"English-immersion foes hold children back"
... Under Proposition 227, immigrant children were only supposed to stay in special immersion for a year or so, then go to mainstream class. But [California Superintendent of Schools Jack O'Connell] has refused to credit English immersion for soaring English literacy rates. His silence emboldens the anti-English ideologues who still strive to keep Latino kids in a separate world.
Again this month, O'Connell refused to credit English immersion, telling The San Francisco Chronicle he won't guess why kids are learning English so well...
...The State Board of Education finally ordered O'Connell to produce a study with that in mind. While we wait, I did my own study. I found that school districts like Los Angeles Unified -- where moderate Democrats stamped out failing "bilingual" education amidst fierce lefty resistance -- are producing big, lasting gains in English literacy.
By contrast, districts controlled by left-wing Democrats with an attitude of "they won't be able to talk to grandma!" are producing smaller gains...
Comments
steve risher (not verified)
Wed, 02/23/2005 - 05:35
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To the liberals and the neocons anyone who makes it across the border and then doesn't go home magically becomes a hyphenated American of some sort and we become responsible for their schooling and medical bills. One sensible reform would be to end the archaic tradition of birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship may have made sense in a world where Mexico was an underpopulated, peasant country where the average campensino had only the vaguest idea of where the US was, where touriam was only for the rich, and where it took weeks not hours to cross the Pacific.Today pregnant Korean mothers go on package tours that arrange for them to give birth to a dual citizen child in the US.
eh (not verified)
Wed, 02/23/2005 - 00:00
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These "Latino kids" are from, and do belong in, a "separate world" -- more accurately, a separate nation, since they all obviously came from there, meaning somewhere else.
It is impossible not to have very mixed feelings about this.
One the one hand, there is a problem and it must be solved; after all, we're talking about children.
On the other hand, the harder you work to accommodate their presence, to think about ways to solve the problems their presence creates, the more unlikely it is that the real solution, the best solution, IMO, which is to stop so many from coming here, and to deport the ones here now illegally, will get any attention.
At a minimum, everyone should vote 'No' consistently on school bond measures, since as the statistics clearly show, American taxpayers are being asked to pay for the education of people who are displacing them (at least in CA, where something like 90%+ of population growth is due to immigration and the children of immigrants) as the dominant demographic group. And of course the vast majority of the immigrants are non-white. Which is definitely part of the problem.
All of this is just crazy.