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The refusal to see English as a second language (ESL) as only one part of a necessary holistic language learning goal--bilingualism or multilingualism--leads many scholars to argue that every government should guarantee basic linguistic human rights to all children in the educational system. Waters critically examines the English reading performances of two specific groups of English language learners who did not have the benefit of receiving mother tongue (native language) instruction in bilingual classes.

Following the lead of California's Proposition 227, which passed in June 1998, Arizona's Proposition 203 effectively eliminated bilingual education in that state as of November 2000, signifying that attacks continue on native language instruction at local, state, and national levels. The refusal to see English as a second language (ESL) as only one part of a necessary holistic language learning goal-bilingualism or multilingualism-leads many scholars to argue that every government should guarantee basic linguistic human rights to all children in the educational system, in day care centers, schools, and institutions of higher education. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (2000), a well-known linguistic human rights activist and scholar, provides the following bill of rights:

Every [child] has the right to: (1) identify with their mother tongue and have this identification be accepted and respected by others; (2) learn the mother tongues) fully, orally and in writing. This presupposes that minorities are educated mainly through the medium of their mother tongue(s), and within the government financed educational system; and (3) use the mother tongue in most official situations (including schools).... JE]verybody whose mother tongue is not an official language in the country where s/he is resident has the right to become bilingual (or trilingual, if s/he has two mother tongues) in the mother tongues) and the official language(s) (according to her own choice). . . . [A]ny change of mother tongue [should be] voluntary (includes knowledge of long term consequences), not imposed. [E]very [child] has the right to profit from education, regardless of what her mother tongue is. (502)

In this article I critically examine the English reading performances of two specific groups of English language learners who did not have the benefit of receiving mother tongue (native language) instruction in bilingual classes.

The Case Study

The Benbrook School District (a pseudonym), a large urban district in the southwestern United States, serves communities across approximately two hundred square miles, and its students represent over sixty-five languages, and many more nationalities and countries. During the academic school year 1999-2000, the Benbrook School District had a total student population of approximately 190,000 children. Regarding district racial demographics, 53 percent were Hispanic, 35 percent were African American, 10 percent were white, and 2 percent were other. Within the student body, 27 percent (approximately 51,000) of the students were identified as English language learners. Of those 51,000 English language learners, 30 percent were served in ESL classrooms across the district, 53 percent were served in bilingual classrooms, and approximately 13 percent were served in regular education classrooms because parents signed waivers refusing the services in the district's "alternative language programs," including the bilingual and ESL programs.

At both the elementary and secondary levels, ESL instruction was offered for students whose native language was other than English and who needed to develop their English language skills. The native language of the vast majority of English language learners in the district (94 percent) was Spanish. Other languages included Vietnamese, Mandarin, Russian, and Urdu. At the middle school level, English language learners received intensive English instruction in separate ESL classes, commensurate with the students' levels of English language proficiency, until they were ready for regular education classes.

The Office of Civil Rights mandated a program evaluation because parents had filed letters of complaint against the district for providing inappropriate "alternative language" services to language minority children. The Benbrook School District had signed a fiveyear service delivery program agreement with the Office of Civil Rights to ensure that English language learners in the district were provided an equal educational opportunity consistent with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Hence, the district was required to compile its most comprehensive and disaggregated picture of student performance by program placement. Never before had data by program placement been available to explore student outcomes and their connection to program placement. The district had previously provided the state education agency with a breakdown of performance of students enrolled in bilingual and ESL classes. Until the program evaluation, however, non-English language learners and English language-learning students who were immersed in regular education classes through parent waivers had never previously been included in any program evaluation analysis.

The Benbrook district avoids disaggregating its student outcome data due to a commonly expressed philosophy that "all children can learn." That unwritten but often expressed philosophy encourages research and evaluation personnel to keep student data as global and generic as possible without significant regard to student, teacher, classroom, or school variables. Therefore, most student data are reported in terms of "all limited English proficient students," or "all students." Other specific groups that are reported include "non-special education limited English proficient students," "special education students," and "non-special education students." The unwritten policy and encouraged practice fails to provide a more informed portrayal of the classroom environments in which the students learn. Sometimes more specific group data are necessary to make informed decisions about program processes and outcomes.

Regarding making inferences about the connection between program placement and specific student outcomes such as percentile ranks on the Stanford 9, Hakuta (2000) and Garcia (2000) argue that the Stanford 9 provides a very gross measure of performance and that the test is not refined enough to tell us about differences among program placements. However, in the Benbrook School District and in some other school districts that have disaggregated their data (Scott 2000), making inferences about program placement is exactly what policymakers, administrators, and practitioners are doing. Stakeholders make decisions based on perceived differences in measurements of achievement among different program placements. The Office of Civil Rights was trying to examine those differences among the performances of students in different environments so that further research and inquiry could determine why and how the differences occurred.

Interpretations of the Gross Trends in Reading Performance

Three gross trends were most often discussed in the Benbrook School District among researchers, policymakers, ESL administrators, and practitioners. The first was that the reading performances of ESL students and English language learners immersed in regular education classes were below the average range of performance (< 40-60 NPR) on the Stanford 9 test (see tables 1 and 2). In fact, there was a large difference (almost 30 percentile points) between the reading perfon-nance of students in regular education classes and English language learners, whether in ESL or immersed. Although the reading performance of English language learners immersed in regular education is slightly higher than that of ESL students, it is still below the average range of performance. The ranking of these two groups of English language learners never rose above the fifteenth percentile in national rankings-far below grade-level performance.

The second gross trend was that the below-average range of performance of ESL students and English language learners immersed in regular education classes occurs across categories of measurement. More specifically, the trends are similar at all levels of analysis (district and campus) across grade levels in middle school. Furthermore, the below-average range of performance was found at the district level for both the spring 1999 and spring 2000 administrations of the Stanford 9. Therefore, the trends were interpreted as occurring across units of analysis, English language learner groups, grade levels, and time.

In contrast, the performance of English language learners who had successfully exited out of bilingual classes and were in middle school during the spring administrations of the Stanford 9 in 1999 and 2000 exceeded that of its comparison groups. In fact, their performance stayed within or above the average range of performance (40-60 NPR). The students demonstrated academic success in English reading that exceeded that of even their native English-speaking peers in regular education (another comparison group in the Office of Civil Rights evaluation). Similar to trends for English language learners in ESL and regular education immersion classes, the trends for English language learners who had exited from bilingual classes were the same at the district and campus levels, across grade levels and time.

Questions and Reflections

Why are the rankings for English language learners in ESL and regular education classes so low across the board? The most common response given by ESL administrators, policymakers, and practitioners is that most of the ESL students at the middle school level were recently arrived immigrants. But my research about the Benbrook School District documented otherwise. According to the Stanford 9 1999 data, in the sixth grade only 8 percent of the ESL students were immigrants, in the seventh grade 21 percent were immigrants, and in the eighth grade 31 percent were immigrants. Clearly, the majority of the ESL students at the middle school level in the Benbrook School District were not recently arrived immigrants but students who had been "in the system" since the elementary grades. Inevitably, the proper identification of these students and the variables they bring with them to the classroom can help explain some of the variance in the rankings. However, one cannot deny the gross and consistent findings across categories. What kind of reading skills and concepts in English were or were not being taught in these classrooms? Why were English language learners immersed in regular education ranked slightly higher across grade levels than their fellow English language learners in ESL classrooms? Could it be that the ESL classrooms are repetitive, unimaginative learning environments filled with drill-and-kill worksheets on English conversational vocabulary and English grammar? Could English language learners immersed in regular education be benefiting (albeit minimally) from learning concepts and skills in English so that actual reading performance is expected, as opposed to strictly oral language practice? Further research and observation in the field are necessary in order to gain a detailed picture of instruction and classroom activity at the campus level.

I do not doubt that there are some wonderful ESL and regular education teachers who maintain interesting and truly advantageous teaching and learning environments for linguistic minorities in their classrooms. But we must ask ourselves why the low rankings are so consistent across time and at the district and campus levels.

Conclusions: The Question of Linguistic Human Rights

Is this a case study of the loss of human potential and language? I would argue that there is compelling evidence here to suggest there have been losses of both. Further, I would argue that ESL administrators would benefit by reconsidering the philosophy, policy, and practice of ESL education from the perspective of linguistic human rights.

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Skutnabb-Kangas points out that "one of the basic linguistic human rights of persons belonging to minorities is-or should be-to achieve high levels of bi- or multilingualism through education" (2000, 569). When education promotes bilingualism and multilingualism, language becomes a resource, not a problem (Ruiz 1984). Unfortunately, in the United States education does not usually function as a medium for teaching multilingualism. Instead, monolingualism and assimilation are the "legitimate" goals of programs serving English language learners. Thus, our public education system produces monolingual speakers from both the minority and majority populations (Crawford 1999a).

Public schools also organize education for English language learners through transitional bilingual education. In these prevalent programs minorities move from their native language to the majority language as they aim for proficiency in the latter. Consequently, the language outcome is usually "relative monolingualism" (Baker 1993). Additionally, with respect to our foreign language instruction, "only 3 percent of American high school graduates and only 5 percent of our college graduates reach a meaningful proficiency in a second language-and many of these students come from bilingual homes," according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (Crawford 1999b, 117). Therefore, neither majorities nor minorities in the United States are educated to high levels of multilingualism.

The advantages of bilingualism, and which policies and practices constitute optimal bilingual education programs, have been documented in research for decades (August and Hakuta 1998; Baker 1993; Bourdieu 1977, 1991; Cummins 1981, 1999; Diaz-Soto 1993, 1997; Greene 1998; Macedo 2000; Thomas and Collier 1997). Researchers have made especially striking advances since the 1960s in the fields of psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, applied linguistics, bilingual pedagogy, critical pedagogy, sociology of education, and multicultural education (Corson 1998, 1999; Cummins 1981, 1996; Krashen 1999; Moll 1992; Mora 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Still, educational systems all around the world function to transfer children from one language group to another instead of using sound pedagogical practices and effective policies to promote multilingualism. Linguistic human rights activists might characterize ESL education in the United States, especially at the secondary school level, as the best form of education to promote monolingualism, not multilingualism (Macedo 2000; Moraes 1996; Padilla 1998; Petrovic 1997; Phillipson 1992; Solis 2000; Troyna 1993; Valencia 1997).

Drawing on a linguistic human rights perspective, I would suggest that ESL students and English language learners in the Benbrook School District might appreciate the opportunity to ask their teachers, principals, and district policymakers, considering their percentile rankings in English reading, whether English is best taught monolingually. In addition, the same students might argue that the more English is taught, the worse are the results, and that when other mother tongues are included in instruction the standards of English could rise, as has been demonstrated by the reading performance of English language learners who have successfully exited bilingual classes. Perhaps ESL administrators and practitioners could begin to critically examine their roles and practices that contribute to making English "bigger" and other languages "smaller" or "invisible." How much loss of human potential and language are we willing to accept?