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The Decline of Bilingual Education: How to Reverse a Troubling Trend?

For decades bilingual education in the United States has faced political adversity to varying degrees. Having survived several waves of English-only activism since the late 1970s, these programs seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Research has increasingly demonstrated their superiority to all-English approaches for educating English-language learners (ELLs), as documented by meta-analyses of the literature (see Krashen & McField, 2005, for a recent review). Nevertheless, the continued availability of bilingual education in this country for significant numbers of ELLs is now in doubt. This is true in part because of the antibilingual backlash, which most recently took the form of English-only school initiatives adopted by voters in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts. But in recent years a new and more formidable threat has emerged: the trend toward high-stakes testing, primarily in English, as mandated by the U.S. federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Despite provisions requiring instructional programs to reflect “scientifically based research,” the law provides indirect but powerful incentives to ignore this principle when it comes to ELLs. That is, it encourages schools to abandon native-language instruction in favor of all-English approaches. The antibilingual backlash has clearly taken a toll. Between 1992 and 2002, as the number of ELLs in grades K–12 grew by 72% nationwide, their enrollment in bilingual programs declined from 37% to 17% (Zehler et al., 2003). Although state mandates for all-English instruction had a significant impact, less than half of the INTERNATIONAL MULTILINGUAL RESEARCH JOURNAL, 1(1), 33–37 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.