Immersion Not Submersion: Can a New Strategy for Teaching English Outperform Old Excuses?

fails to support claims that restricting bilingual education improved test

scores in California

December 14, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Flaws Render Education

Report Useless for Guiding Policy/Practice

Lexington Institute report fails to support claims that

restricting bilingual education improved test scores in California

CONTACT : Teri Battaglieri (517) 203-2940 (e-mail) greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org

Jeff MacSwan (805) 893-2250 (email) macswan@asu.edu

EAST LANSING, Mich. – A new report which concludes

that English Language Learners (ELL) are improving under a California law which

severely limits bilingual education is riddled with flaws and offers no useful

evidence on the subject, according to a Think Twice review of the report.

The original report is a policy brief, Immersion Not

Submersion, Vol. III , written by David White and published by the Lexington

Institute. It is presented as an evaluation of the outcome of Proposition 227, a

ballot measure Californians passed in 1998 that mandated the use of Structured

English Immersion (SEI) instead of bilingual education.

The report was reviewed by Jeff MacSwan, an associate

professor in the College of Education at Arizona State University whose research

focuses on the linguistic study of bilingualism. MacSwan is currently serving as

a Visiting Scholar at the Language Minority Research Institute at the University

of California, Santa Barbara.

Immersion Not Submersion claims that the Structured

English Immersion technique mandated by the proposition is responsible for a

“significant improvement in English proficiency across the state” among English

Language learners (ELL). Proceeding from this assumption, the report then

asserts that SEI strategies can overcome the effects of poverty and lower

per-pupil funding. MacSwan points out that neither the data presented nor could

the author’s analysis of that data possibly support these conclusions.

“The Lexington Institute’s report suffers from poorly

sampled data, inaccurate descriptions of district-level policies, failure to

account for alternative explanations for observed changes in district testing

data, and lack of any serious analysis of the data presented,” MacSwan writes.

“The report also fails to acknowledge or address recently published research

studies whose conclusions are dramatically different from those presented in the

report.” MacSwan cites seven such studies, three of them commissioned by

independent federal or state education agencies and the other three published in

peer-reviewed journals.

“The report’s poorly sampled data, compounded by its

inaccurate descriptions of district-level language program orientations, leads

us to abandon all hopes that it might usefully inform education policy,” MacSwan

writes.

Find the complete review by Jeff MacSwan as well as a link

to the Lexington Institute report at: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

About Think Twice

The Think Twice project provides the public, policy makers

and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank

publications. It is a collaboration of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory

at Arizona State University and the Education and the Public Interest Center at

the University of Colorado at Boulder and is funded by the Great Lakes Center

for Education Research and Practice.

The mission of

the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice is to identify,

develop, support, publish and widely disseminate empirically sound

research on education policy and practices designed to improve the quality

of public education for all students within the Great Lakes Region.

Visit the Great Lakes

Center website at: http://www.greatlakescenter.or g