Comment by Charles Glenn
[The Federal Bilingual Education Program]
Christine H. Rossell has amply demonstrated what bilingual education guru Jim Cummins once called an "entry and exit fallacy in bilingual education." That is, the methods used to identify which children are [End Page 255] to be placed in separate bilingual education programs do not identify reliably those whose educational needs derive primarily from the dominance of a language other than English. Instead, they identify children whose proficiency in oral and written English is below national norms, whatever the reason. The same arbitrary criterion makes it difficult to return children, once designated as limited-English proficient, to the educational mainstream.
The key to a more sensible policy was suggested by Catherine E. Snow, who pointed out that a continuum exists of need and of language development that includes, at some point, every student in school. Because this is self-evidently true, it would make sense to abandon the labeling and educational segregation of some language minority students on the basis of an arbitrary cutoff point. My study of a dozen nations with large numbers of immigrant children found that only in some American states and in some highly controversial programs in Sweden is it considered appropriate to educate these children separately from the majority after an initial transition period of (in most cases) a year of intensive instruction in the language of the host society.41
Educational segregation is more harmful to language minority students than to any of the groups for which serious efforts have been made to integrate--female students, black students, special needs students. A case can be made, I believe, for single-sex schools, for schools with a special focus on the needs of African American youth, for schools concentrating on a particular disability. No convincing case can be made, I submit, for herding together language minority children whose most urgent educational task is to become effectively integrated into U.S. society. Language minority students have a compelling need to be with peers for whom English is the first language if they are to learn the language well.
They also have a compelling need to be held to the same educational standards as other students. Too often they are subjected to what I call "Jim Crow educational standards," which almost guarantee that they will not be able to participate in secondary and higher education on equal terms. Blame for these separate but unequal expectations must be shared by educational progressives and conservatives alike. The progressives have recoiled from holding language minority children to expectations that seem culturally insensitive and threatening to their self-esteem, which has led to bilingual education becoming a sort of comforting cultural bubble-bath for too many students who deserve to be challenged [End Page 256] instead. Conservatives, meanwhile, have sometimes focused so single-mindedly on the acquisition of English that other academic objectives are neglected. Even as a technique for teaching English, this is unwise. Proficiency in a language, beyond an elemental level, is developed by using it for real tasks that matter, such as mastering academic materials, not for artificial exercises.
The fundamental mistake made by both sides in the debate over educating language minority children is to focus on language instead of education as the central issue. As both Rossell and Snow seem to agree, effective education can be provided either through use of the home language or through structured immersion. Either can be done well or badly. A couple of years ago, I served as a reviewer for the National Research Council's (NRC) study of thirty-five years of evidence on the teaching of language minority children.42 The NRC report concludes that, despite countless research studies and evaluations (costing hundreds of millions of dollars), one approach is not superior to the other. "It is clear," the authors note,
that many children first learn to read in a second language without serious negative consequences. These include children in early-immersion, two-way, and English as a second language (ESL)-based programs in North America, as well as those in formerly colonial countries that have maintained the official language [of the colonizer] as the medium of instruction, immigrant children in Israel, children whose parents opt for elite international schools, and many others.... The high literacy achievement of Spanish-speaking children in English-medium Success for All schools ... that feature carefully-designed direct literacy instruction suggests that even children from low-literacy homes can learn to read in a second language if the risk associated with poor instruction is eliminated.43
Later in the report, the authors candidly conclude, "We do not yet know whether there will be long-term advantages or disadvantages to initial literacy instruction in the primary language versus English, given a very high-quality program of known effectiveness in both cases.44
The emphasis should now shift to ensuring that whichever method is chosen in particular circumstances be implemented by competent teachers following a demanding curriculum and with accountability for clear and measurable results. What will that take? Some concrete measures should be reflected in federal and state educational policy for language minority students. [End Page 257]
First, the principal and teachers in each school should be responsible for planning and implementing the education of all the students in that school and should have broad discretion about the instructional methods that they use. Development of both oral and written language is a continuous process alongside the other tasks of schooling, and only those directly involved with students should be diagnosing what each needs at a particular time and prescribing the challenges and the support that will best meet those needs. Only those working in the school can develop an effective combination of integration for common tasks and separation for special help.
To make this possible, state and federal programs supporting the education of language minority students should not prescribe teaching methods or the language used but should hold schools accountable for the measurable, steady progress of these students in all required academic subjects.
Second, teachers and school administrators should receive specific training in strategies for language development, including how to diagnose and prescribe for the needs of language minority students. States should make this an important requirement of teacher and administrator certification, and coherent pre-service and in-service training in these skills should be a priority for federal funding. Additional research is not needed to determine what the necessary skills are. Much is already known about good practices in promoting language development; what is not known about, and perhaps will never be known about in view of the complexity and variation of all the factors involved, is what a complete model of good schooling for language minority children would be. Those practices should be taught to every teacher and administrator, not just to those who are preparing to work in separate bilingual programs.
The fine print of the National Research Council report concedes that "we need to move away from thinking about programs in such broad terms and instead see them as containing multiple components--features that are available to meet the differing needs of particular students."45
Perhaps some day a general model will emerge for the education of language minority children, though I am skeptical about that. Those who work in pedagogy as an academic discipline have long sought to make the field an exact science comparable to the natural or, more modestly, to the social sciences, with strong and reliable predictive power. If such a general theory of learning "linguistic, social, and cognitive skills" (as [End Page 258] the NRC study wistfully puts it) is ever developed, it should take language minority children into account. May it happen, and soon.
But until that glad day comes, the interests of language minority children will be better served by principled and theory-based experimentation on effective schooling of poor children of whatever ethnic background, taking language into account in how they are assessed and taught, than by putting faith in research on second-language acquisition. A fair amount is already known about how to develop bilingualism among middle-class children, especially if their parents are bilingual, but very little is known about how to overcome the academic underachievement of Latino youth or why they are outperformed by youth from other immigrant groups. Do they have more in common with underachieving African American students?
I would put my money on schools that are effective by other measures to be effective also for language minority students, but only if they are set free to tackle problems for every student without programmatic preconditions.46
Third, such a strategy of school-level freedom and accountability requires that language minority students be included in all assessments of academic progress. In some limited instances this will appropriately be done through assessment in their home language, but the great difficulty of making assessments in different languages comparable, and the implicit message that students are not expected to demonstrate proficiency in English, creates a danger of returning to Jim Crow standards. In general, it is preferable to assess language minority students in English, while making allowances in reporting and using the results for the challenges they face.
Because schools will choose different strategies for language minority students, parents should be allowed to choose among schools. For some, the maintenance and development of the home language in school will be much more important than it will be for others. Surveys have found, again and again, that Latino parents tend to want the school to help maintain their children's Spanish (though not at the expense of time devoted to English), while Asian and other language minority parents prefer to do that at home or through after-school community groups. Parents should be able to opt for a school that supports their own educational goals.
Finally, schools would be enriched if they provided elective and supplemental--not transitional--language support in a variety of world [End Page 259] languages to students whose parents speak those languages as well as to students whose parents do not. In place of the touchy-feely multicultural activities in so many schools, it would be much healthier for students of different ethnic backgrounds to tackle together the difficulties and the rewards of a language, and thus to learn from one another.
