How Do You Say "White Man's Burden" in Spanish? Why do liberals in Massachusetts feel such a burning need to "help" Spanish-speaking students? Bilingual education has been a code word for "native-language instruction" for long enough, and has been unsuccessful enough, that voters in this state exercised some common sense and voted it (by an enormous margin) into history. Now the state legislature has decided to exempt certain bilingual programs. (Notice how the Globe article frames the issue as not whether the legislature acted, as Governor Mitt Romney says, "arrogantly" and against the will of the voters; rather they frame it as whether Romney has ever tried to contravene a referendum. The Globe editorial, here, shills along too.)

The real issue, in the end, is diversity. (God, I hate that word.) One of the exempted programs is a feel-good initiative called two-way learning "in which," according to the Globe, "English speakers and English learners attend class together and simultaneously master both English and the learners' foreign language." Get it? The kids teach each other their native tongues. No doubt this occurs in some kind of groovy Woodstock-y way, accompanied by mutual understanding and lots of, ahem, diversity happening, which is why the state is trying to carve out this exception. Whether this happens just during language class is not addressed. For all I know, the kids may do this in math class, too -- and we all know what a boon it is to kids who can't do basic math to be sorting out two languages at the same time. And this in turn points to the simple argument for English-immersion programs: At a time when American students generally can't do much more simple things in the classroom, it's pretty clear that communitarian learning in multiple languages is the answer.