J. Manuel Urrutia
I have been asked by a friend to comment on the article titled "Loco, completamente loco, the many failures of `bilingual education'," by Glenn Garvin. It appeared in the January 1998 issue of REASON magazine (pp. 18-29) and can be found in the 227 Web page.
The article, in my opinion, is very slanted. The language used sets up an adversarial situation in which educators -teachers, administrators, and school boards- are painted as petty, incompetent, and evil. Mr. Garvin's premise is explict in the title: bilingual education is a failure. How Mr. Garvin arrives at this conclusion is particularly illuminating. Anecdots of bureaucratic horror stories are lavishly told. Yet, very little research is quoted to back up the anecdotal evidence. In contrast, all favorable research on research on bilingual education is throughly distorted, in the process belittling the intellectual credentials of the researchers. Yet, Mr. Garvin is not afraid to trot out his own researchers to prove his point.
In the rest of this commentary, I will quote pertinent passages of the article and provide my criticisms. As is customary, the article's text is set in <BLOCKQUOTE>:
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Rosa Torres had been dreading this call. Her daughter Angelica's first-grade teacher wanted to come over and talk. The teacher didn't say what she wanted to discuss, but Rosa knew...Rosa wondered how a child developed a learning disorder. Certainly there had been no sign of it a couple of years before, when Angelica started preschool at the YMCA. Rosa had been so worried, sending her little girl off without a word of English to spend a day among the American children. But everything had worked out just fine. Angelica rolled through there like a snowball, picking up more and more English every day. Soon she spoke it much better than Rosa, and after a while she spoke it much better than Spanish.
Implicit in this last paragraph is the belief, not altogether wrong, that language is easily learned while in early childhood. Indeed, pre-school children will learn the rules of any language -its grammar- from early and continuous use. No psychological research is necessary to confirm this fat to anyone who has watched a child grow. In fact, prior to almost universal literacy in the "Western" World, that is how many languages were primarily maintained. This is still true in the so-called Third World, where literacy is not sufficiently high.
However, to imply that all non-English speaking children, regardless of age, can easily learn English is plainly wrong.
Of course, that wasn't surprising. After all, Angelica was an American, born just a few miles down the freeway from their home in Redwood City, a scruffy working-class town 30 miles south of San Francisco. It was her parents Rosa and Carlos who were the immigrants. They left Cuzco, the ancient Inca city in central Peru, with plans to study in America, learn English, get college degrees, live the good life.
Mr. Garvin advances the naive notion that simply being born in the US guarantees that a child will learn Standard English. If this was so, then the existance of communities (Native Americans, German, Spanish, Gullah, Cajun, Sweedish, etc.) that speak a language or dialect other than Standard English is an aberration that should never have happened. In short, Mr. Garvin promotes a myth that conforms to English-Only philosophy: there is no room in the US for anything other than English..
Parenthetically, I would like to point out that, to the best of my knowledge, US visa officers never give resident visas (a "green" card) to people like Carlos and Rosa, who have no marketable skills and speak no English. In short, the article also promotes the myth that the US welcomes, with open arms, any would-be immigrant that wishes for a better life. In general, immigrants must have a quarantee, either in the form of a sponsor or economic resources, that they will not be a burden to taxpayers. Thus, Mr. Garvin is using the "hard-working immigrant" angle as a device to make the reader empathize with their particular plight. That this type of immigrant is demonized elsewhere -such as during the Proposition 187 campaign- is, to me, sufficient proof that Mr. Garvin has an ax to grind.
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The teacher turned out to be a Japanese lady (well, American, really; Rosa had to keep reminding herself how it worked here) with a manner that was at once kindly and intense. "I think you need to go talk to the principal at the school about Angelica," she said after they settled in."What about her?" Rosa said, stomach churning, knowing the answer, dreading it.
"I think you need to get her into an English-speaking classroom," the teacher replied. "She understands English perfectly. And she doesn't like taking lessons in Spanish. I think it's really holding her back. It's damaging her."
"What do you mean, Spanish?" Rosa asked, silently cursing Oprah and Kathie Lee, who had obviously failed her, because this teacher wasn't making any sense.
"Spanish, that's what we're teaching her in," the teacher said. "Didn't anyone tell you? She's in a bilingual education program. Just go tell the principal she speaks English, and you want her out."
The whole conversation has a Kafkaesque ring: The apparent foreigner who tells the non-English speaker foreigner of something that does not make sense. It is worth pointing that Angelica is of Peruvian origin, a country that has a Peruvian of Japanese descent that speaks perfect Spanish as President. Why shouldn't that make sense to her? Again, Mr. Garvin is subtly reinforcing the notion that every one, including a Japanese woman, speaks English in the US.
The language used in the conversation is also extremely suggestive. What proof is there that a child who understands Spanish is damaged by being taught Spanish instead of English? If anything, it might slow the acquisiton of English grammar, but never will it promote the loss of English. Conversely, what about the actual damage done to children, who speak a language other than English, when they are "mainstreamed" into English-only classrooms?
When the teacher left, Rosa still found it hard to believe the whole conversation hadn't been some horrendous translation glitch. The teacher had explained that Angelica, because she was Hispanic, had been swept into a class full of immigrant children from Mexico and El Salvador who spoke little or no English. OK, Rosa could understand how that might have happened. But why were the children being taught Spanish instead of English? How were they ever going to learn English if the school didn't teach it to them?
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The solution, unfortunately, was not as simple as the teacher promised. When Rosa went in to see the school administrators a few days later, her request to transfer Angelica into an English-speaking class met with withering disapproval. "That's not in your daughter's best interests," one of the school officials said. They flashed incomprehensible charts around, used a lot of language Rosa didn't understand, but the message came through loud and clear: We know better, we're the teachers.
Nowhere in the hypothetical conversation was it said that the whole criterion for Angelica to be placed in a bilingual class was the Spanish surname. For example, Los Angeles Unified School District does the placement on the basis of "home language." Even then, the parents have the option of not enrolling their children in bilingual education classrooms. In this anecdote, the school administration is portrayed as not informing the parents of how students are placed, nor how they are taught and why. Taking the facts of the story at face value, this is a horror story about an educational bureaucracy ran amok. But it is not a failure of bilingual education.
Mr. Garvin concludes that, because the administrators fail to communicate with parents, there is an inherently evil intent in their part. He then shifts targets and says that teachers, not administrators, are arrogant and unwilling to come down from lofty heights to explain how children are educated.
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Each morning for the next two years, she watched Angelica mope off to a school that bored her nearly to tears. Each afternoon, when she checked the girl's homework, it was in Spanish. Rosa began to wonder why the program was called "bilingual." The principal had promised Rosa that the amount of English in the lessons would increase, but there was no sign of that happening.And it never did. It wasn't until the family moved 20 miles south to Cupertino, a Silicon Valley suburb on the edge of San Jose, that Angelica got any English education. Then she had to have a lot of it. "Your daughter isn't reading anywhere near a third-grade level," the teacher told Rosa. "And she's behind in math and science, too." But Cupertino (fortunately, as far as Rosa was concerned) had no bilingual program. So Angelica stayed in the class, though all year she had to take special after-school English lessons with newly arrived Chinese immigrant children.
This is what bilingual education did for my daughter, Rosa thought bitterly. It stole two years out of her life.
The littany of horrors is blamed solely on bilingual education. But it is clear, at least to me, that the blame lies elsewhere. Bilingual education of the sort described in this story, officially termed Academic Support in the Primary Language (ASPL) by the California Department of Education, is meant to teach all the curriculum in the primary language of the student, with English introduced gradually, usually employing English as a Second Language (ESL) techniques. Thus, a child should be doing normal grade-level work, albeit not in English. As usual, the success of a given child depends on the child's ability as well as how well s/he is taught. Again, taking the facts at true and assuming Angelica to be of average, or greater, intelligence, the blame lies squarely on an inept or unqualified teacher as well as on Rosa, for not assisting her daughter in her learning process, not on bilingual education per se.
It is widely known in the educational community that many teachers that are assigned to teach bilingual education are unqualified to do so. The reasons are many: poor training by some of the credentialing institutions, lack of skills on the language being used, little classroom experience, etc. To be sure, this malady does not affect all bilingual education teachers. Regardless of the source of the problem, the state of California has done little to remedy these shortcomings, relaying instead on a patchwork of solution, some of them ineffective. (It is worth noting that Governor Wilson is quite willing to fund other educational initiatives. For example, $2 million were recently earmarked to encourage the training of computer artists so as to promote the State's entertainment industry). In addition, it takes a significant length of time to produce bilingual educators. For example, the first significant number of bilingual teachers that speak Hmong or Kmer (Cambodian) has recently graduated.
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Rosa Torres isn't alone. Bilingual education was born 30 years ago from a good-hearted but vague impulse by Congress to help Spanish speakers learn English. Instead, it has become a multi-billion-dollar hog trough that feeds arrogant education bureaucrats and militant Hispanic separatists. And now poor immigrant parents increasingly see it as the wall around a linguistic ghetto from which their children must escape if they want to be anything more than maids or dishwashers. Like Rosa Torres, they are starting to say no way:
Mr. Garvin claims that bilingual education is a big business. This is not true, at least for California, where the spenditures are $300 million out of a total budget of $30 billion. Thus, 10% of the budget is used to serve 25% of the state's school population [approximately 1.4 million students are classified as Limited English Proficient (LEP), out of a total of 5.7 million students) in a variety of bilingual education programs, from "full immersion" (known as English Langauge Development, or ELD) to bilingual (ASPL). To me it looks like a very good deal.
I find the claim that Hispanic separatists are behind bilingual education specially inflammatory since it implies that there is a "fifth-column" out there trying to undermine the integrity of the United States. Mr. Garvin offers no evidence that this is so and the claim does not show up anywhere else in the article. I view this as a "stealthy" way of increasing the reader's suspicions and fears of "all those Mexicans."
It is also equally offensive to me that Mr. Garvin feels that bilingual education programs have been erected as a way of ghettoizing the new immigrants. He claims to have done much research into writing this article. Yet he seems to have ignored the fact that, prior to the imposition of bilingual education subsequent to the Law v. Nichols decision, ghettoization was a fact of life for the immigrant. It has been widely documented that "Mexican" children, reagardless of their actual place of birth, were segregated into their own schools throughout the Southwest. Higher education opportunities were routinely denied by "tracking" students into vocational classes instead of college preparatory courses, a fact clearly documented by Mr. Garvin himself when writing, at the end of the article, about Fernando Vega.
It is clear that Mr. Garvin is rather selective on his use of facts.
* At 9th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, located on the edge of the city's garment district, parents held about 90 children out of class for two weeks to force the school to start teaching English. "The only time they spoke English at the school was during lunch and recess," said Luisa Hernandez, a sweatshop worker from Mexico whose 9-year-old daughter Yanira attends the school. "I want my daughter to learn English. All the exams for things like lawyers and doctors are in English. Without English, she would have to take a job like mine."
As is routine in this article, the facts are different. This "factoid" implies that the entire 9th. Street Elementary School has discontinued its bilingual program. Not so. Those 90 children have been placed in English-Only classrooms. According to figures made available by LAUSD at a UC Riverside conference, those children are below their peers in grade-level achievement tests. This result is not surprising since they are under an additional handicap: they are struggling with a language that is not their mother tongue and which is more than likely not spoken at home. One cannot expect that children who are esposed to English for barely six hours, five days a week, are going to attain the fluency necessary to pass the Stanford 9 at the 85 percentile or, in the future, the SAT at the 1100 level.
* One hundred fifty Hispanic families in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood sued the state of New York to force the release of their children from a bilingual program. Ada Jimenez, one of the plaintiffs, said her grandson spoke only English when he entered the Bushwick school system. "We were told that because my grandson has a Spanish last name, he should remain in bilingual classes," she said. Result: He flunked kindergarten. "He is now in seventh grade and cannot read in either English or Spanish," Jimenez said in an affidavit for the lawsuit.
Does this say that bilingual education is an evil thing? No, it says that administrators are engaged in clearly illegal activities, no different than those that lead to red-lining or restrictive sale covenants, practices which were outlawed in the 1970's.
* Denver is considering a change that would limit students to three years in its bilingual program instead of the six that many of them have been staying. Leading the charge is school board member Rita Montero, who originally championed bilingual education--until her own son was enrolled. "The kids were doing work way below the regular grade level," she said. "I was furious." She yanked him from the program and enrolled him in another school across town: "I had to think, what is more important to me? To keep my child in a program where perhaps he'll learn some Spanish and that'll make me happy? Or do I want my child to be able to come out of public education with the ability to compete for scholarships, to be able to go to the college of his choice?"
More of the same. Why are children doing below grade-level work? Either the administrators are condoning this practice or the teachers are unqualified. But it is not the fault of bilingual education methodologies. The statement from Ms. Montero does highlight a problem within our community: it is believed by some that having our children learn Spanish at home or in the schools is good because it keeps their cultural identity alive. That may be so in the best of all possible worlds but it is not true in reality. Forcing a child to not speak English at home is counter-productive because it stifles the growth of her/his cognitive abilities, in my personal experience.
However, ability to compete in an academic setting is not determined by language alone. We, as a community, must place a greater emphasis on literacy and learning in general. After all, a university education requires that the student be well rounded in all aspects of human knowledge. Bilingual education offers the student the possibility of keeping up with her/his peers while learning a new language.
* An October 1997 poll by the Los Angeles Times showed that California voters favored a proposed ballot measure to limit bilingual education by an astonishing 4-1 margin. The support was greatest among Hispanics: 84 percent. "Wake up call for los Maestros...If you are into Bilingual Ed. your days are numbered," the bilingual paper San Diego La Prensa warned teachers. "We, los Chicanos, are responsible for putting you in...and you betrayed us. Bilingual Ed. has been turned into a full employment program for your own agenda that has nothing to do with our kids...that's why 84% of la gente en Los Angeles voted against you...YOU BLEW THE PROGRAM."
It has been said that there are lies, big lies, and statistics. The L.A. Times Poll falls squarely in this category. The results of the poll are very much dependent on how the question was asked. The question was: "There is new initiative trying to qualify for the June primary ballot that would require all public instruction to be conducted in English and for students not fluent in English to be placed in short-term English immersion program. If the June 1998 primary election were beign held today, would you vote for or against this measure?" On the surface, it seems like a good idea. Who in his right mind is going to say that they are against learnign English?
But the devil is in the details since this short summary is bereft of any facts that an educated electorate needs for an educated decision. The poll report simply meaasures a "knee-jerk" rection. Which brings me to the question of who is the electorate being measured. The poll included 1,396 adults, 1,092 of them registered voters who were contacted by telephone. The TImes claims that the sample was weighted to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, education, region, and registration. However, they admit that the error margin for certain subgroups may be higher than the 3% points they claim to have. Since Latinos are notorious for non-participation, I would not be surprised if the error margin was larger. In other words, their sample may be heavily skewed in political leanings and education, that is, a wealthy Cuban Republican may be less inclined to vote for bilingual education than a blue-collar Chicano Democrat.
To their credit, the L.A. Times does indicate that the numbers might change as the electorate learns more about Proposition 227, as it did during the 187 campaign. And that seems to be the case since other polls conducted by Times, where the questions have been worded differently, have produced results that indicate greater opposition to 227.
As for the assertions made by "La Prensa," I am sorry to say that I don't place much credence on their asertions since their Web spin-off, Latino Beat, has become a mouth-piece for the 227 campaign. If you want more details please read my comment on their editorial. But it is telling that the above quote does not address the methodology of bilingual education. It attacks the way it has been administered. Their support of 227 is akin to burning the village in order to save it.
* In Los Lunas, New Mexico, high school students walked out to protest the lack of English tutoring. In Dearborn, Michigan, the school board junked a proposal for $5 million in federal money to begin a bilingual program after parents complained. In Princeton, New Jersey, immigrant parents raised so much hell about rules that made it difficult to get their children out of bilingual programs that the state legislature stepped in to change them.
I am not familiar with these events, hence I cannot comment on them.
Though usually poorly organized and often relatively powerless--they often aren't U.S. citizens and sometimes aren't even legal residents--the parents are starting to make themselves heard. Michigan has adopted reforms in its bilingual programs. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, did away with its bilingual program altogether. So did Orange County and three smaller school districts in California. In November, when Orange County voters were asked what they thought of the change, a crushing 86 percent approved.
While I am not familiar with the events in Pennsylvania and Michigan, I do know that the movements in Orange County have not emanated from the immigrant communities. They have originated in the "Anglo" sector. In fact, considerable opposition has been mounted in by the Latino community but there have been legal setbacks, as well as plain stone-walling by the school boards. I will never forget the statement from a blonde woman interviewed on TV about the need to teach English to immigrant children. It was her belief that this children should be taught English before they enter a public school, at their parents expense. As if the immigrants were not contributing nothing to the local economy.
An even bigger blow may be on the way in California, where voters in 1998 will consider a ballot initiative making bilingual education optional. Under the "English for the Children" initiative, non-English-speaking children would normally be placed in a short-term "structured immersion" program; parents could, however, apply for a waiver to have their children instead placed or kept in a bilingual or English-only program. If it wins the sweeping victory that current polls predict, the proposition is bound to turn bilingual education into a hot-button issue around the rest of the country--just as previous California ballot initiatives on property taxes and affirmative action have started dominoes tumbling. At press time, it was unknown whether the initiative would be on the ballot in June or November.
What Mr. Garvin neglects to mention is that, in the name of this "short-term 'structure-immersion'," 227 "allows" and "encourages" the placement of children with the same linguistic ability for a period of up to one year in the same classroom. Furthermore, during this one year period, the wording of the Proposition is silent on what other areas of the curriculum will be covered. The wording seems to indicate, to my layman's understanding, that the student will only be engaged in English classes.
Indeed, Proposition 227 allows parents to apply for a waver. However, they must first clear many hurdles: (i) parents must appear at the school to apply for a waiver, (ii) the child must be placed for at least 30 days (calendar? school days?) in an English-Only classroom, (iii) the child must be labeled by the school faculty and principal as having "physical, emotional, psychological, or educational" needs that can only be addressed in a bilingual education setting, and (iv) a written report is to be submitted and approved by the local school superintendent, who must operate under guidelines drawn by the local school board. Furthermore, the text of teh initiative goes on to say, and to me this is the coup de grace to any waiver, "the existance of such special needs shall not compel issuance of a waiver, and the parents shall be fully informed of their right to refuse to agree to a waiver." To say that 227 gives parents a choice must be somebody's idea of a sick joke.
The proposition is the brainchild of Silicon Valley millionaire Ron Unz...Assembling a campaign around a nucleus of anti-bilingual Hispanic teachers (including Jaime Escalante, the math teacher whose success in East Los Angeles inspired the film Stand and Deliver), Unz has turned bilingual education into California's top political issue.
And in the process increased his name recognition to a very high level. This is publicity that money can't buy. Why is Mr. Unz promoting this "idea?" It is my personal opinion that Mr. Unz, who appears to be a very intelligent individual, has turned his attention from the financial sofware field to politics. A one-time promising physicist who once trained under Prof. Stephen Hawkings, who occupies Isaac Newton's position at Oxford University, Lucasian Professor of Physics, Mr. Unz turned a graduate-student moonlighting project into a multimillion dollar company.
Along the way, he seems to have made influential friends in the financial and conservative community -he has published several op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal. He currently serves in the board of Linda Chavez's Center for Economic Opportunity, an organization whose sole aim seems to be the promotion of English-Only legislation.
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That's still the biggest misconception among people who've never had a personal brush with bilingual education. It is not a program where two sets of children learn one another's language at the same time. That's called dual, or two-way, immersion. Only a few well-heeled school districts can afford to offer it, always as an elective, and the only complaint about it is that there usually aren't enough slots to go around. Another thing bilingual education is not is a program conducted mostly in English, where the teacher occasionally translates a particularly difficult concept, or offers extra language help to children with limited English skills. Known variously as English as a Second Language, sheltered English, or structured English immersion, these are all wrinkles in a technique that educators call immersion, because the students are expected to wade into English quickly.
Mr. Garvin is mistaken. Students are not supposed to wade quickly. They are supposed to be dunked, and, depending on the training or charity of the teacher, they are to be given "swimming lessons." The proponents of 227 claim that this is the best way to teach English and claim to have proof that the method works.
But the claim is hollow. Using the same yardstick the 227 proponents employ to discredit bilingual education -number of students who attain fluency after one year in the program- their showcase program at Taft Elementary in Santa Ana, California, ran by Gloria Matta Tuchman, one of the sponsors of 227, has a re-designation rate of 17%, a "failure rate" of 83%. Since 227 intends the immersion program to not exceed one year, what are the schools going to do with all those student who do not make the grade? Who is going to be blamed by the debacle? The teachers? The students? The methodology?
It is my pesimistic opinion that the school system is being set-up for a fall.
As Hayakawa explained to me that day, when educators use the term bilingual education, it's shorthand for "transitional bilingual education," which is the other major technique for teaching languages. TBE, as it is often called, was originally structured around the idea that students would take the main curriculum in their native language while they learned English, so that they wouldn't fall behind in other subjects. But over the past two decades or so, most school districts have reshaped their TBE programs to reflect the ideas of the so-called "facilitation" theorists of language education. The facilitation theorists believe that children cannot effectively learn a second language until they are fully literate in the first one, a process that can take four to seven years. (A new study from TBE advocates at the University of California at Riverside ups the ante to 10 years.)
Mr. Garvin is embellishing his tales because no school district would ever do this. It would be political suicide to do so. In fact, LAUSD policy is that at least 30 minutes a day are to be devoted to ESL. This compares favorably with the amount devoted to teaching English skills in a regular, English-Only classroom. In addition, English is to be used informally as much as possible throughout the day. An astute observer would inquire if this policy is followed across the board. Since implementation of Distric policy is not strongly policed, actual compliance is left up to the school principals, who may or may not enforce it. But as I have stated above, this is not an indictment of the methodology but of its implementation, something that should certainly be corrected.
Mr. Garvin misleads the reader when he slams the UC Riverside researchers. The facts are that Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) had been collecting data on student performance and socioeconomic factors for a number of years. With approximate 80% of its students classified as LEP, SAUSD had the foresight to collect this data in order to assess the success of its programs: 31% receive ASPL (TBE in Mr. Garvin's jargon), 14% immersion, and 10% combined TBE plus immersion, with the rest of LEPs having attained fluncy status. However, SAUSD did not have the expertise nor manpower to colate the data into coherent numbers.
To this end, they retained the services of the California Education Research Cooperative at the University of California, Riverside. Application of "survival rate" statistical analysis techniques -developed by the US military to assess effective triage policy- to the data revealed that regardless of the techniques employed to teach English to SAUSD students, the time to achieve full fluency was in the order of seven to ten years, even though the great majority of students had been functioning in English-Only classrooms since third grade. All this is contained in a report available from their Web site.
Does this mean that the educational methods used by SAUSD are failing? Not at all. It simply means that full fluency is not attained by every student in a one year crash study. It reinforces the notion that no educational methodology is superior but that they are all complementary. If Mr. Garvin is unhappy with reality is his tough luck.
During that time, a TBE student is supposed to be taught almost entirely in his native language, by a teacher fluent in that language, using books and films and tapes in that language. Gradually increasing bits of English are worked into the mix. At some point--bingo!--the child hits his "threshold" in the first language. Now he's ready to suck up English like a human vacuum cleaner.
Preposterous. No serious teacher or educational researcher would advocate this view. It simply isn't true.
The idea that a kid will learn English by being taught in Spanish does not usually strike people outside the education field as very plausible--"loco, completamente loco" was the reaction of Luisa Hernandez when the principal at 9th Street Elementary in Los Angeles explained it to her--but the theory is so inculcated in many teachers that they rarely question it. When they do, it can be a shattering experience. Rosalie Pedalino Porter, director of the Research in English Acquisition and Development Institute, taught Spanish bilingual classes in kindergarten and elementary school for five years in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a 6-year-old kid right off the boat from Sicily, Porter had done just fine without TBE, but education school had filled her with missionary zeal for the theory. She vividly remembers the day that she began to wonder if the bilingual god had failed.It was a lesson in colors. "Juan, que color es este?" Porter asked one little boy, waving a box in her hand.
"Green," he replied.
"Verde," she corrected with the Spanish word.
"Green," Juan repeated.
"Verde," Porter corrected him again.
"Green," Juan answered again.
What in the hell am I doing? Porter wondered to herself. Why am I telling him not to speak English? Pretty soon, once her classroom door was closed, Porter was giving lessons in English. "I wasn't the only one, either," she says.
A very sad story indeed. But one that simply exploits the idiocy of forcing square pegs into round holes. Why should a teacher insist on teaching Spanish to an English speaker? Just to fulfill a mandate from a principal? Isn't it obvious that the wrong methodology is applied? What honest teacher would want to go along with such crazy situation. But again, is this the fault of bilingual education? It is not.
Nevertheless, for every Porter that Mr. Garvin trots out, there are many more teachers that can attest that bilingual education is the best educational methodology. It is so because it addresses the need to maintain te student in a full academic track while using ESL techniques to teach English. The problem with the opponents of bilingual education is that they see children being taught the curriculum in a non-English language.
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In those twilight days of the Great Society, the Bilingual Education Amendment passed easily, triggering no alarms. Yarborough always said he didn't know and didn't much care what method was used to teach the kids. The concept of TBE didn't exist, and it would be another decade before facilitation theory came slithering out of the primordial linguistic ooze.
Why would anyone writing for a magazine that calls itself Reason resort to such sleazy terms? Why, indeed?
Yet, in retrospect, the warning signs were there. Hispanic activists flocked to testify for the bill, and very few of them said anything about learning English. Instead, they argued that the high dropout rate was due to the fact that Hispanic kids had low self-esteem because they weren't being taught in their native language ("or their parents' native language," as NYU historian Diane Ravitch acidly noted later).
Again, Mr. Garvin indulges in fantasy. High dropout rates were due to the sytematic marginalization of the Mexican-descent child. From the first day of school, where they were relegated to the back of the class or, worse, placed with the learning disabled, to the last day of high-school, where they were warehoused in shop and home economics classes, Mexican-American children were shown not to be deserving of a quality education. Why stay in school when the end result was predictable and hopeless?
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Militant Chicano activists immediately began demanding that the money from Yarborough's bill bankroll Spanish-language instruction. Within three years, what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was issuing guidelines making bilingual programs compulsory for school districts. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau v. Nichols that non-English-speaking children (in this case, a Chinese student in San Francisco) had the right to special language programs. The next year HEW said that meant bilingual programs, period--and not just for kids who couldn't speak English. Now bilingual education was expanded to include any child from a home where English wasn't the primary language. Even a kid who spoke like an Oxford don was headed for bilingual classes if his parents preferred Spanish or Chinese. By 1980, HEW had bludgeoned 500 school districts nationwide into creating bilingual programs, with more on the way.
Mr. Garvin is obviously ignorant of the execrable conditions found in all schools serving predominantly Mexican-American comunities. But even if he did, I hold no illusion that he would amend his characterization of Chicano activists as separatists bent on the Reconquista, as Glenn Spencer, of VCT, likes to rant.
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What Cummins and other TBE advocates don't like to admit is that they turn a blind eye to a multitude of acts of intellectual xenophobia and cultural hegemony every day in schools with bilingual curriculums. Here's one of the dirty little secrets of TBE: It's just for Spanish speakers.
Finally, Mr. Garvin gets around to what has been his subtext: bilingual education is part of an effort intended to prop those people who were conquered back in 1848. It is therefore a real threat to the republic and must be dismantled. This is, of course, laughable since the numbers receiving TBE are so small. Presently, California provides TBE to 30% of its LEP population. But given the tremendous variability across districts, the amount of Spanish used in teh classroom is not guaranteed.
"When you talk about bilingual education, people will get absolutely hysterical over how kids will be cognitively deprived if they're not taught in their native tongue," says Christine Rossell, a political science professor at Boston University who has observed hundreds of classrooms in her research on bilingual education. "And yet, thousands and thousands of children are not taught in their native tongue every day, and no one cares. Polish kids don't get taught in their native tongue. Vietnamese kids don't get taught in their native tongue. Russian kids don't, and Greek kids don't. Even though all these principles of bilingual education are supposedly universal, bilingual education is basically just Spanish, and no one seems to notice. I figure it's some kind of mass delusion. That's the only way you can explain it."
I wonder why Prof. Rossell, a political science specialist, is conducting research on educational issues, especially when she makes such categorical statements about non-Spanish speakers not being taught in their native languages. She is wrong about that. In San Francisco alone, the majority of Chinese origin students are in an ASPL classrooms. In LAUSD there is a variety of classes which are conducted in languages other than Spanish.
There are some true TBE classes in other languages. More often, though, a class labeled TBE in anything but Spanish will include at most a token nod to the native language. Doug Lasken, who teaches at Ramona Elementary School in Los Angeles, for a time presided over what was supposedly a TBE class for second- and third-grade Armenian-speaking children. "I certainly don't speak a word of Armenian, and never told anyone I did," Lasken remembers. "It was mysterious. I wondered what I was doing there sometimes. But it was a fun class, with great kids, and we spoke English. They had learned it all by themselves, without any special help at all." About the only hint of TBE in the classroom was some battered turn-of-the-century Armenian textbooks that were rarely opened.
How interesting. Mr. Garvin finds a teacher that admits to have been assigned to a class that was supposed to be mostly conducted in a language that the teacher does not speak. Who put this teacher up to this? The principal? Or did the teacher misrepresent himself? Why would this teacher go along with such transparent fraud? Just to keep the job?
But there is more to this story. Mr. Lasken , the devoted teacher, happens to be an activist in the English-Only movement. His "writings" are featured in the 227 Web site. He forced United Teachers of Los Angeles, the LAUSD teacher union, to hold a referendum on the union's position on 227. The referendum came to be know as the Lasken amendment. Despite extensive lobbying by the 227 forces, the amendment was defeated. So Mr. Lasken is not an innocent party on all this. Why should his testament be believed?
One reason other languages have been discreetly pitched overboard is that any attempt to supply TBE for everyone who theoretically needs it would bankrupt the country before lunch. Schools in the state of New York include kids who speak 121 different languages. In the city of Seattle, 76. In Alexandria Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, 19--including Tagalog, Lao, Twi, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, and Sinhalese. For each of these languages, a full curriculum would have to be planned, textbooks would have to be purchased, and certified teachers would have to be hired. It is a prospect that daunts even the most madcap tax-and-spend liberal.
Mr. Garvin's argument is what is known as reductio ad absurdum. If cost were the only consideration, a great deal of the country's infrastructure would never have been built. He makes it sound as if the education of non-English speakers is an all-TBE-or-nothing proposition. To my knowledge, the Lau decision grants a non-English speaker a quality education. School districts are supposed to do whatever is feasible to provide that. In some settings, TBE may be the most appropriate method. In others, immersion will be the program of choice.
It is worth noting that TBE has, to date, mostly been offered to Spanish speakers because there is an economy of scale. In some districts, for example, San Francisco, the predominant language is Chinese. But this is changing, since textbooks, as well as certificated bilingual teachers, in languages other than Spanish or Chinese are now becoming available.
But even if we invaded Saudi Arabia and seized all its oil to fund full-service TBE, we couldn't provide it. The teachers simply don't exist. When California's Little Hoover Commission, Sacramento's version of the General Accounting Office, investigated bilingual education in 1993, it discovered a statewide shortage of 20,000 teachers. Even among Spanish-speaking teachers, in by far the most plentiful supply, there was a 60 percent shortfall. When it came to Romanian, Farsi, Pashto, and Lahu, forget it. Of course, if anyone had applied for all those empty jobs, there was no way for California to evaluate their competence; the state had teacher certification tests for only nine of the dozens of languages spoken by its schoolchildren.
As pointed out above, teachers are not available because the state has not seen fit to provide incentives for their training. In addition, there existed a reluctance on the part of educational institutions to restructure their English-oriented teaching methods. Hence, the production of bilingual teachers has been seriously hindered. It is not surprising that there is a shortage of qualified teachers.
Some languages simply can't be taught at all in TBE, because they have no written forms. (Remember, the whole point is that students must not merely speak their native language but read and write it well before they move on to English.) That has not stopped the educrats from trying. In Massachusetts, school officials actually created an alphabet so that Kriolu--an obscure spoken-only dialect of Portuguese used in parts of the Cape Verde Islands--could be written for the first time. Textbooks and a curriculum followed, and now Massachusetts boasts the only schools in the entire world where classes are taught in Kriolu. (The unenlightened schools of the Cape Verde Islands continue to teach in Portuguese.) Massachusetts even sends home report cards and school bulletins in Kriolu. The parents have no idea whatsoever what this stuff says--none of them can read Kriolu--but their opinion hardly matters, does it? We know better, we're the teachers.
Again, Mr. Garvin lets his ignorance dictate his sentences. Nowhere in the whole of ASPL theory is there a requirement that a child speak, read, and write in his native language at an advanced level -"well" in Mr. Garvin's words- before s/he can be transitioned to English. This canard, however, is what he needs to condemned a Massachussetts school district in their attempt to reach students who speak a Portuguese dialect. To use his argument, then any effort to give a written representation to the many Native American languages still in use is a waste of time.
It is tempting to label the Kriolu classrooms as the all-time most hare-brained product of bilingual education, but in considering TBE, caution is always advised; this is a field lush with opportunities for stupidity. A better choice may be experiments during the 1970s in New York City and Laredo, Texas, where teachers were trained to speak "Spanglish" ("Hey, Maria, vamanos por el cine Orpheum, they're having a festival de peliculas de directores de Cuba tonight"), supposedly the native language of local schoolchildren. Furious Puerto Rican parents snuffed the idea before it got anywhere in New York, but the Laredo program is still cited in bilingual literature as "the concurrent approach."
Mr. Garvin's ignorance on the theory of languages is laughable but in tune with his apparent "conservative" beliefs. He believes that study and use of "border-lands" languages is stupid because it elevates a dialect to the level of language. If he had bothered to do his homework, he would have found that the English spoken in the days of the "Conquest of the West" was just what is spoken in the barrios today. Since animal husbandry over large ranges was not known in the Anglo world, the early cowpokes were forced to borrow many of their terminology from the vaqueros they found. Thus, words such as lariat and rodeo made their way into today's English.
What is the use of using a Standard version of a language with those who do not understand it? In my opinion, using borderland languages and dialects, such as "Ebonics," in order to communicate with students who might otherwise are left out of the educational process, is to be commended instead of disparaged. This does not mean that there will be no convergence towards teaching Standard English.
Here's another crazy aunt locked away in the bilingual attic: TBE administrators ruthlessly and routinely shanghai English-speaking kids into the program...But Tony doesn't live in Iowa or Kansas. And to the officials in his school district in the Southern California city of Hawthorne, there was only one relevant factor: his last name, Velasquez. When he started first grade in 1995, they put him in TBE. The school did notify his mother Ericka, who offered no objection. She heard the word bilingual and figured it meant he was in a class where he would study both Spanish and English. Ericka and her husband speak both languages and wanted to make sure Tony did, too. But after a few weeks, she began to have doubts.
Mr. Garvin makes an unproven assumption: children who sound Hispanic are automatically placed in bilingual classrooms. However, he lets out the reason why Tony was placed there: his parents use Spanish at home and wanted their son to be taught Spanish. But did not take the time to inform themselves of what bilingual education means nor what their choices were. They believed on a rosy scenario.
"All his spelling words, every day, were in Spanish," Ericka recalls. "I began to wonder, is this really bilingual? Or is it just Spanish?" Finally she paid a visit to the school, where she discovered Tony's class spent just a few minutes a day on English. "I want him out of here," she told the teacher. Nonetheless, it took an entire year of skirmishing before he moved to an English classroom. "I was so mad," Ericka says, brow knitting as she thinks about it. "All that time wasted! He was so confused--why was he in Spanish classes when he knew English? He wants to be in English like the other kids...Now, for the first time, he likes doing his schoolwork."
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Ericka allowed Tony to be placed in a TBE classroom under the mistaken belief that he was going to be taught both English and Spanish. Once she found out this was not the case, she attemtpted to reverse course. On the surface, it would be straight-forward: take the kid out of the classroom. But if there is no room in English-only clasrooms, what then?
...
The idea that those children must be taught in Spanish is ludicrous to Ericka. The daughter of a Nicaraguan immigrant, as a child she never heard English in her own home and spoke none at all when she started school. Yet she speaks it perfectly now, in the stop-and-go cadences (though not the loopy vocabulary) of the Valley Girls who shared her all-English classroom. "If children can't learn English without a special program," she wonders, "how do you explain me?"
Simple, Ericka never did learn proper English since she still use it at home. Her stop-and-go cadence is a hallmark of the person who does not have a full command of the language since she has to stop, think about what to say, and then say it. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not show total fluency.
...
But even school systems that pretend to use more sophisticated techniques for evaluating students often misroute English speakers into foreign-tongue classrooms. Typically, the district conducts a "home language survey" of new students to determine which ones come from a non-English-speaking background, then uses a standardized achievement test to zero in on kids who will be placed in TBE.Home language surveys, however, are hopelessly broad. They typically ask if anyone in the home speaks another language, a fatal flaw when dealing with immigrant households that often include three generations with widely varying language patterns. If Grandma was already 60 when she came to the United States from Saigon or Havana and never learned to speak English, little Tuyen or Rodrigo has to take the test, regardless of the fact that he speaks nothing but English.
Mr. Garvin makes it sound as if every child with a "foreign" lastname is forced to take a test. I know for a fact that this is not the case. My children did not have to do it, even though I indicated that I speak to them in Spanish. School officials simply took my word that they speak English and that was it. To this day, I receive literature from LAUSD in Spanish even though my children are not in bilingual classes. Thus, my experience completely refutes Mr. Garvin's general statements.
Nor will the tests necessarily save them....
And it doesn't necessarily say anything about whether they know enough English to understand history or math lessons.
...
"I have a professor friend whose kid was given an English oral proficiency test because he had a Hispanic name," she said. "The kid tested as limited-English proficient even though he didn't know any language besides English. But he's kind of an odd kid, just wouldn't answer some of the questions, and acted bored. That's not exactly uncommon with 5-year-olds. They may not feel confident enough to answer questions asked by a stranger, or they may just not feel like talking at all at that moment."
Nothing in what Prof. Rossell speaks of says anything about the validity of ASPL methods in teaching LEP students. They are a string of horror stories about bureaucrats. Why should a program that, when properly implemented, works be blamed for administrative abuses? The proper answer is, to me, very clear: reform the educational bureaucracy before proscribing an educational method in favor of an old, failed policy: English-Only.
The failures of standardized tests are much more than theoretical. When the U.S. Department of Education investigated federally funded bilingual programs in Texas in 1982, it found 90 percent of the students designated limited-English proficient actually spoke better English than Spanish. A 1980 study of several California school districts showed only about half the Hispanic limited-English proficient students spoke better Spanish than English; 40 percent spoke no Spanish at all.
This is meaningless. It only says that their knowledge of standard Spanish is worse than their knowldege of standard English. They still can be classified as LEP.
Attempts to develop language aptitude tests that would do a better job of identifying TBE candidates haven't met with much success. As an experiment, one such test was given to Chicago students who spoke English only and were above-average readers. Almost half of them wound up classified as non- or limited-English-speaking. A later experiment with English-only Cherokee Indian students had nearly identical results.
Does this say that ASPL is a failure? No, it says that testing language ability is not a simple matter. Mr. Garvin assumes that the students tested were already English-proficient. Isn't there a possibility that the standards set by the proficiency tests are too high even for native English speakers? Alternatively, could it be that the students, although allegedly proficient, are not properly educated, nonetheless?
The victims of testing malpractice, by the way, are almost always kids from poor families. "There's a ton of research showing that students from economically disadvantaged households score lower than the rest of the population on standardized tests," says Rossell. Yet the church and civil rights groups who would undoubtedly be in a blood frenzy if these tests were being used against poor kids for virtually any other purpose are curiously quiet about TBE.
I am shocked, shocked to find that Prof. Rossell agrees with what many in poor communities have been saying to deaf ears: standardized tests are geared to test skill of the middle and upper classes. Therefore, standardized tests have been, and continue to be, used to deny the poor a quality education.
Prior to the institution of bilingual education, the number of Mexican-American graduating from the University of California was abismally low. Those numbers have increased at least ten-fold. If the bilingual education were the failure that Mr. Garvin asserts it is, those numbers would not have been attained. Tangible progress has been attained. Perhaps that is why church and civil rights are silent.
...
Some of TBE's shortcomings might be argued away, or at least choked down, if bilingual education actually worked. But it doesn't. "When this all started out, we didn't know anything, so we adopted bilingual education on a leap of faith," says Rosalie Pedalino Porter of the Research in English Acquisition and Development Institute. "Thirty years later, we know better. The effects have been almost uniformly negative."
I beg to differ. Thirty years later, we find that, despite the odds against them, from nativist beliefs to reduced funding, ASPL programs have produced many capable students. Students that, in the days of English only, would have been labeled failures from day one. Thirty years later we find that ASPL methods have never been given the support necessary: no teachers, no textbooks, no curriculum. Yet, amidst all this negativity, ASPL continues to flourish and even succeed. It is Ms. Porter who has failed.
Sifting through social science research is always tricky for a layman; there are so many studies, their methodologies obscured in thick layers of jargon, their outcomes in impenetrable mathematics. Fortunately, when it comes to bilingual education, someone has done the academic grunt work for us. Christine Rossell and her research partner Keith Baker, who directed several studies of bilingual education for the U.S. Department of Education, sifted through scientific evaluations of 300 bilingual programs. Their first conclusion: Most of the research was just plain rotten. "It's as bad as the dueling psychologists you see in criminal courtrooms," Rossell says. Of the 300 evaluations, Rossell and Baker found only 72 that were methodologically sound.Then they compiled a scorecard based on the results. The outcome was devastating for TBE. In head-to-head comparisons with the various versions of immersion teaching on reading, grammar, and math, TBE lost every time. That is, there were always more studies showing immersion therapy produced superior results. Often, lots more. For instance, 83 percent of the studies comparing TBE to "structured immersion" teaching (essentially, using simple English) showed kids learned to read better in the structured immersion classes; not a single one showed TBE to be superior.
The research of Rossell and Baker has repeatedly been discredited. Need I say more?
Perhaps the single most calamitous statistic was in the comparison between TBE and doing nothing at all. An amazing 64 percent of the studies found kids learned grammar better in sink-or-swim classes without any special features whatsoever than they did in TBE. Many critics have seized on another way of evaluating TBE's results: the length of time it takes students to "graduate" into mainstream classes. Many school districts don't even compile those statistics--do they fear the results, or do they just not care? and which is worse?--but where they're available, the numbers are sad.
Above, Mr. Garvin completely dismisses the findings of the UC Riverside team that analyzed the data collected by Santa Ana Unified School District. The numbers do not show a sad state of affairs. Yet, because the analysis did not agree with Mr. Garvin's bias, it is dismissed out of hand. What is the use of producing data if the results are not to believed? Furthermore, how can school districts, always strapped for cash, devote the considerable resources to do this kind of study?
A 1994 study in New York City showed only about half the children who enter TBE in kindergarten have been mainstreamed within three years. For kids who enter in the second grade, the number drops to 22 percent. And in the sixth grade, just 7 percent. By contrast, 80 percent of students who enter immersion programs in kindergarten, 68 percent of those who enter in the second grade, and 33 percent of those who enter in the sixth grade are mainstreamed within three years.
If Mr. Garvin's use of statistics is to be believed, then what 227 proposes, total immersion, will be a dismal failure since one year of intense English instruction is not going to be sufficient. The proponents of the demise of bilingual education seem to feel that force-feeding a language is better than giving a "few minutes of English instruction." But this is demonstrably wrong since no subject matter as complex as a language is learned this way. If it was possible, it would be feasible to produce violin prodigies or mathematical geniuses in a few months.
A 1985 report on TBE in Boston showed more than half the TBE students in high school or middle school had been in the program six years or more. Across the country in Seattle, a 1993 study showed the annual exit rate from TBE was 10.6 percent. In California, it's less than 6 percent. These rates are low even according to TBE theory, which says kids should be ready for English classes in four to seven years.
Yet, the best evidence for the length of time required to achieve fluency, the UCR data analysis, is dismissed as flawed or partisan by Mr. Garvin. So damned if you do the analysis and damn of you don't.
Not everyone agrees that exit rates are terribly significant. "Transition out of TBE is a function of local politics and test scores on very unreliable tests, not whether or not you know English," says Rossell. "The reality is that teachers inside the program are cheating, teaching English even though they're not supposed to. So the good news is that bilingual education is not as harmful as people think."
Surprise, surprise. Politics is a major component in how ASPL methods are applied. Yet, when ASPL teachers do what they are supposed to be do, that is, applying ESL techniques for a pedagogically determined period of time, they are cheating. How else are those students supposed to learn English.
Try arguing that point to Alice Callaghan, who runs the Las Familias del Pueblo family center in the Los Angeles garment district, and she has an easy comeback. It's a paper written by one of the little boys who comes to her center each day after school, a veteran of six years of TBE: "I my parens per mi in dis shool en I so I feol essayrin too old in the shool my border o reri can grier das mony putni gire and I sisairin aliro sceer.""The school district says this boy is doing very well and he's nearly ready to leave bilingual classes," says Callaghan, shaking her head. "As far as I'm concerned, that says it all."
It was at Callaghan's center that the boycott of 9th Street Elementary was conceived. For an entire year, the immigrant parents of the kids in her after-school program had been trying to meet with administrators at the school to ask for more English in the curriculum. No thanks, said the school officials. We know better, we're the teachers.
There is no denying that many, if not all, schools in the nation "promote" students to higher grades whether they have mastered the material or not. Ms. Callaghan has managed to find just such an example. If anything, it indicates that Ms. Callaghan has failed in her duties as family center director. If the student has been in ASPL programs for six years and has never demonstrated any progress, surely she should have sounded the alarm well before the problem became almost insurmountable. It is my understanding that she provides after-school care to those children. Why didn't she work to counter what she terms the school failure?
...
We could boycott, pull the kids out of class until the school officials do what we're asking. We could--"Boycott! Boycott!" shouted one of the mothers, jumping out of her chair. "Let's do the boycott!""It was instantaneous," recalls Callaghan...
School administrators reacted to the boycott like plantation overseers to a slave revolt...
In the end, though, the bright light of publicity generated by the boycott caused the school officials to scuttle for the corners. They capitulated, though later some would hint darkly that the parents had somehow been duped and manipulated by Callaghan. It is a charge that puzzles the parents. "It was our idea, we were the ones who wanted to do it," says Juana Losara, a Mexican seamstress whose three children attend the school. "I knew my children needed help. I would hear somebody speaking English on the street or on TV, and I would say to the kids, `What's he saying?' And they would all answer, `I don't know.' They were born here, but they don't speak any English."
What can one say about the language used in the above paragraphs? Admistrators and teachers are portrayed as nothing less than cockroaches. How can any reader not empathize with the garment workers? But it is clear that Mr. Garvin uses the English-as-a-birthright fallacy very skillfully. Unfortunately, that is not true. The children of Juana Losara live in an environment where English is not spoken. How could schools be expected to remedy this? Schools do the next best thing: teach the curriculum while gradually introducing a foreign tongue to those children. To expect more is unrealistic.
When Losara found out her children were spending less than an hour a day on English, she went to the school. "All the other American children are speaking English at this age," she told an official. "Why aren't mine?" The answer--be patient--was not good enough. "If they don't learn English at this age, at 9 or 10, they aren't going to speak it when they grow up," she said.Losara knows how hard it is to learn English later: After 15 years in this country, she barely speaks a word. She knows the cost, too: "If I could get English, maybe I could get a job I like better. But the first question is always, `Do you speak English?'" So, like her husband, she stays at the big sewing machines in the garment factories, toiling away for minimum wage.
Going back to Mexico, though, never crosses her mind. "I want to stay here," she says quietly. "I want my children to be something. My husband and I are nothing. But we're struggling so they can be something."
I do not wish to be cruel to Juana Losara but it is clear that her expectations are being exploited. Languages can be learned at any age, not necessarily at a young age. Furthermore, in order to learn a language, it must be used, through reading and exposure to it. This cannot be accomplished in a mono-lingual home. Mrs. Losara has not learned English because she has not invested the time to do it. I know countless immigrants who have learned English through hard work and perseverance. She should be able to the same.
Perhaps the most telling argument of all against bilingual education is the high school dropout rate among Hispanic students: 30 percent, more than double that for blacks or whites. Those who have difficulty with English are far more likely to drop out. The message has gotten through to Hispanic parents. The Los Angeles Times poll showing their support for the anti-bilingual ballot proposition in California was hardly the first to reflect their skepticism about TBE. A 1996 survey of Hispanic parents in Houston, San Antonio, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles showed that they regard teaching English as the single most important thing that schools do. Second: math, history, and other academic subjects. Spanish finished a distant third.
This is a most preposterous statement. Dropout rates were even higher before bilingual education was instituted. Further, it makes the insiduous claim that all Hispanics go through bilingual education, something that is clearly not possible since not all Hispanic LEP students receive an ASPL education. It is equally possible and, to me, more likely that the high dropout rate can be blamed on not offering enough bilingual education, since, as pointed above, an equal number of LEP students are placed in English-only classrooms.
The poll results were debunked above so not much more needs to be said. The 1996 survey that Mr. Garvin refers to is another matter. The study was commisioned by the Center for Equal Opportunity, which is headed by Linda Chavez, who was once the President of US English, until a scandal involving anti-Latino sentiments on the part of one its founders forced her to resign. Some of the particulars of thise survey are very revealing: the great majority of those questioned have never had children in bilingual programs. A similar number reported living in the US for more than ten years. Most interesting of all, the survey respondents were asked if Spanish should be taught instead of English. This is highly misleading since ASPL does not teach Spanish. It uses the student's knowledge of Spanish to teach to read and write as well as to teach the rest of the curriculum. It may come as a surprise to most people, but learning to read and write in a language that uses the Roman alphabet, like Spanish, is sufficient to read and write in another, like English or German. But what shows the ultimate aim of this survey is the paragraph found at the top of the Web page containing the survey:"The Center for Equal Opportunity is currently seeking to interview people who have had a negative experience with bilingual education programs, especially parents." Any survey that claims that bilingual education is not wanted and that originates from people with such a clear bias cannot be beleived.
But Hispanic politicians and activists, wildly out of touch with their own communities, continue to wave the bloody bilingual flag. Characteristic is their reaction to the California proposition. Although the proposition would establish "sheltered English" or "structured immersion" as the educational norm in California, it would by no means make TBE illegal or force schools to do away with it. Any parents who want to place their children in TBE could do so by asking for a waiver.
Indeed, 227 allows for waivers. However, obtaining one is a very difficult process which 227 itself does not make mandatory. This has been thoroughly explained above.
...
Rosalie Pedrino Porter believes TBE's champions will conduct a scorched-earth campaign in its defense, no matter what polls show about what parents really want. "It's now wrapped up in politics--ethnic politics, victimhood, which of course gives you preferential status through affirmative action," she says. "It's wrapped up in money and power and control. Now we have a huge bureaucracy of administrators, bilingual psychologists, textbook publishers producing books in Spanish. Whether anybody wants to admit it or not, there's a huge investment in keeping this going. The fact is you can't make changes in this program very easily."
Ms. Porter uses value-laden language designed to appeal to nativist. How can proponents of bilingual education conduct a scorched-earth campaign? If anything, it is those promoting 227 who have a significant ideological baggage. Funding for the 227 campaign is coming, for the most part, from people associated with US English, external to California. 227 supporters have been conducting a carefully orchestrated campaign to lure the electorate to think that bilingual education is unAmerican. 227 supporters like to portray themselves as non-partisan and unconnected with the 209 and 187 campaign. Yet Ms. Porter highlights a highly partisan issue, affirmative action, and implies that bilingual education is affirmative action in the K-12 arena. Moreover, she personifies it into the latest boogaboo: ethnic politics and victimhood, as if the new language would remove the historical fact that education for those same communities has always received short shrift.
She affirms that there is a huge monetary incentive to keep bilingual education but there is no reason to believe that significant savings will accrue if those programs are shut down. In fact, the fiscal impact on state and local governments predicted by California's Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance reads "probably no change in total sum spending on K-12 public education. Potential savings to local school districs on programs for students with limited English proficiency." It is worth pointing that most of these local programs are paid with state or federal funds. In addition, 227 will fund, to the tune of $50 million a year for ten years, individuals who pledge to tutor children in English in their communities, with only minimal state supervision. Compared to the $300 million spent by the state in bilingual programs that are subject to review or approval, this does not sound like a savings.
The financial incentives to keep TBE on life support are considerable. Because the money is scattered across thousands of budgets at the state, local, and federal level, and often not plainly labeled, it's difficult to come up with a reliable estimate of TBE's costs, but they probably approach $2 billion. In California, bilingual certification can mean up to $5,000 extra a year for a teacher.
As outlined above, the present expenditures on bilingual education will not disappear. The fundys will be redirected into other programs. To my knowledge. the extra $5,000 is only available to LAUSD teachers, and not across the state. Given the chronic shortage of qualified bilingual teachers, it has not been enough to entice monolingual teachers to learn Spanish. Thus, this sum does not cover all the extra work that a regular teacher needs to put in to be certified as bilingual. It has fallen upon responsible individuals from the communities that are served by bilingual education to become fully certificated bilingual teachers.
...
"A lot of my friends were just scandalized when I started saying I supported the anti-bilingual initiative," says Alice Callaghan. Callaghan, who describes herself as "a Teddy Kennedy liberal," had impeccably politically correct credentials until she got involved in the 9th Street Elementary boycott: An Episcopal priest who's spent 16 years working with sweatshop workers and their kids, she's the veteran of many a civil rights sit-in--even has an arrest record. But the price of supporting English education for the children at her center has been far higher than any she ever had to pay for opposing U.S. military adventures or support for South Africa. Just for starters, the University of Southern California--a stronghold of TBE theory--has just canceled a $238,000 grant to her center.
If this paragraph is to be believed, Ms. Callaghan qualifies for sainthood. However, she does have skeletons in her closet. According to the Los Angeles Times, she runs her center as a personal fiefdom and is not the charitable person that she is portrayed to be (Joy Horowitz, "The Woman Who Saved Skid Row," Los Angeles Times Magazine, Sunday, November 10, 1991).
...
Still, there may be hope. People do change. Fernando Vega did...Fernando called the superintendent, who remembered getting a notice that there was some federal money available for a new program called bilingual education, taught partly in Spanish, partly in English. Fernando, bemused, gave it some thought. Back in Brownsville, he'd learned English sink-or-swim in the first grade, and things had worked pretty well--not just for Fernando, but for a lot of Mexican kids who were allowed to attend school on the American side of the border. One of them even became the valedictorian of his high school class.
The problem with this vignette is that, in general, it is not true. Schools in Texas were segregated when Mr. Vega attended and the rates of high-school completion were dismal. Proof that students of Mexican descent were discriminated against is his son's experience with his high-school counselor: Mexican-American children were routinely discouraged from following college preparation courses. Mr. Vega seems to have conveniently forgotten how bad things were when he went to school.
...
Until the day in 1988 that Oscar stopped by the house. Fernando's eldest son now had a little boy of his own, Jason, who just two weeks ago had started the first grade. Funny thing, though--his class was taught in Spanish, a language the child didn't know. When Oscar went over to the school to ask that Jason be moved into an English classroom, the principal said there weren't any."Besides, he needs to learn Spanish," the principal added. "It's a shame he doesn't know his native language."
"English is his native language," Oscar retorted. "He's an American. He's never even been to Mexico." The principal just shrugged.
"What am I going to do, Dad?" Oscar asked after he'd told the story. "They won't listen to me at all."
The problem with this story is that it is so incredulous. A principal, who probably got his training in the days of sink-or-swim, is going to tell a parent that a child should learn Spanish instead of English? I have never, in all my years of contact with educators, heard that a pricipal would promote a "foreign" language over English. Next, Mr. Garvin is going to report that Mexican instead of US history is taught in bilingual classes.
Fernando didn't answer for a minute. He was still marveling at the insane mutation of a small act of kindness to some immigrant kids two decades earlier. He had gotten involved with the schools in the first place because they were trying to segregate his children under the guise of academic tracking. Now they were trying to do it again, to his grandchildren, under the guise of language instruction.
This is truly twisted logic. Before bilingual education, children were thrown into an educational system that provide very little support. If they managed to survive to high-school, they were then tracked into vocational, instead of college bound, courses. Now that more help is available for immigrant children, nativists like Mr. Garvin contend that this is part of a plot to maintain them marginalized and unable to comprehend English. This after bilingual education has been fought tooth and nail under the guise of unity in culture and language. It would be funny if it wasn't so perverse.
...
Now, at 73, Fernando is mostly retired from politics. But last fall, when he heard about the California ballot proposition that would cut back TBE, he stopped by one of the campaign offices to find out what it was all about. Impressed at the explanation, he took home some signs bearing the proposition's slogan, "English for the Children," in both English and Spanish. He stuck them in his front lawn.That evening, the doorbell rang. "Excuse me, mister," a woman--a Salvadoran, by the sound of her Spanish--asked when Fernando answered. "I saw your sign. Do you teach English here? My children need to learn it."
"I'm sorry, the sign is about something else," Fernando replied. "But why do you need an English teacher? Don't your children go to school?"
"Of course they do," the woman replied sadly. "But at the school, they only teach Spanish."
It is clear to me that the issue is not what is best for the children. It is what serves the interests of the promoters of 227. Historically, communities in need of bilingual education have been marginalized, both culturally and economically. Recent increases in immigration from the "home" countries of this communities has swelled the number of non-English speakers. Civil right advances, both in the legislature and the courts, have secured the right of these communities to receive a quality education, in their native language if necessary.
This has been an affront to nativists who feel that English and American culture, a highly nebulous concept, should be given primacy over the immigrants native culture. Nativist have always promoted the theory that the US was founded by Anglo-Saxons whose cultural values must be preserved. The arrival of immigrants, with their strange habits and tongues, has always discomforted the nativists. US history is replete with stories of immigrants being used as scape-goats and forced to blend in with the Anglo-Saxon stock. This is, however, not possible for the Asian or Latinamerican immigrant since their physical looks preclude it. Nativist have then changed tack: the new arrivals must be willing to shed every vestige of their old selfs, starting with a repudiation of their language.
Since bilingual education does diminish this rate of assimilation, nativists are most unhappy. Organization such as US English were formed to promote the idea that a national identity can only be attained if English is the one and only language of the land, forgetting that this land knew many more languages before the arrival of the Mayflower. The ferocity with which Spanish based bilingual education can only be understood when viewed in the context of the conquest of the US Southwest from Mexico. Mexican-Americans are often exhorted to "go back to Mexico" even though their ancestors may have been here for more than 200 years.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that both sponsors of 227 have ties to the US English movement. Mr. Unz is currently a member of the board of directors of Linda Chavez's Center for Equal Opportunity. Mrs. Tuchman was once in the board of US English (she served from 1989 until 1992). Both persons have also political ambitions. Mr. Unz attempted to wrest the Republican goveratorial nomination from Pete Wilson. Mrs. Tuchman already ran for the post of Superintendent of Schools, a post for which she is again running, as a Republican candidate, with Jaime Escalante as her campaign chair.
Don't be fooled by the propaganda. Bilingual education works.