California’s Bilingual-Ed Mistake

Kenneth Noonan speaks with the zeal of a convert. “I’m convinced,” he says, “that there’s a best way to teach English to kids who don’t know it: all day, every day, from their first day in school.”

The founder of the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) isn’t supposed to talk like this — and back when he still served as a public-school superintendent, he didn’t: “We believed that students needed to become fluent in their native language before they could learn English.”