Did Immersion Triumph in Arizona?
Stephen Krashen
In press: The ELL Outook (Course Crafters, Inc.)
Proposition 203 passed in Arizona in 2000, an initiative that dismantled most bilingual education programs in that state. Prop 203 substituted "structured immersion," (henceforth SI) a program that instructs language minority children entirely in English. SI is supposed to help children acquire enough English in one year to allow them to do classroom work in the mainstream in English.
The State of Arizona recently released data which, they claim, demonstrates that SI has been a success, that test scores show that those in SI outperform the few children left in bilingual programs at all grade levels on a standardized test of reading, the SAT9 (Arizona Department of Education, 2004).
At first glance, it appears that scores for English learners in structured immersion are indeed higher than those for students in bilingual education. In second grade, for example, SI students scored 563 in reading, those in bilingual education scored 551, a difference equivalent to two months. In fifth grade, the score was immersion 637, bilingual education 626, a difference of six months. In grade ten, immersion students scored 628, bilingual education, 610, a difference of one year and three months.
As Arizona State University Professor Jeff MacSwan has attempted to inform the pubic in Arizona, everything is wrong with the conclusion that SI has succeeded. Here are the problems.
No control for initial proficiency in English
We have no idea how much English the children knew before starting the program (MacSwan, 2004a, 2004b). In general, students starting school with less English proficiency are placed in bilingual programs, and those with more English proficiency tend to be placed in all-English programs.1 Those with less English to begin with will obviously not do as well as those with more, given an equal amount of time in school.
No control for length of time in the US
The Arizona data contains no information on how long these students have been in the US (MacSwan, 2004b). It only looks at scores of those currently considered to be English learners. It is possible that those in SI have been in the US significantly longer - we have no idea.
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