Melting Pot Analysis

Those who have studied American History may have come across The Melting-Pot, a 1908 play penned by Israel Zangwill, a Jewish Immigrant from England; in his now-famous work, Zangwill proclaims, “America is God’s crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand… at Ellis Island… in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won 't be long like that, brothers… Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” (Melting-Pot act I). Zangwill’s well-known play serves to point out that America has long been a conglomeration of people from very different

Additionally, a 2009 study conducted by Christine Rossel, a researcher at Boston University, found that schools spend up to $700 more per pupil per year on students in bilingual education programs than on native English-speaking students (11). It is important to bear in mind that all of these numbers represent the cost of small programs; a mass-implementation of bilingual education or similar accommodations would exponentially increase the amount money need as allocations would have to be made for large-scale teacher training, textbook development across all subjects, and new accountability assessments. Beyond the obvious monetary costs of bilingual education, another considerable “cost” is the loss of instruction time available to teachers for covering the material appropriate to their subjects; bilingual education would slow down the pace of teaching and learning in the classroom immensely, hurting both Anglophone students and non-Anglophone students alike.

For example, Stanford sociology professor Kenji Hakuta, in an article summarizing years of research on the topic, writes, “…one defensible conclusion from the Ramirez et al. study [is] that early-exit bilingual programs appeared to yield better outcomes in English literacy than did the English immersion programs” (Hakuta 2011, 166). The official Supreme Court Opinion in Flores v. Horne concluded, however, “Research on ELL instruction and findings by the State Department of Education support the view that SEI [Structured English Immersion] is significantly more effective than bilingual education.” (U.S. 2009, 4). Aside from these conflicting conclusions, a disturbingly large amount of research on the topic is downright misleading. In her 2012 article titled “New talk about ELL students”, researcher Stacy Lee mentions two successful schools in the “Internationals Network” which have achieved graduation rates near ninety percent using the network’s bilingual education approach (Lee 2012, 67). Lee fails to mention, however, Crotona International High School and Oakland