Welcome to Francis Scott Key Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, less than two miles from Washington D.C. Key Elementary's Spanish Immersion Program was among the first bilingual education programs in the D.C. area. It proved so successful that Arlington County extended the program to its middle schools and high schools, and other area school systems have adopted similar immersion programs. For two years, during my vacations, I worked as an unpaid teaching assistant in the Immersion program. It wound up being a lot more of an education than I had bargained for--a complete seminar including lessons in crowd control, word problems, lunch money, and the politics of language.
Arlington County, like most of suburban Washington, has undergone a dramatic population shift within the last ten years. Immigration to the area has soared, and in many schools like Key, traditional "minority" groups actually comprise a majority of the student body. By far the largest percentage of Hispanic students are American-born citizens. Those who are not citizens may be legal residents or illegal aliens-school officials have no way of knowing, since a green card is not necessary to enroll in public school.
Unlike bilingual programs in New York and Miami, which were created to ease students' transitions from their native languages into English, Key's program is not for Hispanics only. While Spanish Immersion allows Hispanic students to continue their education in their first language, it also offers non-Hispanic students the unique opportunity to become fluent in a second language at an early age. Fifty percent of the students I worked with spoke Spanish as their first language. The other half spoke English or another language at home. Each student, therefore, was actively learning a second language, since half the day was taught in Spanish and the other half in English. When I began work at Key, I found that even in Arlington, a politically liberal community where Democrats sweep the polls at every election, there still exist many lingering stereotypes about Hispanic children. Members of my own family are apprehensive about sending their children to schools where Hispanics are in the majority because "they take up too much of the teacher's attention." Some point to low standardized test scores among Hispanic students as proof that "they just don't succeed as well as white students." Well, yes, but if you were taking the SAT in Norwegian, your scores wouldn't be all that hot either. Low test scores for immigrant students of any background almost always mean that they haven't mastered English, not that they are inherently stupid. And let's face it, learning English, which has the largest word pool of any spoken language and grammar that defies explanation, is no easy task.
Many Hispanic students struggle for years to become completely fluent in English. I knew that from growing up with Hispanic friends. What I discovered at Key was that many native English-speaking students have an equally difficult time learning Spanish. Some, in fact, were downright hopeless. Emily, whose first language is English, was unable to form a complete sentence in Spanish after two years of constant immersion in the language. Her best friend, Tara, also a native English speaker, spoke perfectly fluent Spanish after the same two years. The Hispanic students I worked with were much the same. Some picked up English very quickly, some took much longer to get used to its strangeness. How quickly one learns a second language apparently boils down to who has strong verbal ability and who does not. There are plenty of Hispanic children with outstanding language skills that are equal to, if not better than, their Anglo and black classmates. The "bell curve" theory would die a quick death if sociologists tried to apply it to the classrooms I worked in. Stupidity and intelligence, I discovered, are amazingly color-blind.
Still, the majority of my time in the Spanish Immersion Program was not spent developing my own socio-cultural theories. Instead, I worked in reading groups, graded tests, and did anything the teachers didn't have time for (xeroxing worksheets, especially). I learned plenty, too. My Spanish improved; I had been away from native speakers for so long that I sounded absurdly formal and scholarly. Reading Cervantes is fine, but it doesn't help you a bit with the slangy, rapid-fire Spanish of the D.C. suburbs. Six weeks interpreting for Hispanic parents sharpened my skills a hell of a lot faster than six weeks in Spanish 304 had. And to my dismay, I had to face up to my math phobia once again. If you think word problems suck in English, try doing them in another language. Then try explaining them in that language to innocent little second graders while secretly wondering if you're explaining them right or if you're doing it all wrong and the kids are going to grow up permanently scarred because they were taught word problems by a dumb gringa who only scored 430 on her math SAT.
Work was good for the occasional laugh, too. The first week I was there one of the second graders came up to me, looked me straight in the eye, and asked me how to say "vagina" in Spanish. Of course, my first impulse was to snicker in the most immature fashion possible. I managed to overcome that urge (just barely) and asked why she wanted to know this. It turns out she was doing a worksheet in science class on the human body (science was taught in Spanish) and the textbook she was using had been most unhelpful on the subject of private parts. I ran this by the teacher (who did snicker) and was told to go ahead and help her with the paper. So after a few minutes searching for the appropriate terminology (all the words I knew for private parts were not appropriate for a second grade classroom), we finished the project together, and I sneaked off to share this episode with the other teachers. I also learned other useful phrases, like "I have a crayon stuck in my ear" (that came up after two boys got into a fight in art class) and "If you bite him again you go to the principal's office" (to a seven-year old vampire wannabe, who preferred biting to pushing and shoving). If my time at Key proved anything, it's the universal nature of kids: your troublemakers, know-it-alls, and class clowns are the same no matter what language they speak.
Parents of children in the first Immersion classes liked the program so much that when their children graduated from sixth grade, they pressured the School Board to install similar programs at the middle school level. The Board did so, and a few years after that, bilingual programs were incorporated into two Arlington high schools. Spanish Immersion is now so popular that parents place their children on a waiting list in order to enroll them in Key's bilingual kindergarten. Other schools in the D.C. suburbs have begun similar half-day immersion programs-Great Falls offers a Japanese immersion program, Montgomery County a French one. These programs don't have the benefit of native speakers in their classes, but they are based on the same idea as Key's program: children educated in more than one language will have greater opportunities and a definite advantage in a multi-lingual, "global village" world.
Recently, however, despite the popularity of bilingual programs in the Washington area, Washington's major players have become less enthusiastic about other languages being taught in public schools. In September, Senate majority leader and presidential hopeful Bob Dole slammed bilingual education before a meeting of the American Legion, declaring, "We must stop the practice of multi-lingual education as a means of instilling ethnic pride or as a therapy for low self-esteem."1 Following a storm of criticism, especially from Florida's Cuban-American population (usually among the strongest supporters of the Republican right wing), Dole backed off the issue, stating that he would not seek to end bilingual programs so long as they "ensure that people learn English in a timely fashion."2
Senator Dole would be pleased to know that a recent report published by two professors at George Mason University noted that immersion programs like Key's are the surest way to improve the performance of students who enter school with little English. The George Mason study tracked 42,000 non-English speaking children for thirteen years and discovered that the highest achievers were ones who attended "two way" schools like Key where children are taught half the day in one language and half in another.3 Bilingual programs, it seems, are the best way to ensure that children who do not speak English at home learn it "in a timely fashion." Arlington teachers were quick to point out the benefits of two-way programs for native English speakers too: students showed increased verbal ability in both English and Spanish as well as a "genuinely positive" attitude towards racial and ethnic differences in their community.
Despite this study and a number of similar ones, bi-lingual programs are the center of national controversy: pending bills introduced by GOP members would "virtually dismantle" 27 years of federal support for bilingual education, and Dole himself plans to introduce legislation aimed at establishing English as the "official language" of the United States (radical right-wing groups like English First are pushing for an "official language" constitutional amendment). Still, Republicans face significant opposition from their own supporters if they try to slash too much funding for bilingual education. Governor George Bush of Texas has refused to cut popular immersion programs in his state because of pressure from his Mexican-American constituents; in Florida, a key primary state for Dole, Cuban-American educators warned Republicans that "attacking bilingual education here is like attacking Mom and apple pie."4 Supporters of the program at Key would probably agree. The classes are, after all, taught in an American school by American teachers, and the history and social studies the children learn, regardless of their backgrounds, are decidedly American. When the second graders in my class wrote essays on why they liked learning two languages, Raulito, one of the biggest troublemakers in the room, came up with an answer everyone (even Bob Dole) can live with: "Ahora puedo decir al todo el mundo que los Estados Unidos es el mejor pais del mundo." "Now I can tell everyone that America is the best country in the world."