Schools need more
flexibility to meet needs
East Valley Tribune
November 20, 2005
Perspective, p. 102
- Jeff MacSwan is associate professor of education at Arizona State University.
Last month a survey, based on 21 key education indicators, dubbed Arizona the
“dumbest state.” The survey considered a wide range of factors such as
teacher/pupil ratio, school funding, how well students do in academic subjects,
and teacher pay, ranking Arizona as the very worst-performing of all states.
Though not addressed by the survey, our state is also doing a terrible job
educating its immigrant students.
About 15 percent of Arizona students are English learners, who are struggling to
learn English at school in addition to the usual school subjects. And contrary
to popular belief, most of these kids are here legally.
Current Arizona policy, Proposition 203, requires all English learners to be
taught in English only, with no significant use of their native language, for a
period “not normally intended to exceed one year.” The approach is known as
structured English immersion.
Previously, a variety of approaches were used, as determined locally by school
districts. Among these was bilingual education, a program then used for about 30
percent of students.
The bilingual approach used structured English methods to teach English, but
taught school subjects such as math and science bilingually so students could
keep up academically while learning English.
Ron Unz, the California millionaire and neoconservative activist who bankrolled
the 2000 initiative, was widely criticized for misusing educational statistics.
His interests were overtly political, and Unz appeared to be fixing the facts
around the policy.
Indeed, Unz made remarkable promises in an effort to gain Arizonans’ support,
including claiming that under Proposition 203 students “will learn English in a
couple months” and that “there will be no Arizona children in English
acquisition classes” within just a few years.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who campaigned against
Republican incumbent Jaime Molera on a promise to “enforce” the English-only
law, has made similar dramatic claims.
“I have been in a number of English immersion schools where at least 85 percent
of the students become orally proficient in English in one year, and fully
proficient in reading and writing within three years,” Horne wrote in an
Neither produced evidence to support their remarks.
However, a recent study by Arizona State University researchers, including
myself, paints a very different picture. Indeed, it seems that the
superintendent was almost exactly wrong.
The state’s own data show that 89 percent of immigrant students who tested
nonproficient in 2003 failed to achieve English proficiency in 2004. The finding
is very important given the theory behind Proposition 203. The immersion
approach suggests that because kids learn English very fast, we don’t have to
worry about them falling behind academically in a classroom where they can’t
understand what the teacher is saying.
But the evidence suggests we should worry, because the policy appears to have a
startling 89 percent failure rate.
The research community had warned of these potentially dismal results for a very
long time. Before Unz’s anti-bilingual campaign, for example, the National
Research Council, which was established nearly a century ago by the National
Academy of Sciences to provide scientific advice to the federal government, had
prepared two reports that concluded that bilingual education was an effective
method of teaching immigrant children.
This year, Johns Hopkins University researchers conducted a comprehensive review
of the scientific literature and found most comparison studies favored bilingual
approaches over English immersion. While some studies found no difference
between the two, none showed a significant advantage for immersion over
ASU researchers also recently synthesized the research literature regarding
effective programs for English learners, using a statistical method known as
meta-analysis. These researchers similarly concluded that bilingual education
tended to be more effective at raising children’s test scores, on tests taken in
English, than did English immersion.
A related study focused only on Arizona studies and conducted by the same
researchers found even stronger advantages for bilingual education over English
Given these facts, one would expect a rational state policy to permit a variety
of approaches, including immersion and bilingual education, among others,
selected by locally elected school boards.
Instead, Arizona is fettered with an ideologically driven one-size-fits all
language education policy, now infamously the most restrictive in the nation.
The ideological nature of policy is seen in the sources supporters use in
defense of their position.
Rather than relying on scientific research, the English-only advocates turn to
politically charged organizations like the Hoover Institute and the Lexington
Institute, whose neoconservative credentials are usually carefully hidden from
Arizona needs an effective education policy for English learners one that
seeks positive results, unites our diverse community and looks to sound
information to build effective policy, with the result that all immigrant
children become proficient in English and also develop academically.