Apparently, Boston voted for a change six years ago that enforced English-only curricula in their schools in hope of speeding non-native English-speaking students along their road to language acquisition. --This doesn't work, and there is proof. In six years, the dropout rate in Boston has doubled. Imagine not having full proficiency in your second language and having all of your classes--not just language arts, but also math, history, and science--in that language with no extra help. I might drop out, too. This is especially unfortunate because 38% of the district's 56,000 students are non-native English speakers: 21,280 students. The full story is here.
Luckily in Texas many educators realize how ineffective this approach is, possibly due to the large (and continuously growing) Spanish-speaking population in the state. For example, I tutor at Metz Elementary School, which has adopted the mentoring program Help One Student To Succeed (HOSTS). At Metz, the school has two HOSTS programs for language arts/reading, one in English and one in Spanish. The purpose of the program is to pair students one-on-one with a mentor and have them read together; the mentor teaches the student reading processing skills and strategies, as well as pronunciation and vocabulary. What is unique about Spanish HOSTS is that it is based on a type of language transfer theory. Reading is a process not dependent merely on decoding the lexicon, but on processing the ideas, structure, transitions, etc.; if a student has under-developed processing skills in Spanish, then he/she will have the same struggle in English--with the added struggle of also grappling with foreign lexicon and syntax. This could create a crippling cognitive load for the student. In HOSTS, native Spanish-speaking students are tutored in Spanish so they can learn the processing skills in their first language so those skills will transfer to their reading in English.
Granted, Spanish is not the only first language students will have, which complicates the dilemma. However, we already have teachers who are negotiating this difficult area. ESL teachers daily search for ways to communicate with their students who are learning English because it is often at the same time the only common language among them.
In my humble opinion, enforcing an English-only curriculum is a simplistic way out of a very complex problem, and Boston's growing dropout rate proves that. It is an injustice to our students to choose this "solution" when they are the ones who suffer for our mistakes. If bilingual or multilingual education is not an option, we have to--at the very least--acknowledge their needs and try to meet them through individualized efforts. That is what we claim we believe in as a country. That is what our public education stands for: equal opportunity. Denying students' needs for specialized instruction is denying them of the equal opportunity we say we believe in; denying them of that opportunity essentially denies their validity as members of our society. As teachers, we cannot stand for this. It will be hard work, but we have to find an effective solution to this problem.
