Long plagued by high dropout rates amongst Latino students, the Texas Education Agency has been ordered by the U.S. District Court to overhaul its bilingual education program, reports the Houston Chronicle. It's about time, honestly. According to Judge Justice's (yep, that's his name) decision and the El Paso Times, ELL students are held back twice as often as other students and routinely underperform on standardized tests. The ruling calls for more monitoring of bilingual ed programs and a "review" of the system. Sounds great in theory but this is totally inadequate in practice.
Here's the problem, Texas: you let your students languish in bilingual classes until sixth grade. Only then, in seventh grade, do you re-label them ELL, test them in English, and then wonder why they all drop out and/or fail their tests. This is not an occasion for just instituting more monitoring programs. This calls for a serious overhaul of bilingual education. Why don't you try instituting more support systems for students, transitioning them from bilingual to ELL starting in fourth or fifth grade, mixing English immersion with bilingual classes at?? younger ages, or even ending bilingual education in fourth grade or before. I can only hope Texas takes this golden court-ordered opportunity.
