Bilingual Education: Bad Idea

There is a corollary that never fails in education: If "social justice" professors want something to be done in American schools, then it is bad for American values and prosperity.

It is no different with bilingual education. Matt Sanchez has a great post up right now detailing his observations and negative experiences with bilingual education.

The term "bilingual education" is referred to by the education establishment as making Hispanic students learn certain subjects in their native language, instead of placing them in ESL classes or mainstream classrooms. It is not learning a foreign language in schools. The former is a cruel and horrendous experiment promoted by "social justice" professors that has never been shown in any scientifically-based studies to increase student achievement. The latter makes sense. Everyone should know foreign languages.

For the low down on bilingual education, it is best to start with the website of Linda Chavez, an expert and activist against bilingual education. If you have had a bad experience with bilingual education, e.g. arrogant, liberal educationists telling you that your child should be in bilingual education because he or she has a Latin surname, she would like to document your experience.

Linda Chavez states:

Bilingual programs are also wasted on children who do need help learning English. Studies often confirm what common sense would tell you: the less time you spend speaking a new language, the more slowly you'll learn it. Last year, bilingual and ESL programs in New York City were compared. Results: 92 percent of Korean, 87 percent of Russian, and 83 percent of Chinese children who started intensive ESL classes in kindergarten had made it into mainstream classes in three years or less. Of the Hispanic students in bilingual classes, only half made it to mainstream classes within three years. "How can anyone learn English in school when they speak Spanish 4 1/2 hours a day?" asks Gail Fiber, an elementary school teacher in Southern California. "In more than seven years' experience with bilingual education, I've never seen it done successfully."

"Social Justice" professors are very clever and authoritarian at the same time. They push for bilingual education that will force Hispanic children to be segregated from Americans of other races and ethnic groups in the hopes that they will not be assimilated, as every other ethnic group has been in America's history. At the same time, they fight Hispanics every step of the way by insisting that they should not have the right to be able to choose where their children can go to school. They hope that America will change from its e pluribus unum values, from a multiracial society to a multicultural society. The latter has never worked and there are no examples in history of successful multicultural societies lasting. America is and has been a multiracial society, not a multicultural one.

In any case, Hispanics should not be used as experimental subjects to bring about a bogus socialist utopia for "social justice" professors. Capitalism, freedom, integration have been proven to work; socialism never.

The vast majority of Hispanics, like everyone else, want their children to go to school and learn English.

Excellent article from Education Next on the disaster of the bilingual education experiment in California: "The Near End of Bilingual Education."

At CEOUSA: "The Case Against Bilingual Education."