Issues of Bilingual Education

This research examines issue fronts of bilingual education, particularly the background and development of such programs in Southern California. The research will set forth the context in which bilingual education has emerged in the American political and educational culture in recent years and then discuss the scope and limit of issues and problems associated with the phenomenon with a view toward forecasting possible lines of future advocacy and development.

The passage of California's Proposition 227 in 1998, which was meant to dismantle and block bilingual education in public schools, was (or more exactly was intended to be) the culmination of a years-long controversy over whether children whose first language is not English should be taught in their native language in classrooms, particularly at the elementary-school level. The voter initiative provided bilingual programs would be replaced either by intensive "immersion" classes for California students (about 1.4 million) of limited English proficiency, or LEP (Bronner, 1998), or by what is known as "Model B," which provides that students be taught "primarily" in English with native-language "support" from bilingual teachers (Sahagan & Anderson, 1998).

The controversy was not over, however, as proponents of Proposition 227 found when bilingual-education advocates, including various civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, filed suit in federal court aiming to block implementation of 227

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eir native language values their family and community culture and reinforces their sense of self-worth, thus making their academic success more likely" (Rothstein, 1998, p. 672). The fact that self-esteem and self-worth were tied to language skills in public school appears to have fostered the emergence of bilingual-education opposition-advocacy groups whose adherents felt the connection to be specious. Opponents of bilingual education point not to the benefits of self-worth but to the effects of bilingual-education strategies on the culture at large. Rothstein says that opponents view culture-directed bilingual education as a balkanizing force in American society and as a detriment to the social advancement of the very immigrant populations targeted by bilingual programs, citing the possibility that LEP students' "failure to learn English well will leave them unprepared for the workplace" (Rothstein, 1998, p. 672). Porter cites academic theories that drove the modern trend for bilingual education and that were called upon to support a variety of court cases that had the effect of mandating various bilingual education as almost exclusively native-language rather than English-language education in primary grades. Basically what t

Category: Psychology - I