Prop. 227 Seen as Focusing on ‘Wrong Issue’

Study of Calif. language law says bilingual vs. immersion debate misses the point.

No single method of teaching English-language learners is more effective than any other, according to a five-year study of California’s Proposition 227, which curtailed bilingual education in the state and switched most such students into English-immersion classrooms.

Released last week by two prominent independent research organizations, the Washington-based American Institutes for Research and the San Francisco-based WestEd, the study found that the differences between those two educational approaches were “minimal or nonexistent.”

“Based on these findings, we conclude that Proposition 227 focused on the wrong issue,” the authors write. “It does not appear to be the model of instruction employed, or at least not the name given to it, but rather other factors that are much more operative in distinguishing between failure...