Background And History Of The Programs Of Bilingual Education
Whether they are additive or subtractive, programs of bilingual education are driven by operational policies and practices relative to the student population, length of the program in each language, level of proficiency students will pursue in each language, and, importantly, the language skills required of their teachers. Of the two types, subtractive programs are the least complex.
In additive programs, the effort is much more complex and demands greater modification of the curriculum and staffing patterns than is the case when a subtractive choice is made. The fact that these differences have not been well described to the schools by state and federal offices has greatly contributed to the difficulties encountered in determining whether bilingual education is effective in meeting its objectives.
Program success can be determined only if and when the goals are clear and the organization, operation, and resourcing of the program are in harmony with its stated goals. At a deeper level, we can clarify the difference between additive and subtractive forms of bilingual education by examining the policy foundations of the two approaches. Subtractive bilingual education is rooted in the tradition of remedial/compensatory education.
This was the operating ideology that shaped much of the federal government's involvement in education, beginning with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and the other large federal program, Head Start. From the outset, the government's involvement was based on a perceived need to remediate the inadequate background of children in poverty. There was a strong perception then, one that has many subscribers even today, that lack of school success by poor and minority children was due to the lack of a sufficiently robust cultural foundation on which to build-hence the need to remediate and compensate for lacunae in the child's cultural and family background.
Congress was led down this path by the work of early education researchers such as James Coleman and Christopher Jencks, who had examined groups of children in poverty and concluded that it was not the failure of the schools that was operant, but rather the social and cultural matrix in which these children were raised. The largest federal education program that sought to remediate and compensate for the negative effects of poverty and "cultural deprivation" in disadvantaged families was Title I of the ESEA.
The degree to which Congress was genuinely convinced that this was the best strategy for intervening in education is not clear. The ESEA came along at a time when the issue of states' rights was a major stumbling block to federal involvement in education. Many politicians who believed in states' rights and the reserved powers of the states to control their schools were still reeling from the impact of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and federal pressures to desegregate.
Title I of the ESEA was, in addition to a wonderful investment in children and youth, an effective way to soothe the bruises of states' rights supporters by providing unprecedented amounts of new funding to public education. It is perhaps coincidental that southern states, because of high levels of poverty, were entitled to substantial amounts of federal money. Politicians from the southern states were the most vociferous defenders of states' rights in education and keeping the federal government out of the public schools.
But financial support was sorely needed in that region. It is not known what incentives and inducements, if any, may have been offered to secure the support of key congressional delegations to ensure passage of the ESEA in 1965 and the additions, amendments, and modifications that came later.
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