In the Spring of 1986, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett announced a change in Department funding policies, whereby local school districts were no longer obliged to provide bilingual education programs to limited English proficient (LEP) children. Instead, he said, one could substitute English as a Second Language (ESL) or immersion programs.

In October of 1986, Governor George Deukmejian of California vetoed an extension of the state's bilingual-education law, citing fiscal constraints.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in June of 1986 asked the question: "In parts of this country where many people speak a language other than English, should state and local governments conduct business in that language as well as English, or should they use only English?"

A majority or all groups polled, except Blacks and Hispanics, answered "only English." The proportion of "only English" responses was greater for Republicans than for Democrats, for Westerners than for those in other regions of the country, and increased with both age and education level of the respondent.

Is the emergence of support for groups such as U.S.English, which proposes to make English the official language of the United States, and the associated decline of both public and private support for bilingual education symptomatic of a newly emerging xenophobia among mainstream Americans? Or is it a reaction to a genuine threat that the presence of a large Spanish-speaking minority could endanger the unity of the States and the American identity of its citizens?

The debate which pits the demands of U.S.English against the supporters of bilingual education is, in fact, a manufactured one. The best reason to support, strengthen, and even expand bilingual education programs is that they promote competence in English of the children in the programs, thereby ensuring those children the opportunity to achieve at a higher level in school.

The specter raised by the proponents of U.S.English of a United States in which a large minority of people are totally unable to function in English, thereby constituting a separate political and social force, is no more real than ghosts stalking the halls on Halloween.

The United States of America is a staunchly English-speaking country, in which one of the greatest educational problems we face is to train students to any level of competence in languages other than English. The U.S. is less succesful in teaching foreign languages to high school students than any developed and many developing nations.

Demographic data make very clear that familial languages disappear by the third generation in almost every case under the onslaught of the overwhelming monolingualism of the American society. There is little real danger, in the long run, that the U.S. will be anything but English speaking.

There is, however, considerable danger that a generation of children from non-English speaking homes will lose their chance for educational success if the public paranoia about the dangers of Spanish affects the availability of the optimal early education programs for those children.

On what basis can one claim that bilingual programs are optimal? Evaluations of bilingual programs, which compare them to immersion programs (in which the children simply are immersed in an English-speaking curriculum) show that bilingual programs produce higher achievement in English, in reading, and in the content areas than immersion programs do.

Good bilingual programs, not surprisingly, produce students with higher achievement levels than programs of lower quality. This suggests that we should, as a nation, be spending more money, not less, on bilingual education programs.

Nor is it difficult to understand why bilingual programs produce better results; they enable the children in them to start learning the sorts of things they are supposed to be learning in school from their first day in school, such as to add and subtract, to read and understand stories and to write.

Immersion programs leave children learning nothing for several weeks of months, while they do not understand what the teacher is saying. By the time they do understand some English, they are behind other children--both those children in bilingual programs and those who arrived at school speaking English--in content learning.

Why should we let children slip behind when we could be teaching them in their native language? People who object to this obvious solution seem to think that what is learned in Spanish or Vietnamese does not transfer to English, but they are obviously wrong.