The professors discovered that students in six years of well-designed bilingual classes did much better on 11th grade standardized English tests, despite the fact that children are removed from such programs after three years in Massachusetts and Illinois (Hornblower). This is but one of the myriad studies that prove a fairly simple concept. If you can understand it, you can learn it. .
One of the other problems arising with the implementation of B.E. is the lack of proper funding. Our schools are all underfunded, so oft times the only solution is to cut funding in an area. Unfortunately, not everyone recognizes the essential nature of bilingual instruction, and many times the worst cuts happen here, where it is thought that hardly anyone will notice. And many times no one cares, as Kathy Bardales writes in her article "Que Pasa with Bilingual Kids-:.
I saw how unfairly minority urban classes are treated . . . the classrooms had encyclopedias from 1978, the lunchroom was also a basement located next to the school dumpster, and the teachers couldn't provide extra school supplies . . . the Bilingual Bridge [program] discovered the school had purchased the wrong books . . . not once in the summer did the principal visit the classrooms . . . she would have seen there was a lot she was not handling.
These terrible conditions have been mirrored in thousands of schools across the nation. The unconscionable attitude of the principal, too, is not an isolated thing, but is a decisive factor in the useful application of native-language education. All too many people share the principal's attitude, for a variety of reasons. .
One of the most insidious obstacles to B.E. is fear. Historians across America have noticed many of the same public attitudes that existed shortly after World War I, a period of "mass immigrant hysteria-. These conditions surfaced again not much later, when, during the Second World War, concentration camps were established for Japanese-Americans.