Education Policy, Business and Technology

Californians, Having Curbed Bilingual Education, May Now Expand It

The New York Times: LOS ANGELES — The students gathered around the tables at Cahuenga Elementary School in Koreatown and exchanged descriptions of their mothers in Korean. She works hard, one student offered: yeol shim hee. She is funny: woo kin dah. The teacher walked around offering help as they began to compose essays. In the Korean portion of this dual-language class, not a word of English could be heard. Teachers and parents here speak of trilingual aspirations, and the sounds of Spanish, Korean and English can be heard throughout the playground.

In 1998, voters in California passed a law that severely restricted bilingual education in public schools, arguing that students were languishing in their native language and that requiring English-only instruction would speed up the time it took children to learn English.

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