Middle-class, native English-speaking, white parents are flooding into dual-immersion bilingual programs, writes Conor Williams in The Atlantic. In some gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re crowding out children from immigrant families.
Let’s say a school offers a dual-immersion program in Spanish and English. The model calls for about half the students to come from Spanish-speaking homes (some may speak English too) and half from English-speaking homes.
In Washington, D.C., dual-immersion programs are attracting significant demand from English-dominant families. One of the city’s oldest immersion programs, Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, has seen its surrounding neighborhood become so English-dominant (and white and wealthy) that the school is running short on native Spanish-speaking students. Neighborhood students get guaranteed slots at kindergarten, and these are now taken almost exclusively by English-speaking children, so the school has taken to overweighting its pre-k enrollment toward native Spanish speakers, reserving 30 of the 36 available pre-k seats for Spanish-dominant kids. Just 15 percent of the school’s students are classified as English learners. Not coincidentally, just 23 percent of students come from low-income families (across D.C. Public Schools, it’s 77 percent).
Expanding programs to meet demand isn’t always an option: There aren’t enough bilingual teachers.
That was what doomed the old bilingual ed model: Schools never had enough teachers, so bilingual aides — many with only a high school education — taught the neediest children.
Usually a boutique program, dual immersion can’t rely on unqualified aides because the middle-class parents won’t stand for it. They also won’t accept a dumbed-down curriculum, the other besetting sin of the old bilingual model.