Xavier Becerra: “I am actually quite encouraged to hear the chairman's remarks because I think, if he were to go to some of the large…”

“I am actually quite encouraged to hear the chairman's remarks because I think, if he were to go to some of the large cities like mine in Los Angeles, what he would find is that transition is actually occurring rapidly. But when you have a situation where, like in Los Angeles, you have so many new kids coming in who are in a situation where they must learn anew--in fact, you have some kinds who have never seen a computer so they do not even know how to say computer even in their native language--it takes some time for a school to be able to show the success. But if you look at the individual children, the average time of stay in a bilingual education program is 3 years. So they are transitioned to a fully mainstreamed program of English-only instruction in about 3 years. So I am very encouraged to hear the chairman's remarks and I hope that we are able to do something because over the last decade, bilingual education has taken about a 60-percent cut in funding. So these are kids who are trying to learn who have seen their funding at the Federal level cut by 60 percent. I have a figure here that says that the Department of Education recently estimated that we are short approximately 175,000 bilingual education teachers to help these kids transition quickly into mainstream instruction.”