Protesters Assail Filing of Bill to End State Bilingual Education
Jordana Hart
Faced with a proposed bill to eliminate bilingual education in Massachusetts, probilingual forces yesterday argued that the program should not be gutted because it provides immigrant parents with choices. And many of them, at least in Boston, already are choosing to enroll their children in English immersion or mainstream classes. In Boston, for example, only 10,000 limited-English students are in Transitional Bilingual Education classes, said the director of Boston public schools bilingual education, Nydia Mendez. Nearly twice that are in immersion or regular classes, based on their parents' wishes, she said. Regardless, advocates say bilingual education is important because its goal is to bridge cultural and language gaps. "To anyone who doesn't speak another language, it sounds so easy to just put kids in a classroom and they will learn," said Representative Marie St. Fleur, a Democrat from Dorchester. "But there are things that have to be in place for that to work. It helps if you have some formal education, and if your parents have some formal education." Organized by state Representative Jarrett Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat, Mendez, St. Fleur, and some 50 others gathered at the State House to counter Senator Guy Glodis, a Worcester Democrat who filed a bill yesterday that would replicate the hotly contested California experiment, known as Proposition 227. That law ended bilingual education for most of California's 1.4 million immigrant children in 1998 and placed them in one-year English immersion. Massachusetts has 40,000 students in bilingual education, a large percentage of them in Boston. "My greatest interest here is to help minority, non-English speaking kids," said Glodis. "Non-English speaking students get little English at home or with their friends. So, if not at school, where will they learn English? We need to give them the tools to succeed, and bilingual education is just not working." Standing with Glodis at the senator's press conference, California software millionaire Ron Unz, who drafted Proposition 227, said that the average test scores for non-English speaking children in his state rose 20 percent in just seven months after the state eliminated bilingual education and replaced it with immersion. He pointed to a Dec. 26 San Jose Mercury-News analysis of test scores, which found that students who speak little or no English were learning more English in English-only classes, and had higher test scores than the 12 percent of students who chose to remain in bilingual education classes. "The children and parents want to be in the mainstream," Unz said, noting immersion could bring up the state's scores. "Why should Massachusetts be any different?" Supporters complained bilingual education in Massachusetts has never had the resources, support, and funding to soar. "Children must learn English, beautiful English," Barrios said. Transitional Bilingual Education "in all its 28 years has never been fully applied. We've known that for a long time, and we've been looking at the bilingual education debacle." Still, supporters pointed to a Spanish two-way immersion program in Cambridge known as Amigos, whose fourth-grade MCAS scores in math were the highest in the distirct in 1998 and second highest in 1999, according to Amigos data. Some 85 percent of Amigos fourth-graders passed the MCAS English test last year, they said. Massachusetts' bilingual education law, the nation's first when it went into effect in 1971 as Chapter 71A, allows students to remain in bilingual classes for up to three years or more, where they learn subjects in their native language at the same time as they learn English. The goal is for students not to fall behind in the subject matter, advocates say. But, Glodis said, too many students remain for four or five years in bilingual education classes, not learning English quickly enough. Barrios countered, saying the average stay in a bilingual education program in Massachusetts is 2.6 years. Critics also said Glodis was taking an anti-immigrant stance that would essentially strip a child of his native language, even as state education reform laws require all students to begin learning a foreign language in kindergarten and graduate from high school proficient in a second language. "If you can speak Chinese or Spanish as well as English, that is an asset," Glodis responded. "The key here is that bilingual education is not teaching children English." Meanwhile, officials at the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state's largest teacher union, said they had yet to study the Glodis bill. "Totally gutting the program is not something we have supported or would support," said MTA president Stephen Gorrie. "That is not to say it should not be reformed in some manner. It is something we are looking at." |