he letter and the spirit of the law is not what it has become in practice. Some experts decided early on that children should be taught for a time in their native languages, so that they would continue to learn other subjects while learning English. It was expected that the transition would take a child three years (Porter, 1998, pp. 28-9).
Bilingual education is not a new phenomenon in the United States, but before 1968 the teaching of non-English languages and of some courses in non-English languages in schools had been a feature of local-school-district discretion. As Porter points out, a feature of the large scale that bilingual education assumed after 1968 was the fact that the original law marked the first time that the federal government articulated a national bilingual policy (by way of making funding available) for schools where educational policy had long been established and implemented at the local and/or state level. An unintended consequence of the 1968 Act, therefore, was that it placed bilingual education on the table of national educatio
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