Essentially an antipoverty measure, the Bilingual Education Act, which is supporting 76 bilingual programs in public elementary schools, comes far from meeting the needs of any significant proportion of the disadvantaged children whose language is other than English. One of the various federal and regional organizations striving to ameliorate these inadequacies is the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory in Austin, Texas. The author, director of SWEDL's Language Development/Bilingual Education Program, describes this program as a multi-faceted learning system designing and expanding instructional materials and staff development. Its experimental program, to be ready for the 1970-71 school year, is intended to be a rigorous and carefully controlled comparison of three approaches to educating the Spanish-speaking Mexican American children in Texas: (1) the traditional approach, in which the non-English speaking child is thrown in midstream to sink or swim; (2) the English as a second language approach, which makes concessions in the form and rate of teaching, but little or no use of the home language; and (3) the bilingual approach, in which 75 percent of the teaching, including readiness and reading, will be in Spanish, and 25 percent in English as a second language. All of the teachers will be Mexican American; those in the bilingual approach will be bilingual. (AMM)