Teaching Kids To Talk The Talk, The Old School Way

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) won a victory last week at the expense of taxpayer dollars and common sense.

A judge has told the state of Texas that the English as a Second Language (ESL) program is not working for Hispanic secondary students, and ordered the state to fix the problem before the start of school next year.

In a rare bit of legal irony, the judge who issued the ruling last Thursday is the same judge who started the whole mess to begin with.

35 years ago, Judge William Justice ruled that the Texas educational system had a legal obligation to provide bilingual education to secondary level students who didn't speak English proficiently.

That ruling, which flew in the face of what had worked before, set our state on the costly road to ESL curriculums that simply don't work.

Before his ridiculous decision, immigrants learned English the old fashioned way, through immersion. Immersion simply means that they were surrounded by written and spoken English every day, and had no choice but to learn the language.

That method may have been old school and hard-nosed, but it had one thing going for it: It worked. It worked every time, and it worked at no additional cost.

Disregarding all that, Justice ruled way back then that Texas educators had to re-tool their approach to non-English speaking students, and bilingual education was born.

The approach, as most government approaches are, was costly and counter-productive.

Its concept was to teach core subjects in the student's native language, while teaching them to speak and write English concurrently.

The program not only required the hiring or training of bilingual teachers, and duplicating curriculum materials in both English and Spanish, it also birthed brand new monitoring requirements, and brand new bureaucrats to oversee them.

Over the ensuing 35 years, those new bureaucrats, now firmly entrenched in our school systems, determined that the programs weren't working.

While some progress was being made with elementary grade students, secondary level pupils were failing and dropping out in droves.

A twist in the concept was introduced to target those students, English as a Second Language. ESL provides core instruction with limited use of the student's native language, combined with a heavier focus on English immersion.

While all that was going on, the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) testing was started in 2003. And as TAKS scores of ESL students are analyzed, it has become apparent that the ESL model isn't working.

Those results, and that analysis, was fodder for a lawsuit, which brings us back to Judge Justice and his latest ruling.

The lawsuit was filed in 2007 by MALDEF on behalf of about 145,000 middle and high school students who are considered deficient in English. TAKS test scores show far below average scores for those students in core subjects.

Justice first ruled in 2007 that Texas was meeting its legal obligations to students with limited English proficiency, and said other factors besides a failure of ESL programs might be to blame.

But in July of this year, he reversed himself and ruled that the state was not complying with federal law that requires students to get equal education opportunities. That failure to comply, he said, violated the civil rights of Spanish-speaking students under the federal Equal Education Opportunity Act.

He then ordered that improvements had to be in place by the start of the 2009-10 school year, and required the state submit a preliminary plan for the improvements by Jan. 31, 2009.

The state appealed the ruling on the grounds it has not received funding or authority from the legislature to revamp the programs. Texas requested Justice delay the order, while they appealed the ruling.

Judge Justice, in a new order release Friday, denied the request and reaffirmed the deadlines. The state, he said, could requests for additional funding from Legislature when it convenes in January.

Offering educators no quarter, his ruling said "The time has come to put a halt to the failed secondary English as a Second Language program and monitoring system".

The state can, and probably will, appeal the ruling and request a stay from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the die seems cast to spend more money on the problem.

Education committees in both the Texas House and Senate have already said that they are working on the problem. Typically, that is code language for opening the checkbook.

And while no one has gone on the record with a price tag, some knowledgeable observers have guessed that remedial education for the 140,000 secondary students could cost $500 more per student, or $70 million a year. Add another $30 million in new monitoring programs, and the cost hovers around $100 million per year.

In a way, the judge was correct. The time has come to put an end to ESL. The time has also come to end bilingual education entirely.

The fix, however, will not come from piles of money being thrown into "new think" teaching programs. What we need, is some old school thought.

What we need, is the intestinal fortitude to address the problem forthrightly.

Students who don't speak English are entering Texas schools. They are disadvantaged to begin with, yet still expected to meet the norms of English speaking students.

And while this lawsuit, and the vast majority of bilingual and ESL programs focus on Hispanic children, we can't ignore children who come from Asian and European countries.

Do we need coursebooks in Japaneese, Chinese and Russian as well?

No, we don't. The solution is not to attempt core teaching in every language under the sun.

The solution is to intercept those students at the door, and put them into classes that do nothing but teach English. All day, every day.

When they are proficient in reading, speaking and writing English, and able to succeed in an English based educational system. Then, and only then, do we advance them to core classes. That would be real, old school immersion, and that would really work.

Yes, it might take a year or two. Yes, they might graduate a couple of years late.
But the benefit of truly knowing the language of their new country would serve them for a lifetime.