Essay: The New Face of Bilingual Education

However, the program faces stiff challenges such as shortages of bilingual teachers, non-compliance of parents, nationalism issues and competition from schools that offer English only programs. The number of teachers who can provide bilingual instruction are scarce and “the student to teacher ratio is already 31 to 1” (Dual Language Programs: The New Face of Bilingual Education). This also gives rise to the problem of legal compliance, wherein, the State law requires bilingual class sizes to be ten percent less than the average class size.  Also, parents are unwilling to let their children stray from English only medium as it does not fulfill their perceptions of the American dream. Other constraints towards adapting a district level dual language program, includes and is not restricted to logistics problems, as well as stereotypes against other languages. Another major problem that exists is that many students coming in from poorer family have little or no language skills in their native language. It augments the problem of dual language instruction, provided that the student  possesses few literacy skills to build upon.

Nonetheless, implementation of the program is quite possible provided that sincere efforts be made to implement it. The benefits of equipping students with bilingual skills are many and the most important being, the future employability of these students. For this purpose State policies would have to be relaxed in Chicago district, newer assessment procedures will have to be developed and curriculum changes will have to be made. Problems such as lack of staff have not been proven to significantly impact the functioning of such a program. Once a system is in place, parents awareness with regards to the benefits of these programs can be created and the logistics problems can also be sorted out.