The Official Language Movement Checkpoint

The Official Language Movement CheckPoint

The Official Language Movement CheckPoint
Jane Brown
ETH/125
September 16, 2010
Anne Massie


The Official Language Movement CheckPoint
Bilingualism/Bilingual Education's article speaks about the organized opposition to bilingualism, which became known in the 1980s as the English -Only movement. Many observers were against the movement because of fear of competition for jobs and resentment of government spending on bilingual programs. The article expresses the following information of the government under fire about bilingual education:
The government program that has drawn the most fire is bilingual education, which costs taxpayers an estimated $200 million a year in federal funds and billions of dollars in state and local expenditures... Critics of bilingual education (or of those methods that rely heavily on the students' native languages) claim that it fails to provide children with an adequate knowledge of English, thus disadvantaging them academically, and they cite high dropout rates for Hispanic teenagers, the group most likely to have received instruction in their native language. They accuse school systems of continuing to promote allocated for such programs. (Bilingual/Education, 2010).

Maria-Cristina Garcia, PHD. speaks in an article from American Studies Today Online Magazine, about why there is no Hispanic Vote, and discusses several contributing factors . "Hispanics are one of the fastest growing groups in the United States; however, they are under-represented in American political institutions (Garcia, 2010). Garcia further explains the factors which hinder the Hispanic political participation as follows:
Several factors, however, hinder their political participation as well as their development into a unified voting bloc. One such factor is the youth of the population. According to some sociologists, the younger a community the less likely they will take an active interest... [continues]

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