Bilingual education is already a hot topic for teachers but two recent news items add more fuel to the fire. First, new evidence shows that California's pioneering English-only ballot proposition 227 is working as intended. According to the California English Language Development Test, the number of students who speak proficient English despite having a different at-home language has tripled between 2001 and 2002. Thirty-two percent of California's students learning English--or 862,000 children--scored "advanced" or "early advanced" as opposed to only 11 percent in 2001.

Remarkable for its timing, this week also saw a decision by a San Francisco Superior Court that ordered the State of California to give bilingual education programs access to $133 million in grant money from the federal Reading First program. The court ruled that denying the bilingual education programs access to the federal $900 million Reading First grant discriminated against non-native English speakers.