Beyond "Bilingual" Education: mode...

Beyond "Bilingual" Education: modern Immigrants and Public School Policies in California, by the agency of Alec Ian Gershberg, Anne Danenberg, & Patricia S??nchez. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2004 234 pp Pb $2950

One of the first questions I asked my Foundations of Bilingual Education class this semester was the difference between language-minority observers English language learners (ELLs), and immigrant pupils I was spurred to ask the question on my reading of Gershberg, Danenberg, and S??nchez's novel book, Beyond "Bilingual" Education, because the main thrust of their argument is that the distinctions between these collections are too often overlooked in education research, policy, and practice, to the detriment of the one and the other immigrant students and the non-immigrant language-minority population.

My for the most part first- and second-year master's and doctoral scholars easily answered the immediate questions-"Are all language-minority pupils immigrants?" and "Are all English learners immigrants?"-with "no's" and head shaking. With the exception of a hardly any who were new to the field of languageminority education, they understood the labels. However, the discussion in my class continued for quite a time as students contributed their experiences as immigrants, as ELL as language-minority learners in U.S. schools, and as practitioners working with these different populations. There were overlaps in their experiences, as well as extremely clear distinctions. There were instances where my scholars felt misunderstood by the research they had read that misted these differences. Several students experienced a feeling of "wow" as we clarified the distinctions. The greatest in number valuable contribution of Gershberg et al.'s work is to open up the conversation and untangle the places where the characteristics, experiences, and distresss of immigrants differ from those of ELL or of language-minority scholars in general. Of course, the room for expectation is that this clarification will help educators address the more specific be of importance tos of the distinct groups.

I should point gone out that the authors generally relate to ELLs but not in such a manner much to language-minority students. This is a likely artifact of their location, California, which since the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998 has almost universally shifted language in referring to linguistic minorities as ELL (Unz & Tuchman, 1997) Perhaps it is also an artifact of their attempt to maintain a "neutral stance" in the face of the highly politically charged nature of the debates surrounding ELL education in the state and the nation. Perhaps it is simply an attempt to restrain their topic narrow enough to explore thoroughly. It is, however, impossible to write a book-even to talk about issues -in this field without taking a stand politically. by way of referring to students as ELL the authors decided to take onward the discourse of post-Unz services to these scholars How are we to define our bookish mans (and ourselves), by the language they are learning or through the status of the language they already own? Although mostly immigrants are learners of English, and all learners of English are on definition speakers of another (minority) language, the confine language-minority students is broader than either immigrants or ELL It encompasses pupils who are already fluent bilinguals; bookish mans who are members of traditionally crushed language communities whether or not they maintain affluence in that language; and speakers of dialects of English like as African American English. by dint of limiting their discussion to ELL rather than opening it up to the issues of language-minority bookish mans they in fact limited their analysis, effectively avoiding the elephant-in-the-classroom of race and class issues.

However, barely pulling apart the entangled labels of ELL and immigrant gives enough challenge to fill seven chapters rich with information that policymakers definitely ne access to. After a brief introduction to their throw and mixed methodology (Chapter 1) the authors begin with their quantitative analysis.

In Chapter 2 they paint a statistical portrait of ELL and of novel immigrants, describing their schools in California. They synthesize statewide data that are readily available forward the Web, principally focusing forward the five largest school districts in the state. In Chapter 3 the authors make the statistical case for treating ELL and late immigrants separately in policy decisions. They work to untangle ELL data from fresh immigrant data at the exercise level, looking at factors as it was as achievement test scores, school-level resources, segregation, languages nuncupative and nations of origin. Their analysis is compelling: one as well as the other ELL and immigrant students populate denominations that are less resourced, have lower standardized experiment scores, have less prepared teachers, and are more segregated than the average; if it be not that ELL students are far worse against than immigrant students in all of these categories. Thus, they deduce "we echo Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000) in the belief that California has to a great degree more of a 'long-term ELL problem' than it does a 'recent immigrant problem'" (p 60)