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0 pointspoulsbohemian1y ago0 comments

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.

This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.

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encoderer1y ago

This is exactly the point of the article.

I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.

If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.

Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.

nosefurhairdo1y ago

The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.

I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.

foolfoolz1y ago

this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks

troupe1y ago

There is a very big difference between a bilingual school and a school where half the kids don't understand the language that math is being taught in.

raincole1y ago

Perhaps you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction of getting yourself irritated then. The GP clearly said 1/4 students don't speak English, not 1/4 students speak one more language besides English.

wat100001y ago

My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.

propernoun1y ago

I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.

If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.

thatcat1y ago

for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.

williamtrask1y ago

Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?

seattle_spring1y ago

You think it's useless to be able to communicate to someone directly without the use of an intermediary translation device?

ConspiracyFact1y ago

Well, within 30 years or so AI will be better than humans at everything, so…

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