Attitudes Toward Bilingual Education

Students from New London, Connecticut The Regional Multicultural Magnet School Teacher Javier Castillo Students Ages 9-10

Javier Castillo teaches an English/Spanish bilingual fourth grade class in a dual two way immersion program. He wrote: "Being that I have a multicultural framework to follow, I thought being part of the Orillas program will enhance my teaching and my students global perspective." Javier's class created a questionnaire to assess opinions about bilingual education. They then administered the questionnaire to students at a local college and used graphing skills to help them analyze the data. They also used this project to study the math concepts of mean, median and mode. Below you'll find a note from Javier and a list of the questions the students came up with, followed by comments from Felipe Zatarain, math educator and invited guest to the Connecting Math to Our Lives Project.

by Javier Castillo

My class just finished gathering information on the following questionnaire. We tallied up the information we received from Connecticut College students. We are ready to start graphing and interpreting the data. The information is on attitudes towards bilingual education at the college level with Conn. College students. Here are the questions the students came up with all by themselves.

 
1.) If somebody wanted to stop bilingual education, would you let them stop it or not?

2.) Do you think you need bilingual education?

3.) Do you think bilingual education makes kids drop out of school?

4.) Do you think that we shouldn't have bilingual education in schools?

5.) Do you think that people should get rid of the bilingual program?

6.) Is the bilingual program important to you?

7.) Do you think that we should keep bilingual education?

8.) Should children only learn to speak English?

9.) Do you think that not having bilingual education makes kids drop out of school?

10.) Is keeping bilingual education important?

11.) Does learning in a bilingual education program hold kids back in some way?

12.) Do you think that Spanish speaking children should just learn English?

13.) Do you think that we should stop Spanish and English children from having a bilingual education?

14.) Do you think that English should be the only language?

15.) Is Spanish good for communicating, for example, if you went to another country and didn't know how to speak Spanish?

16.) If you were a kid in a bilingual class, would you stop and fight for bilingual education?

17.) Is the bilingual program important to you?

18.) Should books be in English and Spanish in our schools?

19.) If you were a kid in a bilingual class, would you drop out of school?

20.) If you were in a bilingual program, would you be more into going to a foreign country as an exchange student?

21.) Do you think that the bilingual education is making kids dumber?

Comments from Felipe Zatarain
Math Educator and Invited Guest to the Connecting Math to Our Lives Project (1988-1999)

Before commenting on Javier's exploration of an important topic, I would like to provide a little background to this classroom project.

The United States is a culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse country. This country has professed a belief in equal opportunity for all, and a parallel belief in providing equal public education opportunity for all students. When confronted by the growing numbers of students entering school from homes where English is not spoken, and reputable research on how children can successfully learn English while gaining academic competence in all subject areas, educators created bilingual education programs which worked to bring these two American beliefs into the lives of non-English speaking students.

Flying in the face of these two beliefs, in June 1998 California voters abolished bilingual education. The sponsor of the law, Ron Unz, is now sponsoring similar laws in Arizona. He has indicated the desire to spread these laws to all states with bilingual education programs.

Now I want to turn to the project initiated by Javier and his students. I congratulate Javier's students for their desire to explore this important issue. Statistical information is, I believe, the singular most important contact that most people will have with mathematical information (with the exception of information about money and prices).

In the United States the majority of learning activities in statistics are innocuous... students are asked to collect (uncontroversial) data about food, toys, sports, etc. Javier's young students, on the other hand, are using data collection and statistical interpretation to explore an issue important to the future of millions of young people living in the United States. As Javier says, this work is "To tell you the whole story."

Let me propose a challenge to take that story a little further. Seeing the statistical interpretations of the data will give us information about the viewpoints of the statistical universe interviewed. Based on the results students might develop new questions and ideas about the implications of the data. My challenge to all of us is to look at the statistical information developed by Javier's students, then propose questions which we might ask students to help them understand those results.

I should note one very attractive feature of this project: the student - developed questions. When students find interesting questions which can be answered mathematically, they learn, and understand, more math!