opinion
Immigrant children attend school on their first day at MS 297 in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.
©Brittany Somerset
Cities such as New York City, Denver and Chicago are urgently hiring bilingual teachers as more immigrant children enter their schools.
Bilingual education will fail most of these children.
They are often educational ghettos, producing dropouts who cannot speak English and face lifelong poverty.
Non-English speaking students should receive intensive instruction in English when they first arrive at school and then be mainstreamed into classrooms where they are taught only in English.
Educational institutions have said that emphasizing English proficiency is “xenophobic”.
But immigrant parents deserve the truth, not political brainwashing.
They need to know that only 4% of 8th graders and 3% of 12th graders in bilingual classrooms are proficient in math and reading, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores.
A whopping 80% do not understand either subject.
Imagine the limited future they have.
New York City promotes a bill of rights to parents, saying they can provide their children with continued bilingual education “year after year.”
The truth is that bilingual education is not a “right.” That's wrong.
Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in America, and poverty there afflicts both native-born residents and immigrants alike.
However, students in bilingual programs are less than half as likely to graduate compared to those taught in English.
Learning English is a modern civil rights issue.
For the first time in American history, 15.5% of the population is foreign-born, more even than in the 1890s or 1910s.
Now is the time to get language instruction right and not second-guess your mistakes.
Bilingual education creates language confusion in the classroom.
Fourth grade teacher Miriam Sicherman shares how she teaches a dual language class at Children's Workshop School in Manhattan, Chalkbeat reported. “In a recent class on Internet safety, she translated a presentation in advance into Spanish and Russian for five newcomers.” Immigrant students who speak those languages used cellphones to answer questions. I used my phone to search for words like “password” and “email address.” She repeats this process over and over again during her eight-hour school day. ”
Conclusion: The English-speaking student, the Russian-speaking student, and the Spanish-speaking student each have a portion of their time and must wait until she speaks to the rest of the class in a language she doesn't understand. It won't.
Sitcherman uses a pocket translator to answer questions in a foreign language an average of 25 times a day, even though most of the students in her class have no idea what she's saying. crazy.
Even weirder, New York City is trying to teach kindergarteners phonics before they learn English.
A kindergarten teacher's assistant wonders what will happen to a girl in her class from Venezuela whose “understanding of English is very limited.”
How do you pronounce and recognize words you've never heard before?
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times recently reported that test scores have skyrocketed since Mississippi introduced phonics.
But in Mississippi, only 4% of students live in homes where a language other than English is spoken.
In New York City, that number is 48%.
For phonics to work here, children must first learn English.
Other countries are examining how best to teach immigrant children and the impact immigration, a taboo topic in the United States, has on native-born students.
Chile has received a large influx of immigrants from Venezuela and Haiti.
The arrival of Haitian students who don't speak Spanish led to lower standardized test scores for Chilean-born students, according to a study in the Economics Education Review.
The influx of Venezuelan students did not have much of an impact because they spoke the language of instruction and did not cause language confusion in the classroom.
In Denmark, scores for all students fell because the high proportion of immigrant children in classrooms “diverts teachers' attention and time” to helping nonverbal children.
Similar results have been reported in Germany and Sweden.
Bilingual education is failing almost everywhere.
In the United States, immigrant parents should demand that their children be taught only in English.
English is the language of success in this country.
That's what parents want for their children.
Political correctness should be cursed.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey
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