Bilingual education in the elections

The NYT has been been running some blog posts on educational policies of the two major party candidates, including now this piece on transitional bilingualism. I'm not entirely in agreement with Obama's position on the issue, but I'm not convinced that transitional bilingual programs are nearly as bad as this piece makes them out to be. But the authors, Bruce Fuller and Lance T. Izumi, write this:

While he agrees that immigrants should learn English, Mr. Obama recently trivialized the issue when he said that people should stop worrying about “English-only” legislation.

That's trivializing the issue? Seems more like apples and oranges. English Only is a pretty different issue, though it certainly bears on the topic at hand.