"Hola. Como estas! Bien. Hoy estoy hablando de educacion bilingual." Or, "Hello. How are you? Good. Today I am going to talk about bilingual education." I have been studying Spanish for five academic years now. What you just read is pretty much all that I can say. I was taught Spanish when I was a small child by my mom and grandmother, but I have failed to retain much of it because of the lack of education in a secondary language. The lack of financial funding of bilingual educational programs comes from the effectiveness of the bilingual educational studies.
             In my case, I learned Spanish at an early age but could not retain it because there was not enough funding to hire sufficient staff at an elementary level, especially one who could teach a second language. Throughout my years in high school we had one bilingual teacher, who taught Spanish and psychology. My school almost lost her because she was not getting paid enough for all of her classes. Not to mention, the school almost had to drop her because the state would not help fund our bilingual education program. In order to keep the teacher my town had to raise the school taxes. This has enabled the school to sufficiently pay the teacher therefore the school can continue to keep the bilingual education program. In 1986, legislation passed the Elementary and Secondary Act under Title VII. This act was created to start programs in bilingual education and so those programs can access federal funding to keep these programs running.
             Studies are being conducted all the time to see how effective the bilingual education programs really are. Most of these studies have inconclusive results because the studies only last a couple of years. According to J.P. Greene, "Most of the Bilingual educational studies last an average of two years"(Bilingual Research Journal, 22:1 page 3). Little results can be obtained from studies to see how effective most bilingual education programs are. Greene ...