Insight and resources in the field of Bilingual Education.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy had this to say on the Senate floor on May 20, 1974 during the debate on what would become the 1974 Bilingual Education Act:

When the United States is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country in the world and when a near majority of people in this hemisphere speak Spanish, surely our educational system should not be designed so that it destroys the language and culture of children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds.<29>

Moreover, many local education agencies as well as the states of California and New York require a LEP student to pass both an English reading and an English language standardized achievement test at the 40th percentile. By definition, 40% of the monolingual English-speaking population could not pass a 40th-percentile cutoff. To make matters even worse, the joint requirement -- the 40th percentile on two subtests -- is about a 60th-percentile score on the total test battery. The majority of monolingual English-speaking students could never pass the test to get out of these programs.