Beacon Hill hearings on various bilingual education proposals will be held Tuesday. State Rep. Jarrett T. Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat, said this week that he and state Rep. Antonio F.D. Cabral, D-New Bedford, will file language seeking to amend the Glodis bill by replacing it with a bilingual choice and accountability bill. Barrios convened a working group to examine ways to reform bilingual education. The resulting proposal would allow, and encourage, flexibility within bilingual education, he said. Barrios said the Glodis bill suffers from the same problem as the current bilingual education law does.
Children learn differently.
Rogeness has seen her bill shot down before. After California took the ballot route to dismantle bilingual education, scores on the standardized Stanford 9 reading tests for students with limited English proficiency rose for all grades tested, with the greatest gains posted by the youngest students. Grade 2 reading scores went up 9 percentage points between 1998 and 2000, moving students from the 19th percentile on national rankings up to the 28th percentile, according to the California Department of Education. Third-graders around the state posted gains of 7 percentage points. Grade 11 scores only nudged up 1 percentage point over the two years.