I have been a high school English teacher for 15 years. I worked most of my life in Colorado. I now live and teach in Colombia. So, what I am proposing is that we start to teach bilingual classes for ALL students, starting in kindergarten. This way, our native English speakers can learn Spanish, and our native Spanish speakers can learn English.  This is what they are doing here, and my high school students are fluent in English by the time they are in high school. The efficacy of a bilingual education is proven!  It results in students who have better critical thinking skills as well as better cultural understanding. I am not worried about our current bilingual students, but I am worried that we need to raise our standards the country over to compete with European and South American schools that regularly graduate bilingual (trilingual, and more...) students every year. State schools need to realize the importance of creating more worldly students who can compete with everyone else!