The Results: Bilingual Education Means Better English
If only that were what polls tell us about
bilingual education. To believe most
polls would be to believe that bilingual education is more reviled than most aspects
of American life and it certainly doesn’t mean better English. There are some
exceptions such as a poll done in Texas by the Office of Survey Research at the
University of Texas in June, 1998, that shows that 72% of the respondents find
bilingual education an important part of the academic process for some
students. With the exception of these precious few, do polls really show such
aversion for bilingual education or do the polls strike another chord with the
respondent? I must side with the latter. Allow me to explain.
What most polls on bilingual education
actually show is the overriding support that English has in the United
States. The polls show that English is
considered to be the language of the land.
The respondents believe that English is exceedingly important in order
for anyone to be successful in an academic as well as in a commercial
setting. I agree with this. In fact, there is no bilingual educator or
bilingual supporter that would not agree with this also. The anti-bilingual movement knows this and it
uses these strong feelings for the English language to gain a political and
cultural advantage.
Many groups, including the English Only
movement, manipulate their questions to solicit the response they desire. David Moore, vice president of the Gallup
Poll states in Media Beat magazine, “Slight differences in question
wording, or in the placement of the questions in the interview, can have
profound consequences…” He goes on to
say that the poll findings “…are very much influenced by the polling process
itself.” In fact, author Herbert
Schiller in the same article says that opinion polling is “a
choice-restriciting mechanism.” I
concur. The English Only movement knows
that a question that seems to pit English against Spanish will always cause a
response in favor of English and mistakenly against bilingual education.
The organization, Public Agenda, polls
respondents on a variety of issues and it recognizes that sometimes the results
may be less than reliable. The guidelines
for recognizing a possibly flawed poll are:
Results change when survey questions
are reworded slightly
Results change when implications or
trade-offs of a policy are pointed out.
Results may be misleading if reported
in isolation or out of context
Other research suggests that people
have incomplete or inaccurate knowledge in this area.
These guidelines
could apply to just about every poll that I have seen on bilingual education
especially the last guideline. Public
Agenda didn’t follow its own guidelines when it solicited the opinion of the
public as to in which language immigrants should be taught. The question read in part, “…public schools
should teach immigrants in their native language only until they know enough
English to join regular classes…” First
the majority of respondents know nothing of bilingual education, see the fourth
guideline. Secondly, this statement is
misleading. The word, only, leads some
to believe that children are taught exclusively in the native language until
they learn English. No, this is not
true. English is taught on a daily
basis. We teach in the native language
to make input in English comprehensible.
This statement might be flawed but I don’t think that Public Agenda set
out to mislead the public. However, some
organizations will take these polls to mean that there is ground-swelling
support for the abolition of bilingual education when, in reality, people are
giving their opinion on a subject of which they know next to nothing. In the case of bilingual education, the
respondents will most consistently vote on the side of English with that
language being the most familiar to them.
In truth, there
are no sides. Bilingual education is on
the side of English. We bilingual teachers sometimes refer to bilingual
education as B.E. It is most fitting
that it could also stand for, Better English because bilingual
education does give a child the opportunity to communicate with more
comprehension and function with higher degrees of success academically in
English and as a great secondary benefit, the child can do the same in
Spanish! Much of the United States has
to become more cognizant of what bilingual education is or perhaps more
importantly what it is not.
The truth is out
there, but it is not in the polls. Talk
to bilingual teachers, visit classrooms, go to libraries and do the research if
you are so inclined, but don’t let polls form your opinion. Formulate one on your own and I think that
you will see that bilingual education is not what many think it is. It is the best way to teach a child English
while still giving that child an opportunity to be successful in the
classroom. As a country, we need to ask
ourselves if we want to teach some children to speak English or to teach
children to speak English and then know what to do with it. Bilingual education, since it maintains and
develops literacy, affords the child the luxury of knowing what to do with his
second language. Too many respondents in
polls do not realize this and with the simple answer of yes or no in a poll,
one more child loses the opportunity to learn how to learn.
Stephen Pollard