On September 25, 1981, a final draft report was completed by staff members in the Office of Planning, Budget, and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Education. This report is referred to as a review of the efficacy of bilingual education. The report concludes “the case for the effectiveness of transitional bilingual education is so weak that exclusive reliance on this instructional method is clearly not justified, (abstract, p. 1).” Given the significant effects of the dissemination of the Baker/deKanter Review, there is a need for a scholarly inquiry into the specific studies cited by Baker and deKanter as “methodologically applicable.” Utilizing the same catories and procedures as Baker and deKanter, the original sources for the “twenty- eight” references cited by Baker and deKanter were obtained and reviewed. However, this inquiry produced significant questions concerning the Baker/deKanter data, and found serious methodological problems in at least nine significant areas, with multiple examples of deficiencies in these nine areas. Given the significant difficulties found with the studies that were selected by Baker and deKanter, one must seriously question their conclusions. Based upon the scholarly review reported in this paper, it is now possible for scholars, utilizing original sources, to scrutinize, in an atmosphere of open scholarship the Baker/deKanter conclusions.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.