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Dean Dad recently experienced a forehead-slapping moment about bilingual education:
In the last few weeks, two of the biggest, most respected and sought after employers in our service area told me, independently and without prompting, that they desperately want bilingual employees. In the fields the employers represent, the ability to communicate with the population that actually exists is hugely important, and they’ve had a terrible time finding bilingual workers with the skills they want.
We teach a substantial (and growing) bilingual population, of course, but I realized just now that we’re doing it wrong.
Our entire ESL/Bilingual framework is built on the assumption that ESL status is an obstacle or a handicap. The unstated goal has been to ‘catch up’ the ESL population to the rest of the students. Accordingly, we have all manner of ‘bridge’ programs, tutoring, ‘outreach,’ and the rest.
These are all good, as far as they go. To the extent that they help students from struggling high schools to develop the skills to succeed in college and eventual careers, I’m all for them. And you’ll never catch me saying bad things about tutoring, whether for this group or anybody else.
But the attitudes we convey, and messages we send, by treating ESL status as a handicap are backwards. In this market, fluency in two languages (English and Spanish, really) is a huge plus. It’s an asset. Given two similarly qualified candidates, one bilingual and the other not, both employers made it abundantly clear to me that they’d hire the bilingual one in a heartbeat. The ability to communicate with Spanish-speaking clients (or, more importantly, potential clients) is a major business advantage, and one for which they’re willing to pay. It’s worth something to them.
What makes Dean Dad's contemplations interesting at this point in time is that the approach he advocates is apparently antithetical to the 2008 Republican Platform (PDF) on education. The GOP platform emphasizes the importance of K-16 education on both the country's economic development and individual students' success in finding jobs by meeting employers' needs for 21st-century skills. Certainly speaking more than one language is a key skill. Many of the job ads I have seen lately--I read a lot of them because friends and family are always looking for better opportunities--require or encourage bilingualism, particularly in Spanish, although people who can speak Korean, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, or Arabic also appear to be in demand.
From the 2008 Republican platform:
To ensure that all students will have access to the mainstream of American life, we support the English First approach and oppose divisive programs that limit students’ future potential. All students must be literate in English, our common language, to participate in the promise of America.
The liability of an English-first approach is that students' brains are most pliable and capable of learning multiple languages at younger ages. If we forbid the reading and writing of students' native languages in U.S. schools, we may be hurting those students more than we are helping them. When I was in the high school, there were a number of native Spanish speakers in my Spanish language classes. They knew how to speak colloquial Spanish, but needed to learn how to speak it correctly and how to write--even how to spell--their native tongue.
Similarly, my college students who are bilingual--usually in Spanish or in Asian languages--talk frequently with me about how they don't feel fully literate in either language because they learned only to write in English (and not too well) at school and to speak their first language (but only colloquially) at home. It's frustrating for them, and it's frustrating for me as an instructor.
Conservatives tend to respond to this dilemma by saying that English should take primacy because it is the national language of the country. But the reality is that students will continue to speak their native languages with older relatives and many of them speak their first languages with peers as well. Does this persistence of another language harm students' learning of English? Or would learning to speak and write two languages serve students as both learners and future professionals?
I share Dean Dad's perspective: Knowing--and especially being fluent in--two or more languages is a huge advantage, not a liability. Contrary to the implicit (half-explicit?) statement in the GOP platform that bilingual programs are "divisive" and to "ensure the transmission of a culture," bilingual education actually advances cultural transmission and promotes cross-culture understanding. Learning about--and experiencing--cultures in a
