Bilingual Education In America

The ethnic composition of the United States is slowly trending towards a greater percentage of minorities, and among those ethnic groups there are thousands and thousands of immigrants, each of whom brings with them their own cultural experience and language. Correlating with that trend, the number of language immersion schools in the United States has increased from 50 in 1985 to 448 in 2011 (“Growth of Language Immersion in the United States 1971-2011”), a marked growth that can be attributed in part to the great influx of immigrants from South and Central America. The struggle to assimilate into American communities presents great difficulty to these people, especially children; for those children who lack proficient English skills, it is
This focus on keeping up with English-speaking peers with regard to coursework distracts from the most important objective: mastering English. Delaying the development of English language skills resolves to excessive time spent in BE programs, as a symptom of the untreated dependency of students on their native language. For instance, the public school system of Brooklyn, New York faced a lawsuit from 150 parents, claiming that their children had been segregated into BE programs for as many as six years (Porter, “The Case against Bilingual Education”). This is the serious and worrying problem that BE presents to our immigrants and ELLs. Continued segregation will result in lower and lower performance in school SEI programs provide radically different results: A Washington Post study revealed that many immigrant children participating in SEI programs are at the top of their classes after only a few years (Geyer, “Schools Should Not Employ Bilingual Education”). As seen time and time again, the SEI program's early focus on learning English yields superior results, accelerating the language development of ELLs nationwide, while the BE program