Dual-language-immersion students in Portland, Ore., outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year's worth of learning by the end of middle school.
"Those are the preliminary conclusions of a four-year, randomized trial of the dual-language program by the research firm RAND, the American Councils for International Education, and Portland public schools.
About 10 percent of the district's 46,000 students attend dual-language programs in Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Vietnamese. Seats are oversubscribed and assigned by lottery, which allowed researchers to run a randomized trial of about 1,600 students who started kindergarten in 2004-2010. Schools that operated dual-language-immersion programs had comparable class sizes and resources."
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