Bilingual Education Returns To California. Now What?
Voters in California officially ended the era of English–only instruction in public schools and lifted restrictions on bilingual education that had been in place for 18 years. Proposition 58 passed by a 73–27 percent margin.
What happens next though, could get complicated. Classrooms won’t change this school year because the measure doesn’t kick in until July 2017. Until then, state and school district officials need to figure out three big things:
1. How many schools will actually begin to offer bilingual or dual language instruction?
2. Will it cost more for schools to have this offering?
3. Where will schools find the bilingual teachers they need?
As for the cost, sponsors of Proposition 58 say that based on their financial analysis, restoring bilingualed won’t cost the state more money. Instead, local districts will have full discretion to shift the money they already have to pay for new programs.
Finally, let’s not forget that California has been under lots of scrutiny because of its shortcomings in educating ELLs under English–only policies. In 2015 the U.S. Justice Department found that California had failed to address the high failure rates of tens of thousands of ELLs. As a result, state education officials agreed to new training and monitoring procedures to ensure that districts provide the necessary services and interventions required under the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act.
To that end, bilingual education and dual language instruction will now become part of the mix of instructional options educators will have to appease parents and improve the quality of instruction ELLs receive on their way to English proficiency.
Source: NPR
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/11/25/502904113/bilingual–education–returns–to–california–now–what
