Bilingual education at its best provides students with a strong support system as they become fluent in both the English language and the culture of their neighborhood, providing them with a community of learners with similar struggles and goals.

These programs are based on the idea that a student will be more able to master CALP level English when he is first literate in his native language, and also the idea that a student will be better able to transfer ideas that he already understands in his native language to the new language than to learn new content in a language he has little experience with.

One major drawback of bilingual education programs is that they require a full classroom of students with the same academic level and native language, in addition to a qualified teacher who is fluent in both the native language and English. This means that students are more likely to be combined into classes with larger age ranges than their English speaking peers, simply to attain a class large enough to justify having a separate teacher.
Another common problem can occur when both the teacher and the students are more comfortable in the native language and there is not significant interest on the part of the teacher or students in using and improving the students' English. Students may receive little instruction or practice in English and suffer when they move on to classrooms where a higher level of proficiency is expected of them.
In addition, these tend to be long-term programs, and while the students may be combined with native speakers for some parts of the day they are still segregated for much of their time at school, which has the potential to exaggerate differences between the groups and denies them the access to native speaker models for academic discourse.