Ken Noonan

About the author: Ken Noonan is superintendent of schools in Oceanside, California. In 1970, he founded the California Association of Bilingual Educators (CABE), which for years actively campaigned for bilingual education. But after the adoption of Proposition 227 in California in 1998, he became convinced that English immersion is a better approach than bilingual education.

For many years, bilingual education was the preferred strategy of the Oceanside school district in San Diego, California. However, things changed with the passage of Proposition 227, which mandated schools to teach limited-English speakers in a structured English immersion classroom for one year before moving them to a mainstream class. After one year of implementing English immersion, the district achieved amazing results in English-administered state tests. Specifically, Spanish-speaking students achieved dramatic academic gains in reading and writing, where the...