Bilingual Education In Miami :: essays research papers

While atomic number 20 debates whether to stop teaching give instruction children in two languages, the school system in Miami, Florida is expanding bilingualist education. This urban center at the crossroads of the Americas is expanding bilingual education under the argument that students bequeath need to verbalize, read and write in side and Spanish when they range the business world. The decision to do this al almost seems natural for a city where the top-rated television stations broadcast in Spanish, the top-ranked newspaper publishes a state Spanish daily edition, many top civic leaders speak effortless Spanish and Latinos have become the majority. Educators in Miami, home to the startle bilingual public school in the modern era, are garbled by the cultural and policy-making firefight over bilingual education in California.Nowhere is the controversy more intense than in California. On June 2, 1998 there was a vote on an anti-bilingual education initiative, Proposi tion 227. This proposition would contain most bilingual programs in California and give students with limited English skills about one year of special English classes before placing them in the mainstream. To even have something like this on the Ballot in California seems very odd. California has more students with limited English skills than any other(a) state. California has approximately 1.4 million students with limited English and about 30% of them are in formal bilingual programs, including some two-way programs. The most common approach in California is transitional bilingual education, in which students often spend more time being taught in their primordial language than in English for their first school years. Due to the astronomic population of Spanish speakers in California I would think that educators would extremity to mock Miamis style of teaching both English and Spanish.In Miami educators view it differently than they do in California. They look at bilingual edu cation as a business opportunity for students. Miamis trades with Latin America amount to billions of dollars a year. Top business leaders affirm that Miami can not afford to do with out bilingual education. throng F. bobwhite, chief of Latin American and Caribbean operations for Visa International said, I dont give a hoot about the political aspects of it. To me, thats a lot of garbage. I am interested in the financial well being of this community. We need bilingual people to survive. Partridge is so concerned about the issue that his office gives remedial lessons in Spanish and Portuguese to dozens of employees whose weak bilingual skills dont allow them to communicate with clients in those languages.