Breyer’s rebuttal on “English Immersion” left out of Fischer article

by David Safier
Yesterday I wrote about the Supreme Court decision to kick the ELL funding question back down to the federal court, and I mentioned that Howard Fischer had left an important fact out of his article in the Star: it was a 5-4 decision with the usual conservative-liberal split. Leaving that out left the impression that "The Supreme Court" ruled against the federal court decision, when in fact the ruling came from the slim conservative majority. That's a very significant difference, not in the actual ruling, but in its partisan nature, and it should have been reported.

This morning I found another serious omission in the article, though this time the reason may have been the deadline crunch rather than a journalistic decision by Fischer.

I mentioned in my post that Alito got it wrong in his opinion when he wrote, as was quoted in Fischer's article,

Since Alito was repeating Horne's line, I assumed he was fed that information by Horne's lawyer, Ken Starr, and didn't know better. In Alito's footnotes, he based the value of English immersion over bilingual education on a 1994 and a 2006 study, as well as a 2004 report out of the AZ Dept of Ed.

But a 2008 article in Ed Week says a more recent study showed no added benefits to the E.I. program, and a noticable downturn in ELL achievement here in Arizona.

This morning I read Justice Breyer's dissent, and he took apart Alito's assertion using information from Arizona's own Dept of Ed. Breyer writes that there hasn't been enough rigorous assessment of the E.I. program to show any significant change in achievement, and the test used in 2005 and 2006, which showed "dramatic improvements," was easier than earlier tests, and that accounted for the uptick in scores. The test was never used again.

As I said, I don't really blame Fischer for this omission. He had to get the article out and didn't have the luxury I had of poring over the lengthy decision. But, purposely or not, Fischer spouted Horne's favorite ELL talking point, that his immersion program is performing miracles without spending extra money, while there is a strong counter argument based on research and information from the AZ Dept of Ed. For those of us who think ELL should be better funded, the lack of a counterpoint is a very serious problem.

From this point forward, there is no excuse, at least for those journalists who read BfA, for presenting only Horne's side of the debate.

Here is the relevant passage from Breyer's dissent: