Lately, it has become fashionable in California to bash on the immigrant segment of the population. First came proposition 187, nicknamed "Save Our State." Then 209, erronously called the "California Civil Rights Initiative." Now it is an initiative perversely nicknamed "English for the Children." It is now in the signature gathering stage. Given the present political climate, as well as the already under way skillful steering of public opinion, it will get on the June 1998 ballot, and most likely will pass, only to be bottled up in the courts because it has serious flaws and is patently based on pseudo-science.
The initiative is sponsored by Ron Unz, a "high-technology" entepreneur who heads One Nation/One California, and Gloria Matta Tuchman, a Santa Ana teacher who has been a long time champion of "sheltered immersion" and opponent of bilingual education according to the 13 August Los Angeles Times. The proposed statute supposedly will assure that all non-English speaking children are taught to fluently speak, read, and write English within one year of entering school at any level. In order to achieve this laudable goal, it will effectively proscribe the use of any language other than English in the classroom, since classes can only be conducted in English via the "sheltered English immersion" method.It does provide for the possibility of waving this requirement but only if several criteria are met. Even then, the child's school district is not required to actually provide an alternative method of learning, such as bilingual education. In essence, if a child does not respond to this method, its parents have no recourse to ensure that their child will be properly schooled.
Another flaw of this initiative is the windfall it provides for organizations that purport to provide English classes. It sets aside fifty million dollars for ten years to fund such groups. The disposition of these funds is left to the discretion of local school districts subject to "reasonable guidelines established by ... the State Board of Education." The potential for abuse under these conditions is enormous. It is worth noting that these services are already rendered by many school districts under their adult education programs. It is, therefore, a veiled attempt to privatize a segment of the educational duties of the State.
The initiative proponents claim in their Web site that bilingual education is an experiment that has failed. To back this claim, they cite statistics produced by the State's Department of Education that asserts that 5% of all students in California schools are, at any given moment, in transition from a bilingual to an English classroom. This figure is then used to assert that bilingual education has a 95% failure rate and therefore should be abolished. Absent from this analysis, for example, is the fact that all children who enter any given school at kindergaten is placed in an English classroom typically by 4th grade, without falling behind its cohort in any subject, a 100% success rate. Nor any attempt is made to account for the fluidity of the school population of California, where newly arrived children, not all of them in the lower grades, are continuously entering classrooms.
Mr. Unz and Mrs. Tuchman also claim that Spanish-speaking immigrant parents are overwhelmingly in support of their children being taught English. As proof, they cite a poll commissioned by Linda Chavez' Center for Equal Opportunity, of which Mr. Unz is an advisor. However, judging from its questions, this "research" is extremely flawed. It consists of a poll of 120 persons in each of five cities: Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Miami, and New York. According to Question 2, the targeted population overwhelmingly chose to have the interview conducted in Spanish (83%) even though 50% of the respondents had been in the US more than 10 years (and 20.5% were native-born, Question 19) and 81.5% claimed to have had no children in "a program in school for children who need help with English" (Question 3). Although the entire questionary is not included in the above URL, it is interesting to note that leading questions were asked. For example, part D of Question 13 asks: " - Please rank the following things children might learn in school in order of importance: `learning about hispanic culture.' " This is followed by Question 14: "In your opinion, should children of Hispanic bacground [sic], living in the United States be taught to read and write Spanish before they are taught English, or should they be taught English as soon as possible?" Of course, what immigrant is going to respond affirmatively to the first question (only 17% did)? The stage is set for Question 15, the coup de grace: "In general, which of the following comes closest to your opinion? 1. my child should be taught his/her academic courses in Spanish, even if it means they will spend less time learning English. 2. my child should be taught his/her academic courses in English, because they will spend more time learning English." Not surprisingly, an overwhelming 81.3% opted for answer number 2. The research thus confirms the poll commissioners' bias, proclaimed in an "activist alert" at the top of the above URL, where they solicit to "interview people who have had a negative experience with bilingual education programs, especially parents."
Why do the sponsors and supporters of this initiative focus so much on the Spanish-speaking immigrant population? It is the opinion of this writer that this group is an easy target given the success of the ads employed in the prop. 187 campaign. The large increase of the Latino population in Southern California has also increased the fear and loathing of a significant portion of the population. This is exemplified by an essay authored by H. Netkins found in the sponsors Web site where he attributes the continuance of bilingual education to "Mexican nationalism and cultural brainwashing" by organizations such as MALDEF, LULAC, and MEChA. Of course, bilingual education curriculum does not concern itself with such issues. This type of statements is very painful to the Mexican-American community which has vivid memories of being corporally punished for speaking Spanish in the playground while simultaneously being asked to translate for teachers and administrators.
Important public policy cannot be based on such blatant misuse of statistical science and appeals to xenophobia. In fact, claims on the failure of bilingual education were refuted by a prestigious panel convened in 1992 by the National Academy of Sciences, our nations' premier scientific body. Further discussion on the many myths of bilingual education can be found at http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/miscpubs/nabe/fact.html. But logical arguments are worthless to people who consider the official primacy of English as the glue that binds our nation together, forgetting that this nation prospered with a polyglot population for most of its history, as anyone who has seen "Fargo" can attest. The bashing of bilingual education is only the latest salvo of the English-only groups, who are intent on employing the present anti-immigrant hysteria to advance their policies. As Stanford linguistics Prof. Geoffrey Nunberg said of the English-only movement in an article that first appeared in The American Prospect (July-August 1997, available at http://epn.org/prospect/33/33nunbfs.html): "It is a bad cure for an imaginary disease." Please carefully consider the background, aims, and consequences of this initiative before supporting their petition or voting on it in the June 1998 ballot.
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Page maintained by J. Manuel Urrutia. Last update: 25 August 1997