The basic idea is called Gresham’s Law, and it isn’t due to the guy who writes legal novels. (Gresham didn’t “discover” it, but does get credit for a particular way of phrasing it.)

With continued non-immersion classes after fourth grade he now speaks Spanish fluently as an adult, with a slight Cuban accent (or so I am told).

As a legal immigrant , let me tell you something . If you want kids to learn a second and third language , don’t shove it down their throats . And btw , social studies is not a place to do language immersion because language immersion implies that you interact with native born speakers of the language you want to learn constantly . That language immersion in Waunakee, Wisconsin is just an expensive way of telling the American people that many teachers , school officials , education experts and politicians have no business in educating American children .

You cannot assume that, because two total immersion model schools of choice in your area do well on state mandated test, presenting academic topics in foreign languages increases students’ performance. For one thing, the parents who choose an immersion model are likely to be of a higher socioeconomic status, on average, than those parents who don’t jump through the necessary hoops to get their children into the program. Any difference in scores is much more likely to be due to the difference in family SES.

If your argument were true, then every ELL child in the country would be outperforming their English-speaking peers. Yet, they aren’t.

In addition, the Wisconsin program began with the first grade, and then added a grade level each year. This is the first year they have required fourth grade social studies to be taught in Spanish.

If you’re talking about tests on the same material they were presented in their particular school, that would be a reasonable indicator. If you’re talking about the state-mandated multple-guess tests that may or may not contain the information studied by all students in every school in America, probably not. You can’t measure what a child really knows by these tests. The tests are for the monetary benefit of the schools, not the educational benefit of the children.

Mixing language is not, then, shown to make a difference.

Vocab in initial language learning is for commonly-used words. Subject learning provides specialized vocabulary not useful elsewhere in place of more commonly used words. I learned a whole bunch of Vietnamese, for example, which would have been useless for shopping or construction or getting from the airport by public transportation or understanding Buddhism, or local art, or farming…. You see my point.
I’ll make another. Social studies, if they’re lucky, might use the term “loess”. Or “extinct”. Or “slash&burn”. Or “prussian” (von Steuben). Or “musket”. Or “epidemic”.
Nice to know, but you wouldn’t want to get in the way of knowing how to ask where the bathroom is, is this water potable, what is the word for ticket, how to ask for directions, how to order in a restaurant. And you can’t do both, unless your social studies lesson for the day is how to ask for a bus ticket to Austin in Spanish to illustrate how hard it is to…somethingsomething politically correct. Which is not social studies, especially the social studies which is impostering as history.

And how would you know that they had learned social studies? I would think that the ability to outscore your peers on a social studies test would be a reasonable indicator. I am being as clear and direct on this point as I possibly can. What standard would you prefer to use? And would you then be asserting that learning in any other content areas is irrelevant? Is there any possibility that one is capable of learning two things at one time (say Spanish and social studies? or math and science? or reading and writing?) Or must we continue to think of school as 30 minutes of social studies followed by 30 minutes of (totally unrelated) language experience followed by 30 minutes of mathematics with no application within the following 30 minutes in which science is taught?