But last month, Mr. Brown's younger son, who is 7, became an unanticipated casualty of an initiative to eliminate more traditional, segregated bilingual education programs in Arizona, which voters approved by a margin of two to one. It is not, however, surprising. For while the United States has experimented for more than three decades with bilingual education for immigrant children, it has never fully embraced bilingualism or multilingualism as an educational priority. Rather than help students from other countries retain their native languages, traditional bilingual programs have strived to wean them from those languages. We have neither attempted to help the immigrant maintain a home language, nor have we sought to make English-only kids be at all proficient in any other language.
Statistics show that the small number of students who graduate from bilingual programs can do well.
But such figures have been counterbalanced by other data that show many students taking six years or more to exit bilingual programs, which were intended to be temporary way stations on the road toward English fluency. In fact, some students never leave the programs at all. Instead, their parents will choose from a menu that includes those classes, as well as intensive courses in English, known as immersion, and fledgling dual-language programs, like those in which Mr. Brown's children are enrolled in Arizona. Though Ms. Hudson acknowledges that the French are often no more enlightened than Americans about promoting fluency in second languages, other European countries are. Professor Glenn, who led the statewide bilingual education program in Massachusetts during the early 1970's, as director of urban education and civil rights, says he now opposes more traditional, transitional bilingual education classes, which are largely segregated.