Texas Lesson – Educators Embrace Bilingualism

AUSTIN – They grow up inside a fort named Bliss, set on the brown flatlands of El Paso, but few children from its blue-collar families will reach educational nirvana.

Still, four-year-old Sydney Walters has much to teach congressional leaders back in Washington, as they begin to dissect what’s gone so terribly wrong with the implementation of No Child Left Behind.

Reading scores have drifted lower across the nation since President Bush approved the ‘No Child’ reforms in 2002, containing the most bewildering set of school rules ever pressed by the Congress. In some states, including California and Texas, gaps in achievement among ethnic groups remain unchanged or have grown wider. Ten Democratic senators announced last month that staying the course on federal school reforms, as President Bush is urging, is plainly unacceptable.

But back in Texas school reform begins with young children and scaffolds-up from preschoolers’ own home language.

In El Paso, Sydney is joined by an equal count of Spanish-speaking youngsters who attend a fully bilingual classroom at Logan Elementary School.

El Paso educators have supported bilingual preschool and kindergarten classrooms for over two decades. State law in Texas requires that if a community demands bilingual education, the district must provide it. In recent years, bilingual programs expanded throughout the state. “The main core is taught in the native language,” said teacher Elizabeth Hout, “their letters, shapes, and colors.”

Sydney timidly reports that she likes the “toys and my friends” at preschool. She’s especially proud of completing a 58-piece dinosaur puzzle.

Children don’t even feel Bush’s No Child policies until they reach third grade – long after children’s gaps in learning are deeply carved. In vivid contrast to No Child, Austin lawmakers and Gov. Rick Perry have embraced this strategy of starting early to narrow early gaps in learning. New incentive grants to school districts are boosting preschool spaces for working-class families, building from a generation of evidence that the early-appearing chasm in children’s school readiness can be effectively narrowed with preschool.

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