I am sure that if I was improperly placed in a bilingual program, others have also. How does this happen? What "characteristics" show school officials that a student needs the classes to begin with? These officials seem to think that standardized tests and parent questionnaires will identify who is in need of ESL, but this system allows students who are not really LEP to be placed in the program. And in order to keep the students out of the program, parents have to attend a conference with school officials. At such meetings, parents are often intimidated and criticized about their decisions and so they leave their children in the program.1 And once the student is in, schools keep them in there as long as possible because to them, it means more money.
             In 1968, advocates of bilingual education started a small, 7.5 million dollar program to educate Hispanic children. By 1996, the program had become a multi-billion dollar industry. The federal program spends seventy-five percent of education tax dollars on bilingual education. Schools that offer bilingual classes get incentives such as federal and state grants. They also receive several hundred extra dollars for each student in a bilingual class. Teachers can earn up to five thousand dollars more a year. These incentives can explain why schools keep children in bilingual programs for such a long time. They want to get as much money as possible.
             A typical student spends three to four years in an ESL program, but it could take as long as eight years to be fluent in English. Why is it that Hispanics are wasting time in bilingual classes that are not helping them master the language they desperately want to learn? At the same time, Arab, Asian, and European students go into mainstream classes and achieve higher academic scores and with a lower dropout rate than Hispanics, who after twenty-eight years of bilingual programs, still hold the highest dropout ...