Sunday, January 27, 2008 | Opinion
Immigrant students need assimilation, not accommodation

The IES is funding research comparing the effectiveness of bilingual and English-only education.

By Bob Zaslavsky

The U.S. Dept. of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is funding research comparing the effectiveness of bilingual and English-only education. This is part of a larger, ongoing project by the DOE’s National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth to examine the impact of special programs like English as a Second Language on the academic achievement of students whose home language is not English.
    
One recent report, “Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners,” clearly shows the extent to which our schools are failing these ethnic minority students: “Only 18.7 percent of English-language learners [in our schools] scored above the state-established norm for reading comprehension,” it finds. Our schools, then, are failing to adequately educate, in terms of literacy, a staggering 81.3 percent of students whose language at home is something other than English—they are functionally illiterate.
    
The massiveness of this disgrace is evident if one looks at the population involved. According to the panel’s report, “In 1979, there were 6 million language-minority students; by 1999, this number had more than doubled to 14 million.” By now, it is larger still, by several million. Of this group, 12 million or more are proceeding through our schools without achieving even basic competence in the use of the English language.
    
That our DOE needed (and still needs) to waste taxpayers’ money to determine this is proof of how comatose our officeholders and educational professionals are. If they awakened and examined how debilitating the prevailing educational theories are for all students, they would see that a revolution in our educational presuppositions is the sine qua non for reforming our schools. This revolution—far more than such peripheral concerns as funding, class size or school choice—is the thing most needful.
    
At the heart of this debilitating mindset is the wrongheaded notion that teaching must be adjusted to suit the home culture of students.
    
The paradox of this approach is that in practice, it means that we have created an educational system devoted primarily to teaching students what they already know. Readings are selected to “appeal” to their home origins. Since that is the prevailing methodology, we should not be surprised that students quickly come to assume that there is nothing new and worthwhile to be learned from reading.
    
This practice results in what is called “demographic determinism,” the phenomenon that each of us is condemned to stay where we are, based on our socioeconomic baggage. Some reading analysts have described this as the “Matthew effect,” namely that “whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Matt. 13:12).
    
This has led to a curriculum empty of prescribed content. Therefore, what we need is a new curriculum filled with those things that students do not know. In particular, we need to teach students those things that humans in our society should be expected to know—like English, for example.
    
Our educators tell us that ethnic minority children must read authors—and have teachers—from their own ethnic community. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, they need the opposite if they are to gain in the knowledge that will induce them to aspire beyond the narrow scope of their home environments.
    
I shudder to think how impoverished my own learning would have been if I—a young Jewish American—had not been beguiled in 5th grade by Sherlock Holmes’ feats of prodigious detection or Tom Sawyer’s float down the Mississippi River. What if I had not been awed in 6th grade by Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of a malevolent white whale or a linguistically sophisticated ape foundling in Africa? Would I be who I am if I had not been amazed in 7th grade by a million-year Martian picnic and dazzled in 8th grade by the voyages of Odysseus?
    
Cultural tailoring—or pandering—does not work. As Mary Ann Zehr put it in her survey of the IES Literacy Panel’s work that appeared in a recent issue of Education Week: “Not one study showed that culture-based education improved achievement in reading and writing.”
    
A teacher’s ethnic background, like the color of her skin, should not matter. What matters is her knowledge, because we should not be teaching students their culture, we should be teaching them our culture. SP

Bob Zaslavsky is author of the recently published textbook “The First Latin Course,” available through www.xlibris.com. He lives in Decatur.