At a meeting last week at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, Porter said classroom teachers and administrators have convinced her that the present system for teaching English to foreign speakers is a failure. Rather, her quarrel is with the way it is taught. Porter was head of bilingual education in Newton for 10 years. Before that, she was a bilingual classroom teacher in Springfield. Her prescription for teaching non-English speakers is intensive English language from the first day of school.
Teachers have to be trained and redesign the curriculum.
Three hours a day of intensive English make an enormous difference at the end of six months. She said strict and inflexible laws, particularly in Massachusetts, have operated to maintain children in segregated classes rather than prepare them to handle courses in English. In the years since she was in first grade, with no bilingual program, society's attitudes have changed. In 1968, Congress enacted a bilingual education law. In 1971, Massachusetts became the first state to adopt its own bilingual legislation.