Exam Packet ID#156

Curriculum and Instruction Program California State University, Long Beach Spring 2007 Comprehensive Examination

Exam Packet ID#156 Introduction Before I begin my critique of bilingual education in the United States, I would like to begin by bringing in my own personal experiences as a bilingual student in America. My family emigrated from Colombia to America in the late 1980s, after my mothers entire family had already emigrated. After a stint of time spent in Miami, Florida, where we stayed with my aunt, my family finally decided to settle in Las Vegas, Nevada. My parents chose this area because of the gaming boom of the late 1980s, and because of the relative ease with which new immigrants could gain minimum wage employment. Once we settled in Las Vegas, my parents quickly enrolled me in the Clark Country School District (CCSD). Despite the fact that in Colombia I was enrolled in the second grade, the CCSD decided that I would be best suited in a 1st grade classroom (Englishonly classroom). That is where my educational journey in America began. As a bilingual student in an English-only classroom, I began to struggle academically (I received mostly Fs and Ds despite my best efforts), and I also began to struggle with my self-image and overall confidence as a student. Whereas in Colombia I was considered a bright student, in America I was considered to be below average. I was fully aware of it

especially Fridays, when my 2nd grade teacher, Ms. Kelly, would

Exam Packet ID#156 rearrange the seating chart based upon our weekly spelling test. Needless to say, I sat in back of the room. But my transition as an immigrant into mainstream American culture is a success story, despite the highly flawed practice of immersing English learners into an English-only classroom. My story highlights the ways in which the practice of immersing English learners can incur detrimental effects on the self-image and overall confidence of new immigrants. Perhaps that is why, as the Civil Rights Project (2005) pointed out, only 60 percent of Latinos graduate high school in California (Aronoff & Nusbaum, 2005). Are these Latino students getting lost in the transitional period between their native language and English?

Bilingual Education: A History The history of bilingual education in America is a long one, and is not, as some people might believe, a recent phenomenon. The country was first presented with the challenge of educating bilingual students during the second wave of European immigration during the early 20th century. While many of these immigrants came to eventually call America their home, still many of these new immigrants that arrived between 1908 and 1924 eventually abandoned American and returned home (Rothstein, 1998, p.290).

Exam Packet ID#156 Many of the immigrants that decided to stay, took low paying jobs and settled in many different geographical parts of America. Despite being scattered all across America, many immigrants particularly the children who were required to attend American schools had something in common with their fellow immigrants: They did not succeed in the school by learning English (Rothstein, 1998, p.291). Not only were immigrant children put in English-only schools, but many of them were frequently given IQ tests (in English), and were often erroneously labeled as below average. Cummins (2001) argues that these standardized IQ tests suffered from methodological defects in that they failed to control for confounding variables such as socio-economic status (SES), sex and the degree of the bilinguals knowledge of his two languages (p.26). The practice of immersing immigrant children in an Englishonly classroom has, in some ways, developed itself into a historical precedent. In other words, it is the way that things have always been done, and therefore it served as a guide by which things should be done in the future. But this argument falls short of explaining why America has kept its bilingual education programs intact, despite an avalanche of research that has shown these current programs to be highly flawed and counterproductive to achieving success for immigrant students.

Exam Packet ID#156 Bilingual Education: The Research and Other Arguments Many bilingual education advocates have exhaustingly shown the positive effects in bilingualism itself. Cummins (2001), for instance, points out that becoming bilingual, either as a result of home or school experience, can positively influence aspects of cognitive functioning (p.32). The idea that bilingualism is a positive thing instead of a negative thing goes contrary to the current methodological practices in American bilingual programs. According to recent research, the acquisition of a second language is a gradual process, based on receiving and understanding messages, building a listening (receptive) vocabulary, and slowly attempting verbal production of the language in a highly supportive, nonstressful situations (Herrell, 2004, p.3). Thus, the conditions under which a second language is learned, is one of the most important aspects in successfully educating bilingual students (this discredits immersion as a sound educational practice).

Many of the people who are against bilingual education point to fact that there are many reports that demonstrate, The poor results of native-language instruction as the superior road to English-language competency for classroom work (Porter, 1997, p.280). Furthermore, opponents of bilingual education

Exam Packet ID#156 point to the fact that there is little consensus on what constitutes a limited English person and that schools have overused the term in order to boost funding, with little to no federal accountability on how the money is spent. These arguments against bilingualism have circulated around the mainstream media and have been served as snippets of information to the general population. Politicians, such as Newt Gingrich, for example, have used some of these reports to bolster their anti-bilingualism speeches and educational policies. In one of Gingrichs most recent speeches, he equated bilingual educationwith the language of living in the ghetto. (Abolish Bilingual Education, 2007, retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/31/gingrich.bilingual.ap/ind ex.html). However, what many of these opponents fail to realize is that the ultimate success of bilingual programs rest on top of a myriad of other circumstances, many of which have nothing to do with bilingual instruction itself. Many rivals to bilingual education focus solely on the educational underachievement of bilingual students while simultaneously ignoring the fact that About one-third of preschool children are destined for school failure because of poverty, neglect, sickness, handicapping conditions, and lack of adult protection and nurturance (Hodgkinson as quoted in Cummins, 2001, p.269). In other words,

Exam Packet ID#156 the ways in which we measure the failure or success of bilingual education is immeasurably compounded by outside factors that have nothing to do with bilingual education itself.

Bilingual Education: Broader Educational Implications Since the issue is no longer whether or not bilingual education works (it has been proven to work better than the current immersion programs in the United States), then we must seek out other possible explanations for Americas failure to overhaul its current bilingual educational practices. Is something deeper going on in regards to the language we speak and the culture that we live in? In this section, I will briefly explore some of the broader educational implications of bilingual education.

America has always, at least on the surface, prided itself on being a nation of immigrants. Nevertheless, there has always been a dominant group (or individual) that has exercised and exhibited their (his/her) power over the subordinated group (or individual). This can be plainly seen in the current debate over bilingual education. Despite current research highlighting the ways in which bilingual students learn best, and all the other positive aspects associated with bilingualism itself, there is still an overt push towards creating a monolingual society;

Exam Packet ID#156 indeed, this can be lucidly seen in the ways in which slogans like one language-one nation have become commonplace in America. American monolingualism is part and parcel of an assimilationist ideology that decimated the American indigenous languages as well as the many languages brought to this shore by various waves of immigrants (Macedo et. al, 2003, p.23). It is an assimilationist ideology that continues to misguide bilingual programs from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Conquering someones language is, in my opinion, the last vestige of colonization. By eradicating a persons language, Americans are eradicating a peoples cultural heritage. And while it has been argued that a country divided by languages will fragment and then eventually be less economically and politically powerful than it can be if it were monolingual, it can also be argued that trying to impose a shared language in multilingual societies is often accompanied by [greater] social division (Macedo, 2003, p.96). All this is to say that there is a hidden reason why many policies concerning the education of new immigrants flows contrary to the litany of educational research in teaching bilingual students. That reason might be that by controlling the language, the rich and powerful or the WASP culture are solidifying and fighting for their dominant place in American society they are fighting for it by making sure that all other

Exam Packet ID#156 languages become secondary to English. In war, this would be the equivalent of interrupting the lines of communication between the enemies troops in the battlefield. The most illuminating point in regards to the way that some of our language policies do not live up to what they promise is the fact that many African Americans (who also hold English as their mother tongue) have failed to reach full equality and power in American society. If the acquisition and mastery of English was as inextricably tied with success and equality as many opponents of bilingual education argue, then why have so many African Americans been systematically denied entrance into many of the top universities and colleges in America? Why are African Americans still underrepresented as CEOs? These type of questions point to a greater struggle deeper and more poignant than the debate over the education of bilingual students. Instead, this information points to the fact that many of the policies made in education are made with the desire of the dominant class to keep control over the subordinated classes. And when one applies this power-relation paradigm to the realm of bilingual education in America, it becomes clear that many of the current policies that are made, are packaged with the goal of reducing bilinguals into monolinguals.

Exam Packet ID#156 Bilingual Education: A Look Forward As the racial landscape of America continues to change and evolve, the issue over bilingual education will undoubtedly take center stage in the political arena. The future of bilingual education in America rests mostly on the decisions made by politicians and other policy makers. Hopefully, these policy makers will mirror back the racial and cultural groups that they are representing, although being of a certain racial group does not guarantee that the policy will be pedagogically and culturally sound. The issues in this paper reveal the different dimensions in the bilingualism debate: (1) The instructional methods for teaching bilingual students, (2) the research versus the reality of bilingual education, (3) and the broader implications of bilingual policies in America. The arguments for and against bilingual education can sometimes obfuscate the most important issue: The education of the child. What is best for the child should be at the heart of all the current debate and arguments, but that is rarely the case. Therefore, I believe that we need to put the child back at the center of the debate. And while the range of abilities within English learners can vary greatly, that should not make us shrink from the task of providing each child with the best

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Exam Packet ID#156 possible language acquisition program that we can develop. The country as a whole should embrace the positive aspects of bilingualism, especially in light of the fact that economic globalization will be best served by a country that has a healthy acceptance of its bilingual people. If America wants to distinguish itself from other nations, then our educational policies must be based on what is best for all people, instead of what is best for an elite few. We can start by acknowledging the worth and value of other languages. We also need undergraduate programs that can better equip teachers to meet the complex needs of bilingual students, with extra pay for bilingual educators. Lastly, we must undo some of the rigidity associated with standardized testing, by allowing alternative ways of measuring students success. While these policies will not automatically undo the hundred years of faulty educational practices, it will be a step in a new direction; and as we all know, every new journey begins with one step.

Conclusion The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were approximately 32 million non-English speaking individuals living in the country in 1990 (Gollnick, 2002, p. 245). This fact presents a unique challenge to U.S. society. Will we see bilingualism as an asset to the nation or will we see it as a

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Exam Packet ID#156 detriment? As Gollnick (2002) argues, The advantage to being bilingual or multilingual is often overlooked because of our ethnocentrism (p.245). If all languages are equal, why are we so adamantly pushing for an English-only society? Even though I was able to learn English as a bilingual student through immersion, I do not see it as a viable option in the education of immigrant students. Such anecdotal evidence should never be generalized to the entire population. As an immigrant I have experienced first-hand the trials and tribulations encountered by other English learners; as a teacher, I have witnessed first-hand the problems and injustices that our current policies bestow on English learners. Both perspectives have given me a unique insight into the debate like a soldier in a war, who understands better than the academic historian or the politician the complete and utter ugliness of the war itself.

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Exam Packet ID#156 References Abolish bilingual education, Gingrich urges (2007, March). Retrieved from April 20, 2007 from http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/31/gingrich.bilingual.a p/index.html Aronoff, S., & Nusbaum, J. (2005, March). The civil rights project: New research exposes hidden school drop out crisis; acute among Californias African-American and Latino students. Retrieved April 20, 2007 from http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressrelease s/dropout05.php Cummins, J. (2001). An introductory reader to the writings of Jim Cummins. Great Britain: Cambrian Printers Ltd. Gollnick, D.M., & Chinn, P.C. (2002). Multicultural education in a pluralistic society (6th ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill Prentice Hall. Herrell, A., & Jordan, M. (2004). Fifty strategies for teaching English language learners (2nd ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill Prentice Hall. Macedo, D., Dendrinos, B, & Gounari, P. (2003). The Hegemony of English. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Porter, R.P. (1997). The Politics of bilingual education. In J. Noll (Eds.), Taking sides (pages 280-289). Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin Rothstein, R. (1998). Bilingual education: The controversy. In J. Noll (Eds.), Taking sides (pages 280-289). Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin

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