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Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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February 12, 2004

'This is not good news' -- LAO

Sixty percent of non-English speaking children who begin attending California schools after kindergarten never become fluent in English, according to a study released today by the Legislative Analyst. And even for children who begin school here in kindergarten, immigrants from different countries master English at very different rates. Native speakers of Hmong and Spanish, for instance, learn English far more slowly than speakers of Mandarin and Korean. The differences are clear by the second grade, when more than 80 percent of Mandarin- and Korean-speaking students score at a level 3 or higher (out of 5) in reading English on the state's special test for English learners. Among students who speak Spanish or Hmong, fewer than 30 percent reach that level by the second grade. The findings raise important new questions about the cultural differences that might lead to the different results, and about the different techniques used to teach children English. Here is a link to the report.

This Legislative Analyst chart shows that while native speakers of Spanish and Mandarin start kindergarten with similar grasps of English, by third grade more than half the Mandarin speakers are reading and writing English at a level 4 or level 5 out of 5 while only about 15 percent of Spanish speakers have reached that level.