New ELL Research Trumps Horne’s Old ELL “Research”

by David Safier

I’m no expert on ELL education, and I won’t play “Expert” here. I honestly don’t know the best way to teach students who aren’t proficient in English. But I do know the controversy that raged in Arizona over bilingual vs. English Immersion instruction. EI won. According to Tom Horne, his decision to replace bilingual ed with EI was “Research based.”

Anybody remember my post a few days ago about Bush’s Reading First program, based on “scientifically based reading research”? Turns out a Dept of Ed study concluded that the $6 billion program had no effect.

Well, chalk up another one for the conservative version of scientific research. It sounds like Horne’s “Research based” English Immersion is coming out about the same — no measurable effect.

See, Horne’s “Research” came down to one study, and that study wasn’t very thorough and didn’t do such a good job controlling for length of time in the U.S., poverty or other factors that are critical to any decent study.

Preliminary findings from a recent, more thorough study indicate that, at best, the three states using the English Immersion model had, um, mixed results, to put it nicely. And of the three, Arizona, which is the most thoroughly English Immersed, seemed to show the poorest results.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been a fan of educational research. For any number of reasons, it’s ridiculously hard to get verifiable results in these studies. But people like Horne, who proclaim that they legislate by the study, deserve to be hung by the study as well.

Here’s how the director of Linguistic Minority Research Institute summed up the results: ““There’s no visual evidence that these three states [using English Immersion] are doing better than the national average or other states.”

Here’s my favorite part. Our own Tom Horne was asked what he thought of the results of the new study. He said, the test results the study is based on aren’t fair. The states using bilingual education test their students in Spanish, while we test ours in English. Of course their scores are higher.

OK, that makes sense. Except for one little problem. IT’S WRONG! (Sorry for shouting.) The reading test used in the study is always administered in English. Sometimes the math test is given in Spanish, but those all important reading tests that, um, test how well a student reads — they’re always in English.

So the next time you hear Horne give a simple, facile reason why he’s right and others are wrong, he may be absolutely right. Then again, he may be lying through his teeth stretching the truth a bit.