Anti-Bilingual Education Politicians Make Me Want To Scream

Cue the yelling (with citations).

I’ve written about the harmful language-in-education laws in my home state of Arizona before. But as an incredibly tight (and incredibly stressful) race for the state’s superintendent of public instruction wraps up, I have to yell about this a little more.

At this moment (the morning of November 15th — one week after election day), Tom Horne, one of the candidates for superintendent, is just marginally ahead of his opponent and potentially slated to win. One of the platforms that Horne ran his campaign on was anti-bilingual education. And I am shocked by the sheer number of votes that he has accrued — and the completely baseless anti-bilingual education claims that voters presumably are believing.

(Update: On Thursday, 11/17, Tom Horne was declared the winner by about a 9,000 vote margin.)

So, here I am again, screaming into the void for anyone who will listen. What are the real facts about bilingual education? Is it actually as harmful for students as these politicians claim it to be?

(The following paraphrased claims and direct quotes are all pulled directly from Tom Horne’s campaign website.)

Claim #1: Bilingual education only works if you’re proficient in two languages to begin with.

“Bilingual education is a disaster for students who do not yet speak English. Many of them never learned English properly… Only after they have become proficient in English, should dual language or bilingual education be allowed.”

There is zero evidence to back this claim up. Dual language models specifically admit a balance of students who are proficient in language 1 and students who are proficient in language 2. None of the students are required to be fluent in both in order for the model to work.

Enrichment bilingual programs geared towards elites (rather than minority language speakers) are an example of this. If a non-French speaking family wanted their child to grow up speaking French, they might consider enrolling them in an additive bilingual program, in which they learn the language for their own enrichment. Who would say that the child needs to gain advanced proficiency in French before benefiting from a bilingual program?

I also have a personal gripe against the wording in this claim, specifically the word “properly.” What does it mean to speak a language “properly?” What are the standards? Even across native speakers of a language, standards of what’s “proper” are highly subjective — and frankly, rooted in power dynamics and elitism. (Same thing goes for the standard of “proficiency.” Where are the benchmarks? What are the statistics? Lord knows we won’t be hearing any.)

Claim #2: Students in “English immersion” outperform students in bilingual programs.

“A study in Educationnext.com compared students who had been in structured English immersion with those who had been in bilingual education, in three areas: college admission, average income, and participation in high-status professions. The students who had been instructed in English immersion outperformed the students in bilingual education in every single topic studied.”

I took a look at this study (which is referred to on a different page as a “landmark” study) to evaluate these claims. It’s not a landmark study. Not even a little bit.

The study is written by Joseph Guzman, who is supposedly a “visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.” But the only places that this bio exists on are Educationnext.com and the Hoover Institute. (It appears that he is currently a professor at Northern Arizona University’s Department of Economics, Finance, and Accounting. So, nothing to do with education, and nothing to do with language. Good start.)

This study has a lot of issues. The study inappropriately defined “bilingual” education when pulling data¹, so it's flawed from the start. It also hyper-focuses on long term, non-linguistic outcomes (like “high-achieving careers”) without accounting for other variables that may lead to those outcomes. And there is little transparency with how the data is analyzed, which is drawn from the high-stakes standardized testing results of one year of a student cohort’s scores in mathematics.

A good study measuring bilingual students’ linguistic and academic outcomes should not look like this. It should track students’ growth over the years with distinctions for various learning contexts, assess at multiple points instead of making inferences from one mathematics test, and have transparent data and thoughtful statistical analyses.

“So where is that landmark study?” you might ask. Here it is. Thomas and Collier’s (1997; 2002) research spans from 1985-2001, makes detailed specifications between different educational contexts, and spans both urban and rural schools from different regions of the US.

Data summarized by Walter and Benson (2012). Carol Benson was one of my professors and she is a phenomenal champion for language-in-education rights.

Here’s the major takeaway from this chart.²

• Students who received six years of instructional support in their first language (see the last line) scored above the national norm for all students, including native English speakers!

• In contrast, students in ESL pullout programs (like “structured English immersion” in Arizona) scored dramatically lower — in the 11th percentile (see the first line).

Prevailing research on bilingual education has proven something that sounds so logical once you hear it: students learn best in the language that they know best. And what’s more, Thomas and Collier’s study shows us that the best indicator for success in second language learning is how much formal schooling the child receives in their first language.

Claim #3: Bilingual students do not become proficient in English.

“In a report by then Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan to the legislature, the percentage of students in bilingual education who became proficient in English in a given year was a pathetic 4%. At that rate, almost none of the students would ever become proficient in English.”

When I read this, I almost fell out of my chair on the spot. Because guess who becomes “proficient” in a language in a given year?

Pretty much no one.

Not a tiny baby, not an adult, and almost certainly not you (or me).

And on top of that, just because students have not achieved “proficiency in a year,” it doesn’t make any sense at all to conclude that students will not become proficient in the future. Are they not still learning?

It is incredibly unreasonable to assume that anyone can achieve proficiency in just one year. Language learning is an incredibly slow and effortful process (yes, even for a malleable little baby brain!!). People who make sweeping claims about “pathetic” learning outcomes after just one year need a reality check about what learning a new language entails (plus some self-awareness).

And so I scream: “AT WHAT COST?”

I don’t think that anti-bilingual education politicians and teachers are villains necessarily. But I think they are misinformed.

Part of the issue is in the word “immersion” (which appears in claim #2). Language immersion is highly misunderstood and looks vastly different across different contexts. To be effective, it requires intentional planning, lots of supports, and a cognizant awareness of just what students need in order for them to acquire new language skills without absolutely overwhelming them with incomprehensible input.

Immersion can be a helpful method in situations like Indigenous students wanting to reclaim their ancestral languages. And “immersion” can also be a grossly inappropriate solution for providing minimal (or no) supports for English language learners. Because it’s not enough to say that kids can just “pick up English” or “soak it in” in the dominant English language classroom. That’s not immersion. That’s submersion.

But how bad can “sink or swim” be, right? What actually happens when kids are placed in submersion learning contexts? The research has shown us that minority language-speaking students will:

• Perform considerably worse than children in the same class who speak the dominant language (both in language and academic achievement — they are missing a LOT of content, after all)

• Stay in school for fewer years and suffer from higher dropout rates

• For some groups, can have higher rates of unemployment, drug use, criminality, and suicide³

Bilingual education is not an inferior alternative for teaching students English “properly.” It is a well-researched, and (if well-designed) highly effective method that can benefit ALL students involved. Anti-bilingual education politicians may think they’re advocating for students and pushing them to participate to the fullest extent in an English-speaking society — but the costs outweigh the potential benefits.

Anti-bilingual education platforms are outdated, unsubstantiated, and more often than not, are rooted in sentiments that are deeper and more harmful than a genuine concern for students’ academic achievement.

We must pay careful attention to who we vote for and what views they espouse. It really does matter.

1. Mahoney et al. (2004) - The Condition of English Language Learners in Arizona: 2004

2. Walter and Benson (2012) - Language Policy and Medium of Instruction in Formal Education

3. Skutnabb-Kangas (2017) - Language Rights and Bilingual Education