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.