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Kids Learn Better in English, In 1998, California voters overwhelmingly rejected bilingual education in favor of teaching kids in English. For the last three years, despite determined opposition from professional educators bent on sabotaging the bilingual education reforms, California's kids' test scores have shown that teaching in English is the way to learn English. New scores reinforce that message. California has recently developed a new standardized test to justify keeping kids in older, failed programs, but it seems that the new test shows what the old test did: kids do better in English when they are taught in English. The first results of the new test came out in early May. The Los Angeles Times says the new scores show that kids taught in English are three times more likely to be fluent in English than kids taught in schools that are resisting English. Unfortunately, old habits die hard. A big part of the push for teaching in English came from minority-language parents who felt that their children were trapped in bilingual education just so schools could get more money. The new scores show that kids are still trapped in failed programs. The San Jose Mercury-News reports that more than 24% of the kids still in language- training courses tested as "fluent" in English, but school officials promoted only 6% of those kids into mainstream classes. Ron Unz, author and foremost proponent of similar efforts in Arizona, Colorado and Massachusetts, predicts that this is the beginning of the end for bilingual education. He reports "younger English-learners not in bilingual are nearly three times as likely to be reading at or above grade level as their counterparts who benefit from that brilliant system. In fact, an examination of the data posted on the California State Department of Education's own official website reveals that non-bilingual English learners outperform bilingual English learners in every academic subject area and at every grade level, and have done so during every year since the tests began." ELPAC strongly supported these bilingual education reforms, and urges all candidates to look at the success of teaching kids English by teaching them in English. |
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The
ELPAC Report 