I went to a public bilingual school for my elementary years somewhere on the Colorado plains. It was a great school when I went there: underfunded, but with great teachers (for the most part) and great students. It was one of the first schools to start an anti-bullying program--sadly, when I was about to leave, since I had been put into the middle school halfway through fifth grade.
The biggest bonus about this school was that every student was treated completely equally by the teachers. There was a TAG program, but nothing really besides. English-speaking and Spanish-speaking students integrated well, and both learned the others' languages. I knew spanish until I was taken out of the program in second grade. The class was taught exactly half in English and half in Spanish. This worked out best for the youngest students, who picked up quickly and were learning the basics. It got harder in the later years, but that was when segregation was already beginning, so it is hard for me to judge whether it still would have been an asset.
Four years ago, my last year of high school, I needed some volunteer hours, so I got in touch with my old teacher and I started coming into a bilingual classroom to help out. The school had changed drastically for the worse.
The teacher was a native spanish speaker, but had clearly grown up in the states. She definitely favorited white children; similarly, the entire structure of the class had changed to make English the main language and Spanish the novelty "Let's repeat the alphabet, even though it's second grade!" language. The quality of the school overall had gone up with increased funding, but I noticed this new money used in very insidious ways: the Spanish-speaking children were shuffled off after the first 20 minutes to do ESL with the teaching assistant, and I didn't see them again. I was then left to work with the white kids in making little booklets about rooms in their house at home, in Spanish.
I didn't realize the truly awful implications of this until long after, when I learned about wise-teaching to promote racial integration and prevent group hostilities. The first and most important aspect of it is to INTEGRATE, not separate--especially not subjecting the minority group to "remedial" activities and classes. I had taken one of the little booklets to my old teacher, who had become the librarian because he was sick of the teaching politics. "The biggest problem with this," he noted, about the booklet, "is that all those white kids have houses, and none of those little mexican ones do. She should call it 'The Home' rather than 'The House.'"
I don't think I'll ever forget that.