Bilingual Education Spells Failure in Any Language

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Some sage - or wag - observed that the causes of most problems are "solutions." A decision to juice up your goozungus by adding a spibble invariably requires having to recalibrate the fimmel assembly to balance the new spibble and then ...

Take, for example, the issue of bilingual education. In a San Francisco case, the Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that Chinese students were being discriminated against by the schools, since they didn't understand the language used in the classroom: English. Do something, the court solemnly decreed.

Bilingualism became the solution. Teaching children in their native tongue, with English as a supplement, would help the youngsters move briskly into regular classes, argued the …