Does NCLB Promote Monolingualism?

Rosemary Salomone is the Kenneth Wang professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law, in New York City, and the author of True American: Language, Identity, and the Education of Immigrant Children (Harvard University Press, 2010).

She writes a thought-provoking commentary regarding NCLB. (Be sure to click on the link at the end to read her piece in its entirety.)

By Rosemary Salomone

Eight years into the No Child Left Behind Act, educators, researchers, and advocates remain locked in heated debate over the effects of the law's testing and accountability mandates on students, many from immigrant homes where a language other than English is spoken. Remarkably lost in the crossfire are the equally serious implications for the nation and its competitive position internationally.

Two recently reported developments related to language instruction, set against rising multilingualism abroad, lend truth to that proposition. Together, they reveal that NCLB is an impediment to fostering bilingual skills and bicultural understandings, especially among the nation's 12 million students from immigrant families, including the 5.1 million identified as English-language learners, as well as millions of English-dominant students who are economically disadvantaged.

The first of these developments has surfaced in the Obama administration's proposed English Learning Education Program, with an $800 million commitment tucked into the president's budget plan for fiscal 2011. The proposal, as laid out by Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Thelma Melendez in a speech before bilingual educators in February, is a disheartening mix of more of the same peppered with hopeful hints of a changed vision. And yet, though threaded through with continued talk of testing and "rigorous" standards, it nonetheless conveys a long-overdue message that the bilingual potential of English-language learners, or ELLs, is a national asset, rather than a deficit as conventionally considered.

Reversing four decades of federal wavering on the question of home-language instruction, the assistant secretary openly affirmed the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, the need for "nuanced instructional approaches" that recognize the diversity within the ELL population, and the administration's desire "in particular … to encourage dual-language programs" that would help prepare students, both English- and non-English-dominant, for a "globally competitive world."

Tying such programs to the global economy is not new to Washington. More than 40 years ago, then-U.S. Sen. Joseph Montoya of New Mexico, a co-sponsor of the original 1968 Bilingual Education Act, warned that "in a world that grows smaller every day, America should no longer ignore the language ability and cultural variety of its people and its heritage." The act's 1994 amendments echoed those sentiments, noting that as the world was becoming "increasingly interdependent" and "international communication becomes a daily occurrence," multilingual skills were an "important national resource" promoting the nation's "competitiveness in the global economy."

That was before the No Child Left Behind Act took a definitive turn otherwise. Though the law neither prescribes nor precludes any particular teaching approach, and even permits dual-language programs that include English-dominant students (a nod to mainstream parents), it still presents strong deterrents against using federal funds for that purpose. The fact that schools are judged by the percentage of students reclassified as fluent in English each year creates a built-in incentive to set aside non-English-language instruction in the interest of moving ELLs swiftly and exclusively toward English proficiency.