ABSTRACT
The current growth of a service/technological economy requires a much higher level of education for even entry-level jobs. The author firsthand experience provides a vivid representation of the issues in educating language minority children, a topic too often discussed abstractly by the theoreticians and ideologues. Here began, first, the author's excitement in being part of a new experiment in education and, later, the evolution of the author's thinking on the impractical aspects of bilingual education in the classroom. An annual event at Christmas time was the serenading of each classroom by the bilingual group. In first grade, limited-English students are placed in a classroom where a bilingual teacher provides all instruction in their home language (typically, Spanish)—reading, language arts, spelling, mathematics, science, and social studies. More destructive was the practice of assigning ineffective teachers to English as a Second Language (ESL) classes or to some of the remedial programs serving students with serious learning problems.
