Omissions and Distortions from The Lexington Institute: Comments on Torrance (2006)

Stephen Krashen

The Lexington Institute has just published a paper, Immersion, Not Submersion (Torrance, 2006), that claims that English immersion has been a great success in California. The argument is based entirely on one finding, the increase in the percentage of English learners who score in the highest two levels of one test, the CELDT. I have responded to this claim in several places, twice in newspapers and in one case before the State Board of Education in Texas, with Lexington Institute members present.

The Lexington paper ignores:

1.	Findings showing that test score increases are typical for the first few years after any new test is introduced (Linn, Graue, and Sanders, 1990). The CELDT was introduced in 2001.
2.	A report from the California Legislative Analyst office (Hill, 2006) showing that at least some of the increase in the percentage of students between 2002 and 2004 at the top two CELDT levels was because of a traffic jam: Many children in these levels had been there for several years; the percentage of those moving into the advanced levels actually decreased.
3.	Reports showing that the overall progress of children in California under English immersion is not spectacular; average gains are less than one level of the CELDT per year out of five levels, where level five means "ready for the mainstream" (Jepsen and de Anth, 2005).
4.	Reports concluding that dropping bilingual education did not accelerate the English development of California's English learners (Grissom, 2004, Parrish, Pérez, Merickel, and Linquanti, 2006).
5.	The well-established finding that bilingual education is typically more effective than all-English alternatives (e.g. Cummins, 1983; Willig, 1985; Greene, 1997; Rolstad, Mahoney, and Glass, 2005; Slavin and Cheung, 2005; Krashen and McField, 2006).

Lexington's reaction has been to simply ignore these reports.

In addition to these inexcusable omissions, the report also contains a number of distortions:

The claim is made that "the most successful schools (in California) have strictly limited the use of any language other than English in the classroom" (page 5). No data or citation is provided to support this claim, and it runs counter to the results of the Parrish et. al. and Grissom studies cited above, which found no advantage to dropping bilingual education.

The report claims that before 227, "most California English learners were taught for the majority of the time in their native language" (page 5). In fact, before 227 was passed, only about 50 percent of English learners were in programs that had any kind of non-English support (Han, Baker, and Rodríguez 1997).