Leaving Children Behind
The Senate votes to quadruple bilingual-ed funding.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
May 22, 2001 12:35 p.m.

ilingual education is one of the worst failures in the whole world of education. So what did the Senate decide to

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do last week? Quadruple the federal funding for it.

That's bad news for Hispanic children trapped in programs that refuse to teach them English — the language they'll need to know and master if they are to thrive in the United States. Modern neurology tells us that young kids are hardwired to learn language — a skill they lose as they get older. Preventing immigrant children from exposure to English is a serious mistake that can't be corrected later on.

The Senate vote will only aggravate the problem. Ron K. Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind two state referenda repealing bilingual education, points out that the main factor limiting the growth of bilingual education has been a lack of qualified teachers. The Senate's new money may begin to address this matter — to the detriment of children who need to learn English.

On the House side, Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo has proposed that school districts that fail to move enough students out of Spanish-only classrooms within three or four years lose 20 percent of their federal funding for bilingual education. That's a nice idea, but it's dwarfed by the Senate's huge funding increase. If both measures are finally approved, it means that districts not meeting the Tancredo standard will still get 220 percent more dollars for bilingual education than they receive right now.

The real answer to all this is found in California and Arizona, where voters have pulled the plug on bilingual education over the last three years. In California, test-scores for English learners have risen dramatically. (The Arizona overhaul is too new for such an assessment.) The good news is that here and there, some lawmakers are taking notice. In Massachusetts last week, Democratic state senator Guy W. Glodis proposed ditching bilingual education in favor of English immersion. "Our students are not learning English because they are not being taught in English. The current system is not working. It's a disaster," he said, according to the Worchester Telegram & Gazette. Glodis also suggested that if his reform fails, the state will follow the leads of California and Arizona soon.