A love-hate affair with language 

It’s a bit of a cliche to compare the history of education reforms to the movement of a pendulum, but there’s no better way to describe educators’ long-standing debates about children’s language development. Consider, for example, the endless repetition of the same few arguments about how best to teach reading in the early grades: Today (as George Hruby explains in this issue of Kappan), intensive phonics instruction appears to be on one of its periodic upswings, while schools neglect other kinds of language development. Tomorrow, no doubt, momentum will begin to shift back toward whole language, while advocates of “balanced literacy” will try for the umpteenth time to catch the pendulum at its midpoint and hold it in place. 

Or consider the rising, falling, and once again rising fortunes of bilingual education in California. As Amaya Garcia recounts in these pages, 61% of the state’s voters favored the 1998 ballot initiative that killed off an earlier generation of bilingual programs; by 2016, however, the pendulum had swung the other way, with 71% voting to repeal the earlier bill and invest in new programs.   

Or consider similar patterns of debate around foreign language instruction in K-12 education. Looking back to see how Kappan authors addressed this topic in previous decades (dating to the 1930s), Teresa Preston finds that the key arguments haven’t evolved so much as echoed down the years: Is foreign language learning an individual benefit or a national imperative? Should it be treated as a core subject area or an elective? Should students be immersed in using a new language or given systematic instruction in its formal structures?