What I'm Reading and Bilingual Education

I just picked up Richard Rodriguez's book Hunger of Memory. It's labeled as an autobiography, but it reads more like a collection of essays dealing with his transition as he learned to speak English. In fact, one of the chapters, "Aria," is often included in essay anthologies.

I am enjoying it in a way that only an English teacher can. Rodriquez has this command over language as an artistic tool that is rare. As I read this book, I sink into the language and get cozy with it. The story's there, but it slowly creeps its way out from under the eloquence of the storytelling. His focus is on the effect of what happened, not the happening, so there is a great deal of philosophizing and reflecting.

My one problem with it is that he weaves into the story his arguments for opposing bilingual education. The problem with it, as I read it now, is that his arguments are outdated. The book was first published in 1982, when the only argument for bilingual education was that it took the fear and alienation out of the education system for non-native English speakers. So Rodriquez tackles and counters that argument. Now the debate has changed, and research has been conducted that seems to validate the efficacy of bilingual education.

Let me qualify: Education research is a tricky subject. The education of a child involves so many factors that it is difficult for researchers to cull out the causes to a particular effect. Case in point: At the conference I was at this week, we discussed the Time magazine ranking of high schools. If you are unfamiliar, here's their criteria for ranking: the number of students enrolled in AP classes. That's it. Nothing else. Just that.

Most educators roll their eyes at this. What makes a school "good" is much more complex than the number of kids enrolled in AP courses. One person pointed out that there is a great deal of evidence that shows that this criteria actually does relate to the quality of the school. Schools with high AP enrollment fare better in almost every manner gauged. My argument is that much can be playing into this. Maybe the school is fed into by a community that values education. Maybe its feeding middle schools are phenomenal, and so the students are more capable of taking AP classes. In this instance, the students, not the school, make the school "good." Maybe the school is in the Midwest with a very small immigrant, and therefore ESL, population, making the comparison inequitable.

These schools may still be "good," but the Time's list of the top best school implies that it's something that comes from the educational system, not its student population, that make a school "good." Humans are complex animals, their brains being probably the most complex organ therein. So who's to say what's accountable for its development?

Research can also be misused. Another case in point: As a result of No Child Left Behind, districts have to bring in training that's research-based to help teachers improve in their teaching strategies. We brought in this company that does a T4S (Teach for Success) protocol where three people come into your classroom, observe and check off boxes. They're looking for whether or not you do things that have been proven to be effective, like make your objective clear to your students. (One problem with this system is that are countless ways to make your objective clear, but because they are observing a 15 minute window, they want you to write it on the board and say it at least one time during the 15 minute block. It becomes a little forced, and therefore not authentic, IMNSHO.)

One of their requirements is providing a "literacy-rich environment." According to the T4S protocol, I have to have posters for kids to read, post student written work, and face books out in the front of the room, like Border's does with the occasional book, making it more enticing.

Now I'm a very practical person. I don't like fluff, and I don't believe that kids really learn anything from a poster of a cat hanging from a tree with a cute, pithy statement underneath it. I believe that as a high school teacher, my job is to instill a love for learning in my students by what I do, not by how I decorate my room.

I know, however, that this extreme thinking is a bit of a weakness on my part and that I could put more thought into my room. So a few years ago, I contacted the T4S company for my district and asked for more info on a literacy rich environment so that I could spend some time thinking more concisely about my room and how I put it together. They had no articles on hand, so they handed me their bibliography. I was only able to track down one of the articles.

In this research they had taken two teachers, one who was considered to have a literacy rich environment and one who was considered to not have a literacy rich environment, and compared how their students valued reading, how much they sought out reading, etc. You can probably guess the result. The crux is that the creators of this study defined "literacy rich" not by how many posters a teacher had up that a student could read, but by what she did in the classroom. Did she encourage kids to read when they were done with their work early? Did she read to them daily? Did she have a place for them to go to read comfortably? I haven't read all the research, but the one article I could find didn't say anything about the elements we are actually judged on. The research was also done in elementary classrooms, and somehow some people out there don't get that a 16 year old is quite a different animal than a 6 year old. My take is that the research has been misused.

(Wow! This is getting long. And a little off topic.)

So back to my point, there has been some research to show that bilingual education is effective, but we must take any educational research critically because it's a tricky little beast, educational research is. In Hunger of Memory, however, Rodriquez doesn't really deal with research. He deals with the humanity of the issue. He argues that although being forced to learn English by immersion (and his family all agreed to speak English at home, which is very unusual), he believes he lost something but gained a lot as well. I'm not done with the book, so I can't comment completely on it now. I can say that Rodriquez had a rather unique situation with parents who committed to speaking English at home and being a very devoted, book-wormish students himself, so his atypical experience can't necessary be compared to the more typical immigrant experience.

But I still love lingering in his words, his sentences, his images. It's poetry in prose. And for me, it doesn't get much better than that.