Title VII Grants: Bilingual Education Programs That Hurt Kids

Executive Summary

Federal bilingual education programs are funded through discretionary grants from the Department of Education’s Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs directly to local education providers. “Federal bilingual education projects have demonstrated effectiveness in teaching English,” asserts the Clinton Administration’s official DoEd budget request for FY 2000.

But a review of bilingual education grants awarded in 1995, the most recent year reports were available for these multi-year grants, reveals how many grants actually hurt the Limited English Proficient (LEP) students they are intended to help. Official grant report documents filed by districts with DoEd and obtained by the Lexington Institute show that many federally-funded Title VII programs:

• Fail to meet most of their stated objectives;
• Omit standardized test scores for large portions of their LEP students;
• Produce lower test scores two years after programs are implemented.

Click here to download the full report as a PDF file.