In the several weeks since I posted my last update on our policy project, my group (the Parseltongue Army) and I have been working fervently to organize our project. We are working to deal with the question of fairness in the current bilingual education system in Pennsylvania. Specifically, we are looking to address the unequal access students in different school districts have to language education across PA. The unfairness in this is that, depending on the school district’s funding and how wealthy the surrounding areas are, some school districts are able to provide programs for multiple languages, while others cannot provide any.
The ideas we have generated for our proposal thus far include a standardized language immersion program for all public elementary schools across Pennsylvania. This type of program would have two main benefits: (1) to allow American students (native English speakers) to learn a second world language, and (2) to allow students whose first language is not English to slowly assimilate into a traditional English classroom. The main and most successful model other schools/states have used is the “Fifty-Fifty” model. Using this, students would spend half of the school day being instructed in English, and the other half of the day would be spent in a classroom where only the foreign language being taught is used. What distinguishes these types of language programs from traditional programs is that regular school subjects are taught in the foreign language. For example, instead of spending Spanish class learning solely about grammar usage in the Spanish language, students in the “Fifty-Fifty” model would learn subjects like Math & science in Spanish. This would not only help them become more comfortable with the foreign language, but it would concurrently teach them core subjects.
An important detail of our proposal is that any language program we recommend will be “opt-out” rather than “opt-in”. In other words, all elementary school students in a particular school district will automatically be enrolled into the program. However, parents & students have the choice of leaving the program if they wish.
An additional aspect of our project involves the Seal of Biliteracy, which is an “award given by a school, school district, or county office of education in recognition of students who have studied and attained proficiency in two or more languages by high school graduation.” With this recognition and distinction on a student’s transcript, we hope it will motivate and energize students to continue learning their language, even after leaving their language immersion program in elementary school. Because the Seal of Biliteracy is spread district to district (when a school district implements the program, school districts in the surrounding area take notice and implement the program as well), we want to start off by proposing the implementation of the Seal of Biliteracy to the State College Area School District. Our hope is that others in the area will follow its lead. There are currently no schools in Pennsylvania that allow its students the opportunity to earn the Seal of Biliteracy, and we are aiming to change this.
Over the past two weeks, we have also begun meeting and speaking with people who have more experience and expertise with bilingual education. On Tuesday afternoon, a few group members had a phone conversation with Arthur Chou, a representative from the Seal of Biliteracy. Essentially, their goal with having this program is to get more people to recognize that speaking multiple languages is not a liability, but rather an incredibly useful asset. He also explained some of the details of how the Seal of Biliteracy works. For example, we learned that every school district sets its own standards for how to earn the seal, but there are general guidelines posted on the Seal of Biliteracy website.
On Tuesday, we also had a phone conversation with Robert Van Der Voot from ProEnglish, a lobbying organization that supports making English the official language of the United States. Since the beginning of our project, we have recognized that bilingual education is a multifaceted issue, and any policy dealing with it will involve many varying players who hold a stake in the issue. To this end, we knew we had to take into consideration the perspectives of those opposed to bilingual education while formulating our policy. During our conversation, Mr. Van Der Voot emphasized how important it was for non-English-speaking students to assimilate into American culture from an early age and to learn English. He believes that having a common language everyone can speak is a thread that binds us all together, and if we don’t have things unifying us, our society is more likely to fracture.
Moving forward, we hope to contact and speak with more professionals in the field of bilingual education so that we can obtain a clearer picture of how we can help address this issue.
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