The ideal solution is to simply admit fewer foreign students. In doing so, fewer ELL and ESL (English as second language) services would be required. This would lessen schools’ vulnerability to lawsuits filed by immigrant parents claiming that these services are not adequately being provided. Imagine — moving to a new country and then suing the school district because your children are not being accommodated! Only in the good ol’ US of A.
Back in 2007, Newt Gingrich made a remark that everyone should learn English instead of the “language of the ghetto.” Afterwards, he meekly apologized. But now, in light of Mitt Romney’s use of the sound-bite in a negative ad in Florida (isn’t “negative ad” kind of a redundant phrase at this point?), Newt claims that he was not in fact referring to Spanish, because, after all, there are a lot of other languages spoken in this country.
But why would Gingrich apologize in Spanish to Spanish-speaking peoples if he were not referring to the Spanish language? This question was posed to Newt by the ever-sharp Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, to no coherent response. For a purported firebrand, Newt seemed at a loss in attempting to explain this innocuous yet politically ill-advised comment.
Gingrich originally made the controversial remark in the context of his advocacy for making English the official language of the United States and his advocacy of English immersion in U.S. schools. English immersion sounds like a nice concept, especially when compared to bilingual education. But once you have students who don’t speak English in our public schools, there really is no good solution. “Immersing” a Spanish-speaking student into regular classes is not as easy as it sounds. It involves taking a foreign student with no language abilities and putting him in a class with other students who need to be challenged with relatively complex instruction. The needs of these two groups of students are mutually exclusive.
Making language immersion more difficult is the fact that students are not tracked by ability in our left-dominated and controlled schools. ELL (English language-learner) students are generally placed with students who are at grade level, as opposed to remedial. Were schools able, or willing, to put ELL students with the most remedial and otherwise dysfunctional students, the proposition of English immersion would be significantly more feasible, or at least less impractical.
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