Bilingual Education Predicting the effect of bilingual education on student outcomes with the work done by Huddy and Sears, "Opposition to Bilingual Education: Prejudice or the Defense of Realistic Interests?" is problematical. The authors investigated the bases for parental prejudice against bilingual education; they did not investigate in any detail what the educational outcomes might be for the children involved. They made only incidental reference to the possibility that Latino, African-American or other minority students -- or even Anglos -- might experience diminished educational outcomes in the presence, or for that matter absence, of bilingual education. In fact, they were not investigating outcomes per se; they were investigating the source of prejudice.

Huddy and Sears proposed that current prejudice against bilingual education is of two kinds. One kind is the realistic interest variety. Those who practice this form of prejudice believe that spending money on bilingual education to serve Latinos does a disservice to the education of non-Latinos by shifting funds that would otherwise be available to enrich...

The second form is some variety of old-fashioned racial prejudice, whether based on externals (Blacks/Latinos/etc.) do not do well because they were prevented from getting an education) to internals (Blacks, Latinos, etc.) do not do well because they are lazy and do not want to work hard.
At the outset, Huddy and Sears note that extending the concept of realistic interest to Latinos seems inevitable in face of the current moves toward restricting access to public services such as education for illegal aliens, most of whom are Latino. In other words, Anglos fear that the dollars for education are ill spent in providing Spanish-language instruction, especially for students who may have no bona fide right to any education in the U.S. On further investigation, Huddy and Sears noted that this attitude was most prevalent among Anglos and African-Americans who were living in the same areas as the Latinos, whether or not their children were in bilingual classes. Arguably, in those areas, education in general is not on a par with completely Anglo middle-class areas.

Huddy and Sears did expend some effort on tracing the origins of prejudice, and this work seems more likely to shed some light on the possible educational outcomes of bilingual education than does much of the rest of their study. They noted that social learning explanation of prejudice "argues that the effective base of prejudice is acquired early in life as part of childhood socialization" (p. 136). They found that this transmittal vector for negative…