Abstract
According to research, students must remain in a 90/10 bilingual program until sixth grade to receive the full benefit of the program (Thomas, Collier, & Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, 2002). Some Latino immigrant parents are pulling their children out of the Spanish immersion program (e.g., before third grade), before students are able to receive the full benefits of the program. This is a problem for many, including the students themselves, the school they are removed from, their parents, the school they will subsequently be placed in, and the community as a whole. For the students, who have only been taught up to this point to read and write in Spanish, being abruptly moved to an English-only classroom can be very traumatizing and have a negative effect on their academic future. For the school they are removed from, which may already be struggling with a “thinning out” of students in the Spanish immersion program as they approach the upper grades due to transiency, this only exacerbates the problem and makes it more difficult to replace these students. Their parents, who may not speak any English, may find it much more difficult to be involved in their child’s education being in an English-only class where the teacher most likely will not speak Spanish. The school/class they will subsequently be placed in may struggle to meet the needs of a student who has received no literacy instruction in English and will be entering in to a third grade English-only classroom. And finally, the community as a whole will suffer the consequences of losing the valuable asset of empowered Latino students that are both bilingual and biliterate. Research shows that these kind of bilingual programs serve not only to build students’ language abilities (Thomas et al., 2002), but for Latino students they also strengthen their self-identity and confidence (López, 2010). The data will be obtained through surveys and semi-structured interviews with Latino immigrant parents who have experience with the bilingual program at the research site, specifically those who pulled their children out before third grade. The quantitative and qualitative data obtained supported the hypothesis that linguicism in America is a factor in Latino immigrant parents’ attitudes toward bilingual education. It also shed light on other macro-level factors that affected their decision making, such as NCLB policy regarding schools labeled as “low performing”, lack of availability of quality bilingual programs, and lack of transportation. The micro-level factors that were discovered through the research were the individual attitudes of the participants based on their personal experiences, which in many cases leads to comments being made to other parents to try to sway them in one way or another about whether or not to place their children in the bilingual program, or even remove them. However, even the experiences of the participants, who were almost entirely Latino immigrants, were influenced by the attitude of the larger American society toward language and how people speak English, which confirms the linguicism theory.