California schools
The English patients
What happened after California abolished bilingual education
TEN years to the day after California banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama Botones”, she intones—“the clown's name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a question in English, she responds in Spanish. __________1__________. But the abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody expected.

Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other subjects in their ______2______(usually Spanish) while they gently made the transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have since ______3______.

In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.

It has been a smooth transition, disappointing the many teachers and Latino politicians who forecast imminent doom for immigrant children. Yet the revolution in standards promised by Mr Unz's supporters has not come to pass either. State tests show that immigrants are indeed doing better in English. But so are native English speakers. In the second grade (ages seven and eight) the gap in reading ability between natives and the rest has narrowed only slightly; in higher years it has not narrowed at all. The results of national tests are even less encouraging.

___________________4___________________.They now just suffer from a dismal education. Fully 74% of English learners in the fourth grade read at “below basic” level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2006 a study found that, after six years, just one-quarter of Hispanic pupils could expect to be reclassified as fluent in English—which is, admittedly, a pretty high bar. This augurs badly for their economic future. And, since more than one immigrant child in five lives in California, it is also bad news for America's largest state.

Howard Bryan, who is responsible for English learners in Santa Ana, says that formal teaching methods matter surprisingly little. Pupils in well-run schools with demanding teachers, who are encouraged by their parents, tend to succeed whatever the language.

The problem is that many parents are unwilling or unable to push their children, and most programmes are weak. The abolition of bilingual education has revealed a much bigger problem. California's public education system is sclerotic, with a meddlesome central bureaucracy and mighty teachers' unions. Until it is reformed, immigrants will continue to _____5_____.

Few such problems afflict Ms Paredes's pupils. Hers is a “two-way” bilingual class in which exactly half of the children already speak English fluently. Most of them are the offspring of upper-middle-class Hispanics who worry that their children will grow up knowing no Spanish. The class is drip-fed English according to a strict formula. In kindergarten pupils speak English 10% of the time; by fifth grade they speak it 50% of the time. Not surprisingly, given the pupils' backgrounds, such classes score remarkably well in tests, Partly for this reason, two-way bilingual education is entirely uncontroversial.

Although such two-way programmes are much rarer than old-fashioned bilingual education, they have roughly doubled in number in the past ten years. They have even _____6_____ in affluent white areas like Santa Monica. While the teaching of English to immigrants is not going too well, the teaching of Spanish to natives is going swimmingly. The clearest change wrought by Proposition 227 is that Spanish has turned from a remedial language into an aspirational one.

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