Bilingual Education Research Paper

Yet while critics in the United States claim that bilingual education is a "failed experiment," most other modern nations consider it the norm and cannot imagine why Americans would prefer an education in only one language.

Yet while critics in the United States claim that bilingual education is a "failed experiment," most other modern nations consider it the norm and cannot imagine why Americans would prefer an education in only one language.

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In this study, great care was taken to observe actual instruction in the classrooms.

But although the principal investigator, David Ramírez, argued that the trajectories of student achievement strongly favored late-exit ("maintenance") bilingual programs, he conceded that the four-year duration of the study was insufficient to draw definitive conclusions.

These findings are important because they may explain results of short-term evaluation studies in which students in bilingual programs sometimes score lower than others in English-only programs when tested early on and only in English.

It seems that students require more time to become competent in both English and the primary language.

Dual-language, or two-way, programs have the added advantage of helping to reduce the linguistic isolation that so many Latino students experience.

The strategy has its own challenges, including the need to cluster the appropriate numbers of both groups and protect against the social power imbalances that can occur in these settings, but their potential for increasing the academic success of English learners (as well as English speakers) would appear to far outweigh these potential pitfalls. Department of Education's Office of Planning and Budget, was charged with reviewing the research literature on the effectiveness of bilingual education.

Ever since, however, programs have had to defend themselves against the accusation that they were "maintenance" programs, trying to maintain students' primary language as they became fluent in English, as though this were a terrible thing to do to a child.

Like "busing," bilingual education has become a lightning rod for those who oppose policies designed to equalize (or enhance) educational opportunity for minority children.