Observations of Chinese and Filipino middle school and junior high school classes in the San Francisco (California) and Seattle (Washington) areas show that the political and practical realities of the bilingual classroom are far removed from the models favored by bilingual education researchers. The typical APA (Asian Pacific American) "bilingual" classroom is multilingual, with five or six native languages spoken in the classroom, some of them understood by no one in the school district. Students are at different educational levels and have entered the classroom at different points throughout the year, and turnover is high. There is no appropriate curriculum, and teachers cope by using small groups and creative classroom management. Research that is related to what actually goes on in such classrooms could help alleviate a very difficult teaching-learning situation. As this survey shows, current bilingual education research is not pragmatically related to what goes on in the classroom. Furthermore, there is no framework to facilitate the systematic observations of bilingual programs or to compare them. Frameworks which can be used in the future should be based on classifying bilingual programs in terms of (1) language used in major daily scheduling components; (2) language used in contacts among whole groups, small groups, individuals, teacher, and aide; and (3) bilingual teaching strategies. (CMG)