French immersion: Bilingual education and unilingual administration

Abstract

By virtue of their organization, growth, and continued success, French immersion programs represent more than a second-language learning methodology; they are and ought to be recognized as programs of bilingual education. This means that their effectiveness ought to be measured by generally accepted criteria of educational effectiveness. These include, among other things, the degree of staff integration in the school culture and the quality of leadership provided by the school principal. But the majority of schools offering bilingual education programs are administered by unilingual or by “theoretically” bilingual administrators; this can deprive the French component of much needed leadership and create situations in which the level of ambiguity is high and the possibility of integration into the school culture is low. An effort to gradually ensure that bilingual education benefits from bilingual administration would be a step in the direction of recognizing the maturity of French immersion.