But I know one of the things that you often hear when you hear bilingual education being under fire like in States like California, you hear that all this money that the United States has put into bilingual education after all these years, we still have one of the highest dropout rates among our limited English proficient. Because it s failed. Well, the truth of the matter is that good quality bilingual instruction has never been offered to everybody anyway. And those high dropout rates are still occurring among the students that are not receiving quality education. Parents are staying involved longer in education.
Most parent involvement drops out considerably after elementary school anyway.
But parents will drop out after the first 2 years if there s nobody to talk to at school. But the offshoot of that is that parents often will not challenge, even if there is someone there to translate, because culturally, they have a different perspective. It is so critical that the teachers make an effort to encourage and involve parents and show them how they can be involved both at the classroom level and at the building level so that they not only understand their rights as parents, but they understand how they can enrich their children s experiences at home. Because when that bond is strong between the home and the school and the child, the children will persist in school longer. Ibid., p. 20.