Right Books

Rosalie Pedalino Porter recalls how, as a young child, she entered the American public-school system speaking not a word of English. With the help of patient teachers—and out of sheer necessity—she became fluent in her second language. Within a few years she was fully assimilated with her English-speaking classmates.

The experience was not lost on Mrs. Porter, who has since spent twenty years involved in the education of non-English-speaking children, both as a teacher and as an administrator. Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education (Basic Books, 283 pp., $22.95) is her “inside account” of the failure of American multicultural education programs to meet their very basic goal of teaching “language-minority” children the English-language skills necessary to fit into their new environment.

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Rosalie Pedalino Porter recalls how, as a young child, she entered the American public-school system speaking not a word of English. With the help of patient teachers—and out of sheer necessity—she became fluent in her second language. Within a few years she was fully assimilated with her English-speaking classmates.

The experience was not lost on Mrs. Porter, who has since spent twenty years involved in the education of non-English-speaking children, both as a teacher and as an administrator. Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education (Basic Books, 283 pp., $22.95) is her “inside account” of the failure of American multicultural education programs to meet their very basic goal of teaching “language-minority” children the English-language skills necessary to fit into their new environment.