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Bilingual education is counterintuitive.
LEP students were placed in English-only classrooms, with no special help in learning the language and no access to the curriculum until they did so. Inevitably they fell behind English-speaking peers. Some caught up, but many failed and dropped out. By the 1960s, a critical mass of educators and policymakers recognized the English-only approach was failing. Bilingual education seemed like a promising, if untested, alternative.