students do better or even comperable to their English-speaking counterparts in other subjects. Now, this is not a matter of moral judgment on whether English or Spanish is better; it's a question of which language will open the most opportunities in this country...clearly English.

Is it just that it is hard to learn a second language, especially after leaving behind everything and everyone a child has ever known?

No.

Children with primary languages that are neither English or Spanish generally do not have the benefit of a teacher who speaks their language. They are certainly not put into classrooms with other children who speak their language with a teacher who teaches in their language. It's a numbers problem: there simply aren't enough teachers of these minority languages to match up with the relatively few speakers per school district. So what happens to these kids? Do they languish even more than their Spanish-speaking counterparts.

No.

They do much, much better. While no one would argue that dumping a child into a classroom where they speak an unintelligible language is ideal, these kids make larger strides.

While this seems a clear indictment on the system (that seems to be not so much a bilingual education system as a garunteed job for people not otherwise qualified to be in front of a classroom), it could be argued that Spanish-speaking immigrants come from more disadvantaged backgrounds than children from other locales (though one wonders why even children refugees who fled the murderous regimes of their homelands are less disadvantaged than those whose parents were looking for economic opportunities).

But now, I have further information. Information from someone with close knowledge of the NYC Special Ed programs.

According to her, non-mainstreamed deaf and hard of hearing** children from Spanish-speaking countries cannot be placed in bilingual classrooms for the simple reason that there aren't any teachers that are both bilingual and qualified to teach deaf children. These kids are given translators (called 'para-professionals') to help them cope with the English, while they still have access to a teacher specially trained to teach deaf and hard of hearing students.

An amazing thing happens:

Hearing impared children who have Spanish as their first language learn English faster than their hearing counterparts.

There is something very wrong with our bilingual education system.



*For more discussion on this and other linguistic topics, I strongly recomend Language Matters by Donna Jo Napoli.
**Depending on the degree of hearing loss and when the loss occured, many hearing impared children do have some access to language. In the case of children from Spanish-speaking countries, being hearing impared does not change the fact that their first language is Spanish.