Immersion or Bilingual Education: Is One Superior?

The Problem

Nationwide, about 3.5 million public school students do not know English well enough to succeed in a regular classroom. In the early twentieth century, such children would have been expected to learn English without much special help, sinking or swimming on their own. Of course, many millions of children did learn this way, but many others failed, falling further behind each year or dropping out of school altogether.

Bilingual Education first appeared over 160 years ago to help ease the thousands of non-English speaking children into the American educational system and prepare then for instruction in regular English classrooms. This first program of bilingual education, still being used in some areas today, only trapped students in segregated classes that denied them the opportunity to learn English effectively. In recent years, research has shown that abandoning the current bilingual education system has "raised test scores at nearly every subject and grade level by 10-20%”(Wildavsky 2). With this new program and positive results, it is time for this nation to evaluate our bilingual education methods.

Claims

The demographics of our public schools are drastically changing every day with the influx of immigrant students that arrive in our country daily. Because of this, we are faced with the question; is our standard method of teaching bilingual students effective? The need of education for immigrant students is obvious, yet the debate of how to teach these students has become a national concern.

There is a new movement initiating that the schools update and change the existing bilingual program. They are calling for action and results in our public schools to effectively integrate the immigrant students with the English-speaking students by ways of English Immersion. The immersion program is one where limited English-speaking students are placed in an English-speaking classroom and expected to be proficient in the English within two years. On the...