JOHN J. MILLER: You came to the United States as a little girl from Italy. How hard was it for you to learn English?

ROSALIE PEDALINO PORTER: It was painful, sitting there, not understanding a word. There was no special help in school for immigrant kids. You either “picked up” the language or dropped out. I managed to learn English quite well in about a year and a half, enough to do all the school work but still making grammatical errors. But the joy of understanding and being able to speak was tremendous.

MILLER: The Grand Poobahs of multiculturalism might say that the schools forced you to assimilate and abandon your cultural heritage.

PORTER: That is absolute tripe! I never abandoned my cultural heritage. The magnificent appeal of our country is that new arrivals are free to keep or drop whatever they want of their language, customs, religion, foods, etc. I am fluent and literate in my native language as well as in English and Spanish. It’s nutty to demand that every immigrant’s language and culture be maintained by the schools — let the family do that part, and demand that the public schools teach our common language and literature as well as math, science, U.S. history and civics, for starters.

MILLER: Why did you become an advocate of bilingual education, i.e., the theory that children can learn English by mastering their native language first?

PORTER: It was purely wishful thinking and idealism! I had long intended to become a professor of Spanish literature, but when I heard about the new education effort, I fell in love with the theory in the expectation that it would help non-English-speaking kids. I changed my major, became a Spanish/English bilingual teacher, and embraced the magical thinking that teaching children in Spanish would help them learn English faster and better.

MILLER: When did you recognize this wasn’t the best approach? What changed your mind?

PORTER: Within my first few years of teaching, I realized through practical experience that the working model was flawed and could not possibly do what it was intended to do. Young children, especially, are at the optimal age to learn a second language quickly, to read and write and use the new language in school. Teaching my Puerto Rican students in Spanish most of the day did not result in their mastering English in three years; many did not make it under this plan in five or six years. Too many children in bilingual classrooms eventually went on to high school unprepared. But the bilingual-education bureaucracy was so well-entrenched with jobs, money, and political correctness that attempts to modify the program were easily shot down, most politicians being too cowardly to make legislative changes in the policy.

MILLER: What should schools and teachers do, if they want immigrant children to become fluent in English?

PORTER: The most sensible, practical, and obvious plan is to start teaching these children English from the first day of school, give lots of time to special lessons in the English language. This type of “Structured English Immersion” is the only guaranteed approach that research has shown to give non-English speakers a good command of speaking, reading, and writing the language, to give children the skills with which to make the greatest use of educational opportunity. Not to mention the other opportunity of great value: the earliest chance to feel included in school and community life.

MILLER: This sounds like common sense. Why do so many educators resist it?

PORTER: Not anymore — support for the commonsense English-teaching approach has grown in leaps and bounds over the past dozen years. Bilingual education is dying and almost universally discredited. A small number of “true believers” among the educrats and some Latino ethnic promoters and multiculturalists still pay lip service to the outdated idea, but not many. Oregon voters in the 2008 election voted to keep bilingual education, swayed by the huge amounts of teachers’-union money that was poured in to defeat the initiative question. Guess there are still a few fuzzy thinkers on the left, I mean, west coast.

MILLER: What was the response among bilingual-education professionals when they learned of your apostasy?

PORTER: It was not pretty! One does not easily take an alternative position on such a motherhood issue as bilingual education. In fact, in spite of all the multicultural niceties and diversity ballyhoo, there is precious little diversity of ideas in some areas of education, and this area is the most dogmatic. I have debated many of the true believers from teachers and school administrators to university gurus and the director of the federal government’s bilingual-education office. These debates and my writing have been my contribution to opening a public dialogue.

MILLER: Did your work on behalf of immigrant children carry a personal toll?

PORTER: Being called a racist and a hater of foreigners and foreign languages in public hurts, especially knowing that none of these charges reflects my character. But I’m a big girl and can stand stupid criticism and fight back. The truly appalling attack on my work by a public official in Massachusetts, who tried to have my doctoral dissertation thrown out, gave me the most pain. To be the first in my immigrant family to attain a high degree and to learn that political pressure almost denied me the doctorate — that was tough to get over.

MILLER: Are today’s immigrant children learning English and assimilating, or are they being trapped in linguistic ghettos and condemned to lives at the bottom rungs of the U.S. economic ladder?

PORTER: Until a decade ago, the latter was mostly the case. Since 1998, three states with huge numbers of non-English-speaking children have — finally — changed their state laws to dismantle bilingual education and require English Immersion teaching instead. At last, not through the efforts of state lawmakers but through ballot initiatives, we’ve succeeded in changing the bad old laws and the results are truly gratifying. California in 1998, Arizona in 2000, and Massachusetts in 2002 revised their laws. Already state reports show students learning English much faster and scoring higher grades in reading and math on state tests. This is phenomenal news. Until recently bilingual children were excused from testing for years, so no one knew how poorly they were being educated. A few states still have bilingual education laws, Texas and Illinois, for example, so the overhaul is not complete. High-school dropout rates and labor-market earning statistics document the fact that, as Antonio Gramsci put it long ago, “Without the mastery of the common standard version of the national language, one is inevitably destined to function only at the periphery of national life and outside the national and political mainstream.”

MILLER: Whoa! Wasn’t Gramsci a Marxist who inspired the Left’s “long march” through our cultural institutions? Why are you quoting him?

PORTER: Worse than that, he was an anarchist/Marxist! I didn’t quote him because he was my paisano but because he gave us that beautifully concise statement of what I believe in with all my being. To deny children the means to function well enough in the language of a new country to overcome the obstacles of poverty, dislocation, etc. is to deny these children their civil rights. This also applies to the once fashionable notion that African-American children should be taught in Ebonics and not forced to lose their “cultural purity” by being taught in Standard English. What a bunch of codswallop!

MILLER: Do you agree that “codswallop” should be one of the first English words we teach immigrant children? At least it would give them something to shout at the bilingual-ed militants.

PORTER: Nah, maybe not the first word. The more words we know, no matter whether common or arcane, the richer our vocabulary, the greater our ability to understand and make ourselves understood. It also equips a person to do the New York Times crossword puzzle and win trivia contests.