EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT ESL IS LOS PIJAMAS DEL GATO

Saturday, September 21, 2002

The debate over bilingual education is all the more bitter because the partisans have so little actual evidence to go on. The observation that people are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts hardly applies.

Amendment 31 on the November ballot would establish English immersion as the standard program for Colorado children learning English. But participants in the debate proffer conflicting facts on how well it works.

That's not an unusual situation in education, because it doesn't lend itself to the kind of research that is the standard in medical trials, a randomized double-blind trial.

Many parents go to a great deal of trouble to select the way their children are to be educated, whether by what kind of school they attend or merely by where they buy a house. They resist enrolling their children in an educational trial if it means that they'll have to give up control over some important aspect of education. And to the extent it's true that the better educated they are themselves the more resistant they are, results even of random trials might be skewed.

Parental education itself is strongly correlated with children's achievement.

Also, it's tricky to design educational studies that are double blind, that is, where neither teachers nor students know whether they are in the group testing an educational innovation or not. Children and their parents obviously know whether they are in English-immersion classes or transitional bilingual education, where they are taught content subjects such as math in their native language while they are learning English.

But which works better? Joseph Guzman reports that one reason the research yields such mixed conclusions is that it has failed to separate the benefits of growing up in a bilingual household with the effects of receiving bilingual instruction. Guzman is a visiting assistant professor in the business school at Georgetown University; his results on bilingual programs appear in Education Next, published by the Fordham Foundation (online at educationnext.org).

Being fluently bilingual, as an adult, is obviously advantageous, for practical reasons in the job market but also because, as Guzman notes, linguists believe knowing two languages has a positive effect on many aspects of cognitive ability. But the question is, what's the best order for getting there?

Guzman lays out the tradeoff this way: ``Bilingual instruction carries with it the assumption that delaying the transition to English is less costly than delaying the acquisition of other core skills . . . even if instruction [in math and science] must be in the student's first language. [English as a Second Language] instruction assumes the opposite -- that the benefits of learning English as early as possible exceed the costs of delaying other core curricula.''

Either of those theories could be true. That's where the evidence comes in. Guzman used data from a large federally sponsored study, High School and Beyond, including information on nearly 2,000 Hispanic students.

First, to estimate the benefits of bilingualism, Guzman compared Hispanics raised in Spanish-speaking households with Hispanics raised in monolingual English households. The bilingual students had on average 0.6 years more education, received bachelor's degrees at three times the rate of monolinguals (15.6 percent compared with 4.6 percent) and were twice as likely to be in high-skill occupations 10 years after high school.

But, separately, he compared Hispanic students in bilingual programs with those in ESL programs. Bilingual education, he concludes, ``has unambiguously negative effects on both years of education and attainment of a degree, even after controlling for such variables as socioeconomic status, 10th-grade math scores, parents' birthplace, sex and region.''

The contrasting influences of living in a bilingual household, on the one hand, and of receiving bilingual education on the other, were roughly similar in strength but canceled each other out, the first being positive and the second negative. For students in ESL programs, in contrast, the positive effect of growing up bilingual remained strong, but there was no offsetting disadvantage to having started school with limited English proficiency. The LEP students did better than their English-only counterparts.

Either theory could be true. But, on the evidence, only one is, and it's not the one that has dominated educational policy for a generation. Parents making educational choices for their children should be informed.