“I see dual language immersion almost like language reparations,” said José Miguel Kubes, regarding teaching English learners. “There was harm done during those 18 years of English-only, and it’s our jobs as educators to do something about it.”

Kubes is the superintendent of Delhi Unified, a small district of five schools nestled in California’s Central Valley. Over 90% of Delhi’s students identify as Latino, around 40% have been classified as English learners and around 75% speak a non-English language at home.

Demographics like Delhi’s are relatively common in the Central Valley, whose agriculture economy has long depended on immigrants. Indeed, they’re reflective of California’s historical success attracting immigrants from a diverse range of cultures. This history is visible in the state’s K–12 system: there are just over 5 million English learners in the U.S., and more than 1.1 million of them are enrolled in California schools.

And yet, the state hasn’t always embraced this diversity — or the immigration driving it — as a strength, indicating the importance of placing more emphasis on teaching English learners. In 1998, as a capstone to a decade of anti-immigrant advocacy from Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, voters passed Proposition 227, a referendum banning bilingual education for nearly all English-learning children in California.

As Kubes notes, this was a disaster for kids. For nearly two decades, California schools stripped hundreds of thousands of linguistically diverse children of their emerging bilingual abilities. Worse yet, this was predictable: research suggests that bilingual and dual language immersion programs are the best models for these students to learn English and succeed academically.

This can seem counterintuitive: Wouldn’t students learn English fastest in programs that taught only in English? But a drumbeat of studies — and the experience of several other states — indicates that forcing young English learners into these sorts of “sink-or-swim” English-only lessons makes it difficult for them to understand academic instruction in English. Bilingual and dual language settings allow these students to begin learning English while deepening their abilities in their primary language, giving them opportunities to learn from classroom materials in both languages.

Read the full article about teaching English learners by Conor P. Williams at The 74.