What does research say about how to teach the large number of young people in U.S. schools who have limited proficiency in English—should they be taught in their native language or not? Former Education Secretary William Bennett read the evidence as negative and beginning in 1985 proposed to eliminate any native-language requirement from the federal bilingual program. Others read the evidence differently. At the request of Congress, the U.S. General Accounting Office assessed the validity of the department's interpretation of the research, using an expert panel to examine published reviews. The experts generally believed there was evidence for the legal requirement that native language be used to the extent necessary to meet two goals, learning English and keeping up in schoolwork in all subjects. Feasibility, not effectiveness, proved to be the main issue, however, when Congress acted to broaden potential funding for non-native-language programs in 1988.
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References
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1. The speech is published as chap. 19 of William Bennett, Our Children and Our Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
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2. A summary of the method can be found in U.S. General Accounting Office, The Evaluation Synthesis, Institute for Program Evaluation, Methods Paper 1, Apr. 1983.
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3. The full report of the study discussed in this article is in U.S. General Accounting Office, Bilingual Education: A New Look at the Research Evidence, GAO/PEMD-87-12BR, Mar. 1987. Requests for copies of GAO reports should be sent to Box 6015, Gaithersburg, MD 20877, or telephone (202) 275-6241.
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Crawford covered the issue for the newspaper Education Week.
5.
Ann Willig , “A Meta-Analysis of Selected Studies on the Effectiveness of Bilingual Education,”Review of Educational Research, 55(3):269-317 (Fall 1985).
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6. The sixth concerned a methodological point about the usefulness of broad program labels such as “the transitional bilingual-education method” in discussing program success or failure with aggregated evidence from programs that may have varied substantially. The experts' views were mixed on the severity of this problem, but there was no consensus discrediting the department's use, and the common use by others as well, of general terms and labels in statements about the effectiveness of one approach compared to another.
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7. U.S. Department of Education, “Bilingual Education Fact Sheet,” 1986, p. 3.
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8. Speech by Secretary William J. Bennett, 26 Sept. 1985, p.5.
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9. U.S. Department of Education, “Discussion of the Evaluations of Transitional Bilingual Education,” material submitted for the record, in Hearings on the Bilingual Education Improvement Act of 1983, H.R. 2682, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Education and Labor (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), pp. 58-59.
10.
reproduced in Hearings on Appropriations for Department of Education: Fiscal Year 1986, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985), p. 576.
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11. Department of Education, “Discussion of the Evaluations,” p. 61.
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12. Regular school programs for limited-English students are covered by a 1974 Supreme Court decision, Lau v. Nichols, which has been generally interpreted as requiring some sort of special program for non-English-speaking children. The Court did not, however, direct any particular remedy, though it mentioned native-language teaching among other possibilities. It required only that “the Board of Education be directed to apply its expertise to the problem and rectify the situation.” San Francisco, in settling the case through a consent decree, did establish bilingual programs for Chinese-, Filipino-, and Spanish-speaking children. The significance of the case, thus, is that it established that a school district is at risk if it does nothing about the special needs of non-English-speaking students; precisely what is to be done, however, remains the district's choice.
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13. Transcript of remarks of Dr. Gary Bauer, undersecretary of education, to the press, Washington, DC, 26 Sept. 1985, pp. 3 ff. The transcript was prepared by the U.S. Department of Education.
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14. U.S. Department of Education, The Condition of Bilingual Education in the Nation, 1986, (Washington, DC: Author, 1986), p. v.
15.
15. Transcript of remarks of Dr. Gary Bauer, p. 28.
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16. Department of Education, “Bilingual Education Fact Sheet,” p. 3.
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17. The World Bank review of literature, by Nadine Dutcher, was one of the 10 provided the experts. See Dutcher, Use of First and Second Languages. On the Department of Education's use of this study, see, for example, the speech by Carol Whitten, director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs, to the New York State Association for Bilingual Education, 14 Feb. 1986, p. 11.
18.
18. See U.S. General Accounting Office, Bilingual Education: Information on Limited English Proficient Students, GAO/HRD-87-85BR, Apr. 1987.
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19. U.S. Congress, Senate, The Robert T. Stafford Elementary and Secondary Education Improvement Act of 1987, S. Rept. 100-222 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 79.
20.
Education Week, 29 Apr. 1987, p. 1.
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21. One advocate of bilingual education, James Crawford, characterized the congressional action saying that “by their actions the policy-makers chose, in effect, to ignore two decades of research on second-language learning.” Crawford, Bilingual Education, p. 84. Others probably continue to view that evidence as ambiguous, just as several of GAO's expert panelists.
