In 2016, California voters overturned a 1998 law that curtailed bilingual instruction throughout the state. After nearly 20 years of "English only" programs, what will it take to restore the schools' capacity to provide a broader range of services to English Learners, including dual language immersion and other forms of bilingual…

A dual immersion program in Chinese and English at the 3e International School in Beijing is helping children become fluent in both languages, even though many students spoke neither language when they entered the school. Children enter the program as young as two years old. Studies indicate that bilingual children have higher levels of cognitive…

Cognitive knowledge about the experiences of refugee and immigrant children and families is helpful in creating teacher empathy, but it's not a substitute for experiencing firsthand the confusion, fear, and emotions of being the outsider. In this article, the author relates her experience in a foreign environment. This experience has taught her…

A few Structured English Immersion programs have been developed and tested in the past two decades. The experience of these programs, especially Seattle's, can provide much-needed guidance to California's schools and reformers of bilingual programs. Although not necessarily an all-English program, SEI employs the original language less extensively…

Describes a program in which native English-speaking students were immersed in a Spanish-only environment for a week. The program was so successful that teachers asked for, and got, their own program. (IRT)

A California teacher in a successful Structured English Program criticizes Keith Baker's November 1998 article's inaccuracies. Baker fails to recognize that gains of immersion and early-exit students in David Ramirez's study are not sustained over time. Also, he erroneously compares study results of defined and ill-defined programs. (MLH)

Explains antecedents, program variations, and rationale for developing single-sex schools for African-American males and females. Such schools share various values and features based on the importance of gender differences. Most programs offer appropriate same-sex role models, help with transition to adulthood, cultural inoculation, strengthened…

Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Public Schools' two new coeducational African-American immersion schools are not segregationist. Key programmatic changes are based on an African social education concept and include staffing based on teaching experience (not race or gender), teacher class assignments lasting two or more years, teacher home visits, staff…

Keith Baker's claims in his November 1998 article on Structured English Immersion are based on unpublished data. There are no data showing that all-English structured immersion programs are superior to well-constructed programs that include literacy development and subject-matter teaching in the child's first language. (12 references) (MLH)

Meier and Krashen, both employed in California's education system, do an injustice to students in rehashing an already settled battle. Fed up with two decades of failure, California voters replaced bilingual education with structured English immersion. Meier and Krashen offer no suggestions for coping with Proposition 227. (27 references) (MLH)