WASHINGTON -- Hispanic students are twice as likely as blacks and three times as likely as whites to drop out of high school, the Education Department said Wednesday in a study suggesting that the nation's education system is ill-equipped to deal with the fastest-growing group of schoolchildren.
Hoping to paint a different picture for these children, Education Secretary Richard Riley called for public school districts to create in the next five years 1,000 new dual-language schools -- which instruct children in English and in a native language such as Spanish.
''If we see to it that immigrants and their children can speak only English and nothing more, then we will have missed one of the greatest opportunities of this new century,'' Riley said. ''It is high time we begin to treat language skills as the asset they are.''
In 1997, 25.3 percent of Hispanics age 16 to 24 dropped out of high school, compared with 13.4 percent of blacks and 7.6 percent of whites.
The study also said that 11 percent of Hispanics age 25 to 29 possessed at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 14.2 percent of blacks and 32.6 percent of whites.
Riley said dual language instruction has proven to help Hispanic children do better academically as well as preserve children's heritage and promote the bilingualism all students will need in a global economy.
''Unfortunately, too many teachers and administrators today treat a child's native language as a weakness if it is not English,'' Riley said, speaking at Bell Multicultural High School, which is not one of the nation's 260 dual-language schools. ''In some places, even the idea of bilingual education is controversial. It shouldn't be.''
Dual-language instruction is one of three main, often hotly debated approaches to teaching the nation's 3 million limited English proficient students, of which nearly 75 percent are Hispanic. These students, designated by school tests and other measures as non-English speakers, also are taught in English-only classes or completely in their native languages.
Conservative critics of dual-language schools said Wednesday that such instruction doesn't necessarily give non-English speakers the language immersion necessary to improve.
''You are basically using Hispanic kids to help teach English-speaking kids Spanish,'' said Jorge Amselle of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington-based group critical of current bilingual education programs and policies based on the premise that non-English speaking children should be immersed in the language as quickly as possible.
While Hispanic children are more likely than other kids to come from poor families where they don't have good access to health care and preschool classes that would make them better students -- statistics recounted by Riley indicated that language is the chief barrier to learning.
The dropout rates for Hispanics -- a third of whom leave school overall -- are linked to a student's language difficulties. Nearly half of foreign-born Hispanic students drop out, while just 16 percent of Hispanic students born in the United States leave school, Riley said. And among U.S. born students who had at least one parent who was foreign-born, the dropout rate was higher at 20 percent.
And there are fewer teachers who can teach bilingual students. While 54 percent of the nation's classrooms have students in need of English instruction, just 20 percent of teachers say they feel prepared to teach them, the department said.
''Parents and educators want all children to learn English because it is essential for success,'' Riley said, disclosing the latest research on Hispanic students. ''But, whatever the approach to teaching English, it cannot be simply a defensive or reactive one.''
The trouble with dual-language schools, said Amselle, is that nearly half of them have a 9-to-1 ratio of non-English students.
''It really is Spanish immersion and that's great for English speakers, but not so great for the Spanish speakers,'' Amselle said, adding that many parents have opposed such schools.
But in Washington at Oyster Elementary, a 325-student school where every child learns everything equally in Spanish and in English, children are successful, said Principal Paquita Holland.
Each classroom has two teachers, who divide the children into two groups. While one group is solving math problems in English; the other is doing the same math lesson in Spanish. At the end of the semester or quarter, the groups switch languages.
Nearly half the children there are poor and 56 percent are Hispanic, yet seven in 10 have scored at or above grade level on recent standardized reading and math tests, Holland said.
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