Of all the stubborn, contentious issues that have bedeviled public education, few have been as weird as “bilingual education.”

For decades, teachers have bickered with each other, school administrators have mumbled and grumbled, stuffy professors have offered up conflicting ideas, earnest outsiders have weighed in with conflicting and peculiar suggestions. And yet, here we are in 2011, with no deal on the table that makes everyone happy.

While Massachusetts hasn’t been alone in trotting across the bilingual ed minefield, the commonwealth has been an active battleground, in part because one out of every three folks in the state is either an immigrant or a crazed professor; and in part, because Massachusetts has enough money to waste on educational experiments.

To the surprise of no one at all, the U.S. Department of Justice suggests that Massachusetts teachers are inadequately trained to deal with students whose first language isn’t English. That provides ammunition for those who want to reinstate the official, certified, well-polished, expensive “bilingual” program back into the schools, where it had been secretly stuffed into desk drawers for many years.

The script calls for politicians, school administrators, teachers and various advocates to pretend that this is a new scenario – a plot line agreed to by compliant journalists with short memories.

In truth, the educational policy battle on how to respond to non-English-speaking students has been going on, in modern times, for at least 40 years, with no side yet declared a winner.

Reform & Resistance

The early battles pitted the “English as a Second Language” educators against the reformist “bilingual” folks – a theoretical and classroom squabble over whether nothing was as important as screaming at the kids in English. Learning English, it was argued, was more important than providing the core readin’, writin’ and ’rithmetic subjects in the students’ native language.

While this battle line seemed well-drawn, it was hopelessly entangled in a number of other side issues that made a permanent “solution” almost impossible.

As many teachers would privately explain, many students came from rural towns, and varying socioeconomic backgrounds, that made them not much better in their “native” language than they were in English. And, to complicate things further, many immigrant parents resisted the “bilingual” approach – insisting on get-tough-with-English as the best method to assimilate the kids.

The feds sniffed around Massachusetts to find evidence that many teachers have not been properly trained to teach kids with limited English proficiency.

Again, the untold story in this part of the debate, which also goes back many decades, is that many teachers privately argue that the “bilingual” approach is an excuse to hire under-qualified minority teachers who, for better or worse, at least speak a foreign language.

All this, of course, has nothing in particular to do with Massachusetts. It is a national debate that has poured out of academia and into the courts and into the schools, with no resolution in sight.

Go back to the 1990s and Massachusetts, at least in theory, required draconian, full-time, bilingual education programs in almost every district that had even miniscule clusters of kids with English-language limitations.

Whether or not the pedagogical justification was there, the practical considerations were impossible to meet and the Transitional Bilingual Education Act, Chapter 71A, faded away, as did similar requirements in Arizona and California.

Massachusetts, being Massachusetts, will respond to the federal scolding with the expenditure of many bags of gold on new initiatives to train teachers and spiff up whatever curriculum can pretend to actually work for the targeted students.

Safe to say, no one will ask the parents what they want. They might give the wrong answer. Writing in The New York Times in 1997, as she anticipated a vote to abolish bilingual education, a community center director, Alice Callaghan, reported the grim truth: “After 25 years, bilingual education has few defenders among Latino parents.”

To mandate one “solution” to this challenge is madness – and everyone knows it, whether they’ll say so or not.

Massachusetts should nod politely to the nice federal investigators – and then prod the local school districts to innovate internally – and also bring in private contractors and market competition.