Bilingual Education Act

Before Race to the Top and before No Child Left Behind, there was a bill that addressed the controversial topic of Bilingual Education. An article by Kasia Broussalian entitled Immigration Reform 2013: Bilingual Instruction Defines Our Education System discusses this act and how it changed the way American schools dealt with non-english-speaking students. Broussalian discusses a podcast with Natalia Melhman Petrzela that focuses on the importance of language. "She believes that bilingual instruction has not only been a key party of education in our multicultural society, but also a defining issue in public schools during the past 50 years." She then continues to discuss the rocky history of bilingual education and the passage of the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) in 1968. "Before BEA was passed, many school districts had already implemented innovative language programs, only to see them replaced with programs characterized by standardization and a top-down approach. In addition, poor funding for proposed programs and BEA’s focus on children from low-income families had the unintended consequence of stigmatizing English language learners." The article doesn't touch much on the most recent education bills and their implementations on bilingual education, but the current bills aren't much better in terms of promoting school creativity and celebrating students for their progress towards bilingualism. In fact, Petrzela even states, "Instead of being celebrated as unique and recognized for their progress toward bilingualism, these students were looked at as if they had a problem, and because of this, many performed poorly academically.” Chapter 6 of the book also cites studies that support this idea. On page 226 it states, "Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut came to a striking conclusions: students with limited bilingualism are far more likely to leave school than those fluent in both languages. That is, rather than being an impediment to academics achievement, bilingualism can promote learning."

In this article, the book, and even in class, the discussion of what can be done to improve bilingual education has come up and criticized what the federal government has done. This article made a very good point about how poor funding led to a standardized approach. However, each school is different. A school in downtown Toledo should approach bilingual education differently than a suburban school in Colorado. Each district is caters to a different group of students, yet the way we approach teaching the non-english speaking students is the same. I don't think simply giving these programs more money will fix everything, but change the funding structure so the schools who need more bilingual teachers get them and allow for creativity in the schools in how to solve the problem. This article is not long, but it brings up very different ideas that could have huge implications in bilingual education.

How can teachers change their expectations?

Self fulfilling prophecy. Every teacher know it exists. Robert Rosenthal is most famous for bringing this idea to light in the classroom. He completed a study in San Francisco where he told teachers that this very special test from Harvard, which was really just an IQ test, had the very special ability to predict which kids were about to be very special — that is, which kids were about to experience a dramatic growth in their IQ. He then selected randomly selected students and told their teachers that these students were about to be very special and by the end of the year they were. Why? Because the teachers had high expectations for these students. As Rosenthal continued to do more research, he found expectations affect teachers' moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more. This is all wonderful to know, but as we discussed in my EDFI 4080 class this Friday, how does one do that. I recently read an article entitled Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform by NPR Morning Edition reporter Alix Spiegel. He asked the question, "since expectations can change the performance of kids, how do we get teachers to have the right expectations? Is it possible to change bad expectations?" This brought him to find Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Pianta understands that the traditional way of talking to teachers' and telling them their beliefs are wrong does not work. It's not effective to try to change their thoughts; the key is to train teachers in an entirely new set of behaviors. He even gives 7 ways teachers can change their expectations. Observe the students so you know all they are capable of. Listen and try to understand what motivates them, what their goals are, and how they view you, your classroom, their classmates, and the activities you assigned them. Talk to students about their interests. Each week, spend time with a student outside your role as a teacher. Reach out and know what students like to do outside of school. Finally reflect and think back on your own best and worst teachers, bosses or supervisors. List five words for each that describe how you felt in your interactions with them. How did the best and the worst make you feel? What specifically did they do or say that made you feel that way? Now think about how your students would describe you. Jot down how they might describe you and why. How do your expectations or beliefs shape how they look at you? Are there parallels in your beliefs and their responses to you?

This speech article, while it may seem simple, can actually have a big impact of teachers across the nation. As i said, everyone knows self fulfilling prophecy exists, it would be pretty hard to argue the opposite. Now the question is how do we take the knowledge of its existence and use it to make our classrooms better. Everyone goes into a classroom and the very first day judges their students to know which ones are the "good" kids and which ones aren't. However instinctual this practice may be, it can be extremely detrimental to our students, so we must find a way to combat this. Spiegel's article finds a realistic way to do this that really doesn't take much time. In fact it can be done by anyone, all it takes is simply changing our behaviors and our beliefs will follow.