Enter a Houston kindergarten classroom on a Tuesday morning, and you will hear something that is rarely captured in the Washington policy debate. A Spanish story is read aloud by a teacher. A boy responds in English. Like her grandmother at the dinner table, another girl, perhaps five years old, switches in mid-sentence without giving it any thought. No one corrects her. The lesson continues. It’s a brief scene that’s easy to overlook, but it reveals nearly everything about the state of the nation and how far behind the law it has fallen.
Bilingualism has been viewed as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be developed for decades in American educational policy. Approximately five million students who are learning English are still routed through systems that are primarily intended to get them out of their native tongue as soon as possible. The presumption that English is the goal and everything else is baggage is rarely expressed aloud. That framing is beginning to appear not only antiquated but also financially careless.
For years, the evidence supporting bilingual education has been accumulating, and it doesn’t really go both ways. Students who participate in well-designed bilingual programs typically perform better academically, reclassify out of EL status at higher rates, and carry advantages into adulthood that manifest in employment and earnings. There are social-emotional and cognitive advantages, as well as something more difficult to quantify: children’s perception that the language their parents use at home is not something to be ashamed of. Anyone who has witnessed a child subtly cease speaking the language of their family by the time they are in third grade knows what that loss looks like.
The political landscape has recently changed. Proposition 227 was overturned in California. The LOOK Act was passed in Massachusetts. Dual-language programs have been introduced in districts from Utah to North Carolina, sometimes at the behest of Anglophone parents who want their own children to learn Mandarin or Spanish. The old “English Only” consensus that ruled the 1980s and 1990s seems to have quietly crumbled. It remains to be seen if the federal government will catch up.
The nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization, LULAC, has been advocating for “English Plus” since the Reagan administration. The argument is straightforward and, to be honest, difficult to refute: learn English well, of course, but don’t discard your native tongue. According to the organization, 100% of EL-classified students arrive already speaking another language, whereas only about 4% of American high school graduates have studied a foreign language for two years. There’s a clear mismatch there. The nation works to deprive children who already speak a second language of it while spending enormous sums of money trying to teach monolingual children a second language.
Practical issues like teacher shortages, uneven program quality, and the possibility of de facto segregation when language groups cluster are typically brought up by opponents of increased bilingual education. These are authentic. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help. Developing a workforce of multilingual educators is likely the most difficult aspect of the task. However, these are implementation issues rather than objections to the objective. The more difficult criticisms are typically cultural in nature, wrapped in catchphrases about unity that, upon closer examination, reveal a more limited meaning.
In this conversation, history keeps popping up, usually without warning. The nation has experienced similar waves in the past: Spanish was used as a form of punishment on Texas playgrounds well into the 1960s, and German-language schools were closed during World War I. Every time the official language debate comes up again, it usually coincides with immigration-related concerns that have nothing to do with linguistics.
The United States will be more, not less, multilingual in 25 years. Whether its schools were built to maximize that or to continuously apologize for it is the question. It’s difficult not to think that the solution ought to be clear as you watch this play out from a classroom in Houston, Queens, or East Los Angeles.
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