Multiculturalists have a firm grip on both elementary and secondary schools and the universities. Their ideology of racial and ethnic difference risks Balkanizing our multiracial society. Students who don't speak English are locked away in special programs whose primary purpose is to maintain native languages rather than teach English, often without their parents' consent. Similarly, in many urban schools, African American students are fed a racialist "Afrocentric" curriculum of dubious merit. CEO seeks to promote educational policies grounded in America's motto: e pluribus unum, "out of many, one."
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 The Center for Equal Opportunity is proud to offer this guide. In it, we attempt to answer the most frequently asked questions about teaching, designing, and evaluating an English immersion classroom and the research underpinnings in favor of English immersion. With the help of this guide, teachers, administrators, and policy makers will reach a better understanding of what structured English immersion is all about, and the special difficulties that affect English-learners at different grade levels, especially older students.
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Reprinted from an article by Linda Chavez in Reader's Digest. It discusses the history and background of bilingual education and exposes some of its flaws.  Luis Granados was a bright 5-year-old who could read simple English before he entered kindergarten in Sun Valley, Calif. But soon after the school year began, his mother was told that he couldn't keep up. Yolanda Granados was bewildered. "He knows his alphabet," she assured the teacher. "You don't understand," the teacher explained. "The use of both Spanish and English in the classroom is confusing him." Yolanda Granados was born in Mexico but speaks excellent English. Simply because Spanish is sometimes spoken in her household, however, the school district-without consulting her-put her son in bilingual classes. "I sent Luis to school to learn English," she declares.
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The litigation in GI Forum v. Texas Education Agency is of crucial importance to those states and school districts that already have or are considering a requirement that students pass a comprehensive test before being awarded a high school diploma. Texas is one of nineteen states with such a requirement. READ Perspectives has collected the key materials from this case and is publishing them.
INTRODUCTION by Jorge Amselle
In the past several years, education reformers have taken a very aggressive role in shaping education policy around the country. One of the centerpieces of these reform efforts has involved accountability through high-stakes tests. Every year millions of schoolchildren must face a battery of tests to determine if they will progress from one grade level to the next or be left behind as their friends and classmates pass them by.
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Perhaps no other "yet to be released" report has been quoted so much or so often as the so-called "Collier Study." In 1995, approximately two years before the report was completed, Virginia Collier was holding public meetings at which she disseminated a five page summary of her "study" - two pages of text, two pages of line graphs, and a one page list of program definitions. In no time, the "Collier Study" had become another factoid in the controversy over bilingual education. Even though no one had actually read it, the report was being cited everywhere as proof that bilingual education, particularly two-way bilingual education, was superior to all other programs for Limited-English Proficient (LEP) children.
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Bilingual education is a classic example of an experiment that was begun with the best of humanitarian intentions but has turned out to be terribly wrongheaded. To understand this experiment, we need to look back to the mid-1960s, when the civil-rights movement for African-Americans was at its height and Latino activists began to protest the damaging circumstances that led to unacceptably high proportions of school dropouts among Spanish-speaking children -- more than 50 percent nationwide.
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This policy brief discusses the lack of evidence that high self-esteem leads to high achievement and that the promotion of self-esteem may actually cause an increase in violence. Educators are particularly eager to promote self-esteem among minority students and may in fact be causing considerable harm.
By Nina H. Shokraii.-Rees
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Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), sent a report to the Denver Public Schools’ (DPS) Board of Education today, attacking bilingual education and, in particular, its use in Denver.
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The five school districts examined in this report took the concept of immersion language teaching and turned it into a practical educational model for teaching today's Limited-English Proficient students. Readers will benefit from Mr. Clark's evaluation of the districts and his data on student achievement.
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Barry R. Chiswick
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago
and
Paul W. Miller
Department of Economics
University of Western Australia
INTRODUCTION
In recent years there has been much concern over the consequences of a variety of education programs, including bilingual education and English-as-a-second-language programs. These concerns have been legal and educational. The legal concerns are over the access students have to various types of schooling, and have been played out in the courts, legislative bodies and in referendums. The educational concerns have frequently focused on the extent to which various types of schooling either enhance or retard English language proficiency and proficiency in the students’ origin or ancestral language. This study focuses on another dimension of the public policy issue that, ultimately, may provide a critical, but hitherto apparently unexplored, aspect of the debate. Namely, to what extent do those with limited English language proficiency, but with some degree of proficiency in another language, incur economic costs.
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This policy brief discusses the bilingual education laws of the ten states with the most language-minority students in detail. The brief also grades the laws of the different states and offers policy suggestions regarding the education of language-minority children.
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This report by Prof. Charles Glenn and published by the READ Institute , summarizes the key findings of the National Research Council's report, Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. The NRC found that based on all of the available evidence they could not determine if children were being helped or harmed by bilingual education versus alternative programs.
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A new national poll of Hispanic parents on education issues. We polled 600 Hispanic parents in English and Spanish on how they wanted their children educated. 63 percent wanted their kids to learn English as soon as possible, 81 percent wanted their children taught in English if it meant more time spent learning English, and parents overwhelmingly ranked learning English as their number one concern.
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