The Glendale Unified School District has become one of the nation’s leading laboratories for such dual-language immersion experiments, offering programs in Italian, German, Spanish, Armenian, Japanese and Korean. At Franklin, instruction is 90% in Italian and 10% in English in kindergarten and first grade, a proportion that will shift to 50-50 by fifth grade.

Growing in popularity, dual-language immersion programs are the new face of bilingual education —without the stigma. Though bilingual education was often perceived — and resented by some —as public handouts only for immigrant families, dual programs offer the chance to learn a second language to native-born American children as well.

“Bilingual education has basically become a dirty word, but dual-language programs seem to have this cachet that people are glomming onto,” said Julie Sugarman of the Center for Applied Linguistics, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. “They are successful for English-language learners. And white, middle-class parents want these programs to give their children an edge in the increasingly globalized world.”

Sugarman estimated that dual-language immersion programs have grown in the last few years from a few hundred to 1,000 or more nationwide, with California and Texas leading the way. California had 224 programs in 100 school districts as of 2008 — a number that officials say has risen considerably in recent years. The majority of the programs are in elementary schools.

About 1.5 million students, or one-quarter of California’s school-age population, are English-language learners. The vast majority are placed in English-only programs, an approach essentially mandated by Proposition 227 in 1998.

The voter-approved initiative, successfully pushed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, scrapped most bilingual programs and decreed that English learners should be taught “overwhelmingly in English.” Parents may still request bilingual instruction in certain circumstances, but less than one-third of the state’s English-language learners have done so, according to state data. Read more.

See: Los Angeles Times