That is why I love the idea of the dual-immersion programs; it allows the immigrant children to ease into American school, while allowing them to learn academic content, instead of waiting until they get fluent in English before they can really learn and show what they know. It also allows English speaking children to learn a new language and culture (and I hope appreciate differences, as you said). Although, I have not seen the data, I would hope that this approach would allow the immigrant children to "track" higher. I think that by putting our children in such a program, whenever we can, we are not only supporting our children, but also other children in our community who need us.
We don't have any standardized test scores for our district yet because children do not take them until 3rd grade. Although we have noticed that the Spanish speaking children in the dual-immersion program learn English much faster than the children in the bilingual classes. It will be interesting to see results next year when they take the standardized test. We have a good school to evaluate the differences because each grade has (on average) 2 dual-immersion classes, 2 English-speaking classes, and 2 bilingual classes.
