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Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In 2019-2021, he served as the Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department's Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the...
Champion of Liberty
The accomplishments of Milton Friedman—and why we still miss him. By Stephen Moore.
Graduate Students As Protected “Employees”
Government regulations may ruin America’s great research universities.
The Great Terror at 40
As his classic work is republished, Robert Conquest reflects on how it threw open the doors of the Gulag’s secrets.
One Nation Under God
Restoring religious freedom to public schools
Markets Work, Government Doesn’t
Nimble private enterprise has risen to the pandemic challenge. Officialdom has not.
After Michigan
In June the Supreme Court issued a definitive—if narrow—ruling that permits the consideration of race in university admissions. This may have been bad law—but was it a bad decision? By Robert Zelnick.
America at the Bat
Lessons from Blair’s School Reforms
The “specialist school” formula pays off
The Gender Refs
Federal regulators lock arms with college athletic departments to gut men’s sports in the name of equality
Men with a Mission
The Scheinman collection brings to life the story of how two friends, a white American and a black Kenyan, helped African democracy bloom. By Tom Shachtman.
Wrong Turn on School Reform
How to get back on track after No Child Left Behind
Support Your Local Charter School
Civic entrepreneurs will be critical to the success of these fledgling independent public schools
Bilingual Education: A Critique
Bilingual education has been a subject of national debate since the 1960s. This essay traces the evolution of that debate from its origin in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Bilingual Education Act (1968), which decreed that a child should be instructed in his or her native tongue for a transitional year while she or he learned English but was to transfer to an all-English classroom as fast as possible. These prescriptions were ignored by bilingual enthusiasts; English was neglected, and Spanish language and cultural maintenance became the norm.
Bilingual education was said to be essential for the purposes of gaining a new sense of pride for the Hispanics and to resist Americanization. The Lau v. Nichols (1974) decision stands out as a landmark on the road to bilingual education for those unable to speak English: bilingual education moved away from a transitional year to a multiyear plan to teach children first in their home language, if it was not English, before teaching them in English. This facilitation theory imprisoned Spanish speakers in classrooms where essentially only Spanish was taught, and bilingual education became Spanish cultural maintenance with English limited to thirty minutes a day. The essay discusses the pros and cons of bilingual education.
Criticism of bilingual education has grown as parents and numerous objective analyses have shown it was ineffective, kept students too long in Spanish-only classes, and slowed the learning of English and assimilation into American society. High dropout rates for Latino students, low graduation rates from high schools and colleges have imprisoned Spanish speakers at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder in the United States.
This revolt, the defects of bilingual education, and the changes needed to restore English for the Children are covered in the essay. The implications of Proposition 227 abolishing bilingual education in California are also discussed.