The Economic Imperative of Bilingual Education in Schools - The Atlantic

The Economic Imperative of Bilingual Education in Schools - The Atlantic:

The Economic Imperative of Bilingual Education

States including Utah and Montana are aggressively pushing for programs that give native English speakers a competitive edge.

Garland Independent School District, a fast-growing suburb northeast of Dallas, has undergone a dramatic demographic shift. Like districts across Texas, Garland schools are blacker, browner, and more racially diverse than a generation ago. The multicultural panorama in Garland schools is reflected in its academic offerings. Still, in a school district with a Hispanic majority, and a state where more than a third of residents are Spanish speakers, Garland chose Mandarin Chinese as the focus of its newly launched language-immersion program at Weaver Elementary School. Increasing Garland students’ marketability in a global economy was the rationale. “It’s preparing students for the future and hopefully, lots of possibilities as they get older,” the school’s principal, Jennifer Miley, told the Dallas Morning News.

In a break with tradition, more schools are adopting language-immersion programs, in which English and another language are integrated into the curriculum and instruction. The Center for Applied Linguistics, a D.C.-based nonprofit, found an exponential growth in foreign-language immersion in a comprehensive survey of public schools and some private schools. Over a 40-year span language-immersion schools grew steadily, with the largest increase in the decade that started in 2001. Spanish remains the most popular for immersion programs at 45 percent, followed by French (22 percent) and Mandarin (13 percent), with a wide array of languages rounding out the list of 22 selections—from Hawaiian and Cantonese to Japanese and Arabic.

As two-way immersion grows, the variety of language options now available marks a turning point in the evolution of bilingual education. Once the mainstay of immigrant children, bilingual instruction has a new band of converts: English-speaking parents, lawmakers, and advocacy groups. Research shows that students gain cognitive and academic benefits from bilingualism. Yet an The Economic Imperative of Bilingual Education in Schools - The Atlantic: