Apparently, the purpose of this state initiative is not to help students learn English but to maintain their culture. If this is so, then their parents should be told about the poor track record of bilingual education and asked if they want their children enrolled in such a program. Those who want their children to learn English should be allowed to withhold consent. Under existing regulations, parents must navigate an elaborate bureaucratic process to withdraw children from bilingual education. If schools really want to teach English to children with limited proficiency, they can look to the Middlebury College Language Schools' intensive summer immersion program as a model.
Students sign a pledge to communicate only in the new language.
By summer's end, they are as fluent as someone who has just completed a first-year college course. Structured immersion, as this approach is called, works so well that it is used exclusively by the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., where the Pentagon teaches 24 different languages to more than 3,000 students each year. Many students in the university's English immersion program are New York public school graduates whose language skills are so poor that they are not ready for college. The United States should not be an English-only society. We should encourage the study of foreign languages in schools and universities.