Tailor Bilingual Ed. to School Needs, Calif. Study Says

By Peter Schmidt

Local educators should stop arguing about the one best approach to educating language minorities and instead focus on tailoring programs to fit the needs of their own schools, a study released by the California education department last week urges.

The study, which examined how five basic approaches to educating limited-English-proficient students were used in several California schools, found that few exemplary programs could be easily categorized as following one approach or another.

Some programs used a combination of approaches, while others used the same approach in different ways, the study indicates, adding that a lack of reliable testing data prevented reliable...