A study commissioned by the California legislature examined a variety of well implemented program models and found no budgetary advantage for English-only approaches. Nevertheless, ESL pullout remains the method of choice for many school districts, especially where LEP students are diverse, bilingual teachers are in short supply, or expertise is lacking in bilingual methodologies. Disproportionate dropout rates for Hispanic students demonstrate the failure of bilingual education. Hispanic dropout rates remain unacceptably high. No credible studies, however, have identified bilingual education among the risk factors, because bilingual programs touch only a small minority of Hispanic children.
Research is inconclusive on the benefits of bilingual education.
Some critics argue that the great majority of bilingual program evaluations are so egregiously flawed that their findings are useless. In other words, they could find little evidence that bilingual education works. Close analysis of Rossell and Baker s claims reveals some serious flaws of their own. Moreover, Rossell and Baker relied heavily on program evaluations from the 1970s, when bilingual pedagogies were considerably less well developed. They treat as equivalent all approaches called TBE, even though few program details are available in many of the studies under review.