Pick Up Spanish

In the state of Texas the legislator has passed a controversial piece of legislation that creates a dual language immersion pilot program that will be tested in up to ten public school districts and will include thirty schools and the program will last for six years. The program is basically taking school children who are not proficient in English (typically speak Spanish) and placing them with children who are proficient in English and teaching both languages in the classroom. Opponents of the program believe the legislators want first graders to be forced to learn Spanish.

Children Not Proficient in English
Legislators believe this will lead to all the children in the pilot schools to be bilingual and the children will actually help each other learn the languages. More than 40% of children in the first grade that attend urban schools in Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth are not proficient in the English language and this has become a trend all over the state of Texas. More than 731,000 children in the Texas school system have been reported to not have English as their primary language. Spanish was the primary language of about 92% of the kids who were not proficient with English.

Representative Debbie Riddle a republican believes that being able to speak in numerous languages is a good idea however she believes that the main purpose of the pilot program is helping the non English speaking kids improve in school and she believes the other kids are basically being uses as guinea pigs. She is also concerned that this type of learning program will not encourage the schoolchildren to master the English language. She believes diversity is becoming too dominating of a concept.

People in favor of the program believe it will benefit all the kids and do not believe the program was designed to have first graders forced to learn Spanish. They believe learning a second language such as Spanish will be useful to the English speaking kids. The Spanish speaking youngsters will occasionally act as tutors for the English speaking students.

The Legislators
The state senate voted 28-2 in favor of the program and the house legislators approved the bill with a 106-34 vote. Some critics of the program believe that first graders are being forced to learn Spanish and they contend that if you diminish the primary language of a country you also loose the culture that has been in place in the country. In order to prevent this from occurring in the United States they believe it should be a priority to keep the English language as the common language and not create a situation in which first graders are forced to learn Spanish.

Jesse Romero a consultant for the Texas Association For Bilingual Education believes that education has to be provided in the right way in order to have educated kids that can be part of a successful work force. If this does not occur he believes Texas will not be able to compete for jobs and the economy of Texas will suffer. However some citizens are not in favor of first graders being forced to learn spanish.

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