One in 10 students is classified as English Language Learners (ELLs). Encouraging them to "live in two languages" helps everyone.
We already know that being bilingual has many advantages. But does it also give kids an educational edge?
Many families that speak a language other than English at home, as well as parents looking to provide their children with additional skills, seem to think so. Recent studies back them up, supporting the idea that speaking more than one language fluently helps kids develop executive function, the part of the brain used for planning and problem-solving, and that it gives them a leg up on understanding how language works.
The most solid data points to an advantage that manifests most clearly later in life, with improved test scores in middle school and beyond, and help to guard the aging brain against dementia and Alzheimer's.
But for many families, the benefits of bilingualism are more immediate and worth starting early, both for concrete and more emotional reasons.
Cipriano Mejía worried that once his daughters Zolie, 7, and Suzani, 5, entered school, they would have a hard time keeping up their Spanish. He and his wife, Zuremia Hernandez, are agricultural migrant workers based in Immokalee, Florida.
The childcare and Head Start programs run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association gave the family a place to leave their kids safely while they were in the fields. It also fosters their skills in English and Spanish.
"Learning English is important in this country," said Mejía, an immigrant from Chiapas, Mexico, in Spanish. "But at home we speak Spanish." He reads to his daughters in Spanish, and helps them learn to write it. "The oldest was at a good reading level, and she has increased it and even made the honor roll," he said, proudly.
The number of kids like Zolie and Suzani is on the rise. About 4.9 million school-age kids are classified as English Language Learners, almost one in 10 U.S. students. This has meant increased support for models that integrate kids with different language abilities, such as dual-language programs, where students are taught in two languages to become proficient in both, no matter which language they know best at the start. These programs have increased tenfold in the past 15 years, from about 260 in 2000 to over 2,500 now.
Nelson Flores, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in the role of language in education, believes that programs that address these demographic shifts head on and respect what bilingual kids bring to educational settings benefit work best, and can work in conjunction with the overall educational goals for all kids, such as Common Core requirements.
"A lot of the discourse around bilingual children is that they don't have a foundation you can build on, that you have to start from scratch," he said. "But they are already well-positioned to think of language in ways that the Common Core asks, a lot of the things they do around language are quite academic."
As an example, he talked about a first-grader in Philadelphia who explained in an interview why her English-dominant teacher pronounced her name one way and her Spanish-dominant teacher pronounced it a different way.
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