Why am I Concerned about Education?
And Why You Should be Too.
What are my beliefs about the importance of bilingual education?
The importance of bilingual in the American educational system cannot be understated anymore. Living in this great nation and to take it further than that living in the fantastic state of Texas there is an enormous need for improvements, amendments, and revisions to the school’s bilingual language programs. The American school system and demographics are always changing now even more so than ever. Teachers, at every grade level, can no longer expect that all their students to be predominately English speaking or even fully English literate. School districts can no longer ignore the need for adjusting instructional to better serve the needs of students that do not speak English as their only predominant and fluent language.
These changes all support my idea that our educational system needs massive reform to our bilingual educational system. Some of our states that have some of the highest numbers of immigrants do not even have actual dual language programs. This further proves that we need to petition to change the legislation governing these schools’ education programs. In the state of California there is the number one Hispanic Population in the United States of 14,358,000 people. According to John Benson from the Huffington Post “There are very successful bilingual education programs in San Francisco City Schools for languages like Mandarin and Japanese,” Carter said. “The data from those programs is very, very good. Those students do better than their peers in non-bilingual programs within the same district.” What’s currently being proposed in California is to allow bilingual education, thus benefiting millions of Spanish speaking students who right now are taking English-only classes.” This shows other people all across the nation understand the importance and significance of bilingualism in the United States.
I have attended public school all my life in the Houston area and every single school I have attended has had a dual language program from elementary school to high school.
While I have never had first hand experience in a bilingual educational program, I have had several friends that were ingratiated in these programs. Some of these friends could barely speak English when they first showed up at my school. Some of these students were pretty close to proficiently bilingual. There were even a couple that could barely speak Spanish but their parents supported all the studies that backed up the idea that the earlier a child begins learning multiple languages the easier it would be for mastery of both. These students all enjoyed their classes and know it helped them to becoming better students.