Do We Throw Nonswimmers in the Ocean?

Consider the resounding success of the Calexico Unified School District, located in the Imperial Valley, where the school population is 98% Latino, and more than 70% of the students entering the school system at different ages speak mainly Spanish.

Although Calexico is in the second poorest county in California, the school district has the lowest dropout rate among Latino students in the state as well as the highest percentage going on to college (in some years more than 80%), according to the state Department of Education. Calexico High School graduates who participated in bilingual programs are attending and have graduated from this country’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of California.

What accounts for this superlative track record? Well, to begin with, the leadership of the school district is engaged in education, not politics. Their goal is to provide the best education for the students. Based on years of experience with limited-English-proficient students and studies that show that the ability to understand symbols and connect words with concepts are important to both long-term academic excellence and the mastering of a nonnative language, the school district’s educational objectives are to provide students with a foundation of analytical skills, impart sufficient knowledge of core subjects and build English proficiency. Calexico does not compromise the first two objectives for the sake of the third or vice versa.

In Calexico, parents are given a choice on whether their children will participate in bilingual education programs and, depending on theie beginning English language proficiency, students make the transition to English-only instruction in one to three years. After years of evaluation, the results in Calexico clearly show that students of limited English proficiency who opted for bilingual education experienced higher achievement scores than those who did not.

Calexico’s example notwithstanding, the statewide political rhetoric is such that Latino parents can be scared into thinking that their children will not learn English or will be stereotyped if they participate in bilingual programs. In many districts, bilingual education is treated as a burden on teachers, the district and taxpayers. In most school districts, we don’t know definitively whether students participating in bilingual programs have different performance results from those who don’t. Records have not been kept to determine this. Yet we are urged by Proposition 227 to blindly eliminate bilingual education across the board.

All parents, teachers and educational leaders want children to learn English. Bilingual education programs are a tool to facilitate learning, to promote understanding of words and concepts and to maintain confidence in academic abilities as the student learns a different language. Meanwhile, it is vital that the student keep up with learning math, history and other subjects, especially in our rapidly evolving information age. We already have plenty of Latino students and dropouts who speak workable English but failed in core subjects and are thus relegated to low-paying, low-skill jobs.

The experience of our immigrant parents, grandparents or great-grandparents, who were simply thrown into English language classes, does not make this the best practice to emulate. We now know more about the process of learning and cognitive development, and we should use this knowledge to formulate optimal educational policies and practices. Thank goodness no one is advocating dropping nonswimmers into the middle of the ocean.