Guides Avoid Bilingual vs. English-Only Issue
Panel members say they deliberately sidestepped politically charged topic.
Educators and policymakers looking for advice on the most highly charged issue affecting the education of English-language learners won’t be getting it from the Department of Education.
Three guidebooks with “research-based recommendations” for teaching such students released by the department last week don’t address the issue of whether it’s more beneficial to use bilingual education or English-only methods, even though it is prominent in research literature. Neither does the draft of a “practice guide,” still to be peer-reviewed, that offers counsel for teaching the same group of students.
“We intentionally avoided that,” said Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group, of Long Beach, Calif., referring to why the panel he led for the practice guide hadn’t made a recommendation on whether schools should provide instruction to English-learners...
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