Bilingual Success

Where I work there are two six year old girls who are in a bilingual immersion type program. I really don't know the details of what exactly they do, but they understand just about everything I say to them in Spanish, which I found really impressive since I know kids graduating from high school having taken years of Spanish who understand less than these girls. They can say a only little bit, but their comprehension is truly impessive, and they can recall individual words very well on top of that. I do know a few kids who have Spanish speaking parents who don't speak Spanish but understand it very well, (the same for other languages too, of course), but I don't know these two to use it at all in the home.

Of course there are many horror stories out there for the state of bilingual education in the United States. I remember once bringing up in a small class discussion for a language and pluralism class the situation that my mother had to deal with while teaching, having children from Africa and other places, some who barely had any knowledge of English (or of many details of this side of the world), and I knew it to be quite straining on her, but I did mention that somebody came in (daily?) who spoke the Bantu language of these kids, on top of various problems. Regardless of the finer details, the professor chalked it up as more one of the success stories of bilingual education, which I found a bit surprising, but I guess it can be real bad at times. There are many lucky coincidences though. A friend of mine grew up speaking Ukrainian in the house, and when he first went to school he was struggling with English, but the teacher happened to speak Ukrainian and was able to help him out.

Anyway, back to these two girls, I'm sad to say that at least one of them won't be continuing it since she is transferring to a new school, allegedly that does not have Spanish (but maybe she just meant it didn't have a similar program?) and I'm actually kind of interested in how it will play out for both of them. Did I mention that they go to a public school?