Bilingual Education Research

* Re “English Immersion and Proficiency,” Ventura County Letters, Aug. 6.

Amy Allison’s response to Denis O’Leary’s letter is full of distortions. It gives Proposition 227 the credit for the overall state of California’s increase on the SAT 9 test, repeats the falsehood that bilingual education only gives students one hour of English per day and claims that after five years students in bilingual education are not proficient. Here are the facts:

* The overall state SAT 9 gain in English reading is nearly entirely attributable to test inflation that one always sees with standardized tests. In addition, Stanford professor Kenji Hakuta has shown that districts that kept bilingual education also gained. A good example of this is the Ocean View Elementary School District in Oxnard.

* Bilingual programs provide a great deal of English. A UC Riverside study reported that by grade three, students in bilingual education receive 75% of their subject matter teaching in English and by grade five it is 90%.

* Scientific studies that compare bilingual students to all-English immersions show that those in bilingual education do at least as well and usually better in English, and drop out less.

Allison ignores O’Leary’s main point: Proposition 227 promised full proficiency in English, enough to do classwork in the mainstream, after only one year. This has not happened. Our analyses show that after one year few immersion students are even ready to handle specially modified instruction.

STEPHEN KRASHEN

Professor of Education

University of Southern California