Read this excellent article by Phillip M. Carter on the negative effects of Proposition 227 in California.

Why this bilingual education ban should have repealed long ago (click to go to the article at CNN ).

By Phillip M. Carter, Special to CNN

Excerpt from the article:

"Now with some 45 million speakers and a 500-year history, Spanish in the United States is an economic and cultural resource to be cherished and carefully cultivated, not dismantled one generation after the next.

It is therefore time to thoroughly rethink the system that takes Spanish away from young children, only to feebly reintroduce it to them 10 years later as "a foreign language." At that point it is mostly too late".