And a goal is certainly not a one year educational straitjacket that limits the ability of teachers to do what is best for each child. Some children may learn English in one year or two and others may need three years or even more. The focus should be on the individual needs of each child and not on some artificial and arbitrary time frame. Goals should be combined with flexibility and accountability. I believe in giving local school districts latitude to design their own programs contingent on their being accountable for the results.
Parents have a right to expect progress.
Children should be tested periodically for English proficiency and when a child is falling behind, extra efforts including after-school classes as well as summer school should certainly be considered. If a school district chooses an approach to teaching English that simply does not achieve positive results for a large number of children, then the school district must have the good sense to fix the problem or use another approach that research shows will work. The demand for bilingual teachers, for example, currently exceeds the supply and that is particularly true in California where the number of LEP children has nearly doubled to 1.3 million in less than a decade. The California State Board of Education estimates that there is a shortage of 21,000 bilingual teachers in that state. This, I suspect, is one of the root causes and real reasons why some parents have become frustrated.