Hi, Phil!

One evening, at a school board meeting many years ago, I was sitting next to an older gentleman who opposed reducing class size because it would cost too much to hire all those teachers. He had a study in his hands that he read from in his statement to the board. He read from the first paragraph that reducing class size to 20 from 30 did not affect student achievement significantly. After he sat back down, I looked at the document. In the second paragraph, it detailed the findings that true benefits were measured with an optimum class size of 12-14 students per teacher. Selective reading.

Let's make sure we don't read the article you cited selectively. Even the opponents of bilingual education admit that its elimination is only one part of a program that includes smaller class size, a phonetic approach to teaching the language (which is how some non-English-speaking actors learn lines for American movies), an overall curricular emphasis on language arts, and >gasp!!< teaching to the test.

Government jobs for the "right" people? Heavens! I thought the idea was to try to teach the children to read! Amazing, isn't it, that European schools manage to teach elementary school children one and even two extra languages besides their own, and teach them well, but in America that's considered too much of a burden on the system. (I know about Finland first-hand: Finnish and Swedish [their other official language], German, and English or Russian.) Or do you suppose American children aren't smart enough to learn more than English? ;)

Regards--
Mary Anne