EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Why should non-college-bound and special education students need FL credits for HS graduation?
Last week the longtime education blogger Joanne Jacobs asked the question “Why require a foreign language that kids won’t really learn?”
Jacobs spun off of a piece by Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli titled “U.S. high schools should stop pretending to teach foreign languages.”
Petrilli’s main beefs are local lawmakers requiring students to take FL courses, and that school districts offer world language classes way too late, usually in middle school:
If we sincerely wanted to succeed in teaching American kids another language, we would mimic other countries and start much earlier—in preschool or at least by kindergarten. We would make it a priority and hold schools accountable for helping their students become bilingual.
Instead, we start too late, make crotchety teenagers go through the motions of trying to learn another language, and almost uniformly fail to achieve the desired outcome. …
Almost nobody is actually becoming fluent. Many of their teachers are less than fluent themselves. It’s not taken all that seriously by their high school, given that there’s no accountability tied to it. Everyone is just going through the motions.
So let’s stop pretending. Especially now that people can stick AirPods in their ears and hear what a foreign language speaker is saying, let’s stop the charade and give students back some of their time—time that could be used studying something they are actually interested in …
As a former Spanish teacher, it’s hard to disagree with Petrilli. When my home state of Delaware mandated all students take a foreign language beginning in 2011, that year I got through about half of the Spanish 1 curriculum I had previously — because now I had special ed students mixed in with honors/gifted students.
Many of the former had no idea what a noun, adjective, or verb was in English, which required a (re)teaching of such concepts.
The full inclusion model of special education is damaging to everyone in the classroom.
— James A. Furey (@JamesAFurey) August 11, 2026
– the student who is pushed in to the classroom despite not having the skills and knowledge to succeed
– the other students, who are often saddled with the extreme behavioral issues of the…
Meanwhile, the latter were twiddling their thumbs, reading, or somehow entertaining themselves during these moments.
Just a few years before, when only students who had earned a final grade “A” or “B” in their previous English course were permitted to enroll in Spanish 1, I typically ended the year by venturing into the Spanish 2 curriculum, as students were that advanced/interested.
If we want kids to speak a foreign language at least fairly fluently, they need to begin in their earliest years. And ideally it should be in immersion programs where only the target language is used.
And cease legislative mandates requiring every student to have a certain amount of credits in a foreign language for graduation, like Delaware. Why should kids who don’t plan on going to college, not to mention special ed students with IEPs (Individualized Education Programs), have to take a world language?
I think a lot of troubles in education boil down to the fact that we deny that some kids are simply smarter than others but throw them all into the same room, give them exactly the same instruction, and wonder why some outperform…
— Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” (@MrDanielBuck) August 11, 2026
As I noted 12 years ago, the way things are set up now an FL-interested student is likely to be able to at least put together what he/she wants to say (vocabulary, verb forms and tenses) in a foreign lingo when immersed in it — such as during a study abroad experience. But listening is a whole other matter, let alone the ability to handle real conversations.
Again, true fluency can only be achieved via elementary school immersion-style programs, followed by more advanced courses in middle and high school.
MORE: Northwestern project aims to create ‘gender bias-free’ foreign language classes
