Political Quotes

“I just want to repeat again that this is a competitive grant program, a program that a local district can apply for if they wish, a program that does not only say that they must use transitional bilingual education programs. Twenty-five percent of that money, with some flexibility with this new language, can be used for other methods of teaching limited English proficient. If one came with the first group, for instance, that came from Vietnam, immersion was the way to go because the parents of all those youngsters spoke English. If one was not fortunate enough to be in that wave and, let us say, came in during our most recent immigration and arrived here and did not even have any formal education at all in their own language-- and most of our young people coming from many areas at the present time have had no formal education at all, nor did their parents--it makes it very, very difficult to meet that 3-to-5-year transition period, if, as a matter of fact, we totally tried to immerse them. So again, repeating, it is a competitive grant program. School districts can reject it or accept it. No one is required to participate. Only 300,000 students participated last year out of the 43 million that are in public schools in the United States.”