Hawaiian immersion education is celebrating 20 years in Hawai'i's public school system. It is certainly something that the Hawai'i Department of Education can be proud of.

The integrated Punana Leo preschool-through-grade-12 statewide system is the most developed program for a Native American language in the United States. It has been widely praised by national researchers for its academic and cultural success.

Indeed, Hawaiian immersion has parallels in its development with the educational system of Finland, whose students currently lead the world in academic achievement.

Drawing special attention to the program locally this year has been the amazing Hawaiian-speaking football team of Anuenue School. When Anuenue goes out on the field, it carries with it the mauli, "the living essence," of 2,022 Hawaiian-speaking students in 27 sites throughout Hawai'i.

Hawaiian immersion education has the highest percentage of Native Hawaiian students of any statewide unrestricted enrollment program in Hawai'i — well over 90 percent. A large percentage of these children also come from low-income backgrounds with parents who have not attended college. Some people do not believe that such children — or any Hawaiian-speaking children — can attain academic success. They are wrong.

The school graduation rate for immersion is above the state average — 100 percent for most years. Approximately 80 percent of graduates have gone on to college. This past year a second immersion student graduated from Stanford and another was enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Oxford. Others have enrolled in such universities as Loyola Marymount, Seattle University and Northern Arizona University along with many in the University of Hawai'i system.

The academic success of Hawaiian immersion has occurred in spite of many high-performing students transferring to private schools. In recent years, Hawaiian immersion students have met Kamehameha's admissions criteria at a rate double that of English-medium schools.

The Hawai'i state Board of Education was criticized in 1987 when it took the bold step of incorporating the nonprofit 'Aha Punana Leo developed immersion program into the DOE. One of the most widely repeated criticisms was that Hawaiian immersion would produce students unable to speak, read or write English. The reality is that by high school graduation, all immersion students speak, read and write English as well as, or better than, their peers in English schools. The ability of immersion students to match peers in English has a parallel in the performance of these students in academic testing.

While Hawaiian immersion schools produce English skills equivalent to English schools, no English schools — public or private — match Hawaiian immersion in Hawaiian. It is the high skills in Hawaiian that give immersion students an added cultural and academic advantage.

Scientific research has shown that children who have high oral and written fluency in two languages have an advantage in their thinking skills.

Hawaiian immersion education promises to reach even higher levels of success. In cooperation with the state DOE, the 'Aha Punana Leo and the Kamehameha Schools, Nawahiokalani'opu'u Laboratory School of the University of Hawai'i-Hilo is developing a model Hawaiian language medium program. The school has a current project to develop basic skills in Hawaiian reading by the end of preschool. By high school the project aims to have taught all students four languages. The goal is full biliteracy in Hawaiian and English with additional high-level study of Japanese and Latin.

The goals of further strengthening education through Hawaiian are attainable. A parallel example of contemporary success is the small country of Finland. Finland has a highly distinctive language in which reading is easily taught due to a consonant vowel syllable structure similar to that of Hawaiian.

Finland requires all students to develop full oral and written fluency in both Finnish and Swedish (its second official language) and to study several years of a third language, usually English. Many students study a fourth language of their choice before graduation. Finland is listed by the Program for International Assessment as the top academically performing country in the world today.

Ironically, parallel to a ban on Hawaiian-medium schools here, Finnish was once barred from schools in Finland with only Swedish allowed as the medium of education. Furthermore, ethnic Finnish children were sometimes viewed by those of Swedish background as uninterested in academics, not unlike a negative perception of Hawaiian children once common in Hawai'i. However, over the past 100 years, schools taught through Finnish have reached the very top of academic achievement in the world. Hawaiian language medium education has made great progress in the past 20 years. Like Finnish medium schools, we will achieve even more in the next 20 years.

William H. "Pila" Wilson and his wife, Kauanoe Kamana, were among the founders of the 'Aha Punana Leo and Hawaiian immersion. Both of their children were educated through the system to grade 12. Wilson is chair of the Academic Programs Division of Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikolani Hawaiian Language College at University of Hawai'i-Hilo. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.