Bye-bye to Bilingual Ed?
Jorge Amselle
The wave of bilingual education that washed over the United States starting in 1968 seems to be receding--though it still suffuses school systems around the country. In recent years, states and school districts with decades-old bilingual programs began to make changes in light of growing criticisms of these programs. In 1995, Hispanic students and parents successfully lobbied the New Jersey legislature to allow them the right to exit bilingual programs. That same year in New York City, the Bushwick Parents Organization, a group representing over 100 Hispanic families, filed suit against the state to remove its members' children from bilingual programs. The watershed event for opponents of bilingual education, however, came in 1996 in Los Angeles' garment district. Over 60 Hispanic families at Las Familias del Pueblo community center boycotted the Ninth Street Elementary School because of the institution's failure to teach English. It was this event that motivated Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz to launch his "English for the Children" citizens' initiative, also known as Proposition 227. Opponents, including the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), called the initiative a "one-size-fits-all model," an "infringement on the right of local communities to make critical decisions about how they educate language-minority students." Raul Yzaguirre, president of the NCLR, successfully lobbied the White House to oppose the initiative and said "the administration has joined every single mainstream educational organization in concluding that the so-called Unz initiative is unsound educational policy." This criticism palled in comparison to the angry tone taken by the National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE). Spokesman Jaime Zapata said that "Proposition 227 threatens to take us back to the days when children entered the classroom eager and ready to learn but were labeled 'slow' because the instruction was in a language they did not understand." PROPOSITION 227's EFFECT Former NABE Executive Director Jim Lyons said that "Proposition 227 will be stopped by the courts; it flagrantly violates fundamental constitutional rights and civil rights protections." Despite the attacks on Proposition 227 and on Unz personally, the initiative was approved in June 1998, with 61 percent of the vote. It virtually eliminated bilingual education and required that all language-minority students be taught in a "structured English immersion" program. Parents are able to sign waivers, asking for their children to be placed in bilingual programs, but these can only be granted under specific circumstances. Several legal challenges to the initiative have to date been unsuccessful. The first year of test results for language- minority students is now available. Kenji Hakuta, professor of education at Stanford University and a leading expert in bilingual education, has recently published his analysis of these test scores. "At present," according to Hakuta, "there is no scientifically defensible way to compare districts that have implemented [Proposition] 227 and those that have maintained bilingual programs. Both show positive changes, especially in second grade. Any claim that Proposition 227 worked is bunk." Unz dismisses such criticisms and said in a recent press release, "Last year, when California voters were considering our measure, nearly the entire educational and political establishment predicted disaster and plummeting test scores if it passed. Now that statewide test scores for immigrant students in elementary grades have risen a remarkable 20 percent after just seven months of the new program, those same opponents are reduced to disputing Prop. 227's success instead of decrying its failure." Indeed, it is clear that language-minority students suffered no harm from English immersion. The debate over Proposition 227 has sparked a renewed interest in the education of English learners, and educators and policymakers have begun to make serious changes in existing programs. Within the past two years, school boards in Denver and Chicago have changed existing bilingual programs to increase the amount of English that is taught and enable students to mainstream within three years. Chicago has focused on speeding up English acquisition with after-school and weekend English as a Second Language classes and summer school. Denver's program includes a commitment to giving parents greater control over how their children are taught. In Arizona, with help from Unz, Hispanic parents and educators have launched their own "English for the Children" initiative-- almost identical to the one in California. The Arizona parents have already begun collecting the signatures necessary to place it on the ballot in the November 2000 election. Congress, which originally helped start these programs, has witnessed various bills intended to kill, reform, or restrict the federal role in bilingual education. In 1998, now retired Rep. Frank Riggs (R-California) introduced a bill that would give more than $ 300 million in federal bilingual-education funding directly to the states for either bilingual or all-English programs. This bill passed the House but was not considered in the Senate. Last year, Congress held several hearings on bilingual education, and Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Arizona) introduced new legislation that would require parental consent before a child may be placed in a bilingual program. SUPPORT FOR ENGLISH-ONLY CLASSES Most polls show that a majority of the general public supports programs that immerse students in English. Questioning the parents of children who need help with English has shown similar results. Nearly every poll taken of Hispanics leading up to the vote for Proposition 227, and every one since, has indicated overwhelming support for English. One notable exception was a CNN/Los Angeles Times exit poll of Hispanic voters indicating that 63 percent voted against the initiative. According to Unz, "We were outspent 20 to 1 in advertising." Indeed, the week prior to the vote saw a massive amount of negative advertising aimed at Latino voters. But public opinion polls continue to show a strong preference among immigrant parents that their children be taught English as quickly as possible. Last fall, a poll by Public Agenda, a nonprofit organization in New York, found that 75 percent of immigrant parents valued rapid English acquisition even if it meant that children would fall behind in other subjects. This was almost exactly the same result that the Educational Testing Service found a decade earlier in a survey conducted for the Department of Education. Supporters of bilingual education were surprised by the California initiative and the passage of the Riggs bill in Congress. These defeats have engendered a sort of reinvention that was evident at the NABE conference last year in Denver. Bilingual education is no longer touted as a remedial program but instead as an enrichment program aimed at providing all students with an opportunity to become proficient in more than one language. Many bilingual advocates are also admitting publicly for the first time that alternative programs can be very effective at meeting the needs of English learners. DUAL-IMMERSION PROGRAMS This new attitude has contributed greatly to the popularity of one form of bilingual education that has not slipped from favor: dual-immersion programs. According to NABE, in two-way bilingual education, or dual immersion, "[Limited-English-proficient] and native English-speaking students acquire each other's languages in a developmental bilingual-education environment that features collaborative learning and a challenging curriculum. The goal is to help both groups meet high academic standards and develop fluent bilingualism and full literacy in two languages. Students are typically enrolled in these programs for five or more years." The classes have the added benefit of not segregating students. There are two types of dual-immersion programs (each of which uses qualified bilingual teachers): One follows a 50-50 approach, in which children spend half their day learning in each language from the start. The other uses a 90-10 approach, in which children start by spending the bulk of their day being taught in Spanish. The amount of time spent learning in English is gradually increased until in grade five it reaches 50-50. Dual-immersion programs have shown some early success and increasing popularity. All successful dual-immersion programs share certain characteristics. One key element may be their scarcity. In general, dual-immersion programs operate in only a few schools in a district and often parents must request that their children be included. These schools have sufficient resources, certified teachers, and parental involvement and essentially operate like magnet schools. THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICANIZATION Throughout the country's past, the notion of bilingual education was essentially at odds with the prevailing U.S. "melting-pot" culture. Assimilation, not separation, has historically been the key to America's nation-building success, and a common, standardized language has been, many argue, indispensable. This ideology has played a key role in America's domestic policies toward immigrants, particularly in the area of education. At the start of the twentieth century, schools were placed in the forefront of new "Americanization" efforts, which the arrival of large numbers of newcomers had fostered. Schools focused on immersing their students in English and teaching American history, customs, and traditions. Native language and cultures had no place in the public schools and were to be left at home. This policy dominated American education until the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s. Until that time, the notion of bilingual education had been rejected out of hand. Comments by Arturo Vargas, current chairman of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, illustrate the mind- set of the era. "History has proven that English-only instruction harms Hispanic students in several ways," he says. "It makes their acquisition of English more difficult and frustrating, it unnecessarily delays their academic subject matter learning, it prevents parents with limited English skills from actively participating in their children's schooling, and it sharply increases the rate at which Hispanic students drop out of school." These dropout rates motivated Congress to pass the bilingual education act in 1968, providing federal funding for programs that taught part of the day in a child's native language. Sen. Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas), sponsor of the act, stressed that the purpose of his bill was "not to try to make the mother tongue the dominant language, but just to try to make those children fully literate in English." In 1974, the Supreme Court held in Lau v. Nichols that Chinese students in sink-or-swim programs in San Francisco had a civil right to receive specialized-assistance services. The court did not, however, mandate any particular approach. According to NABE, "Bilingual education is an instructional approach that uses a child's native language to make instruction meaningful. Bilingual education programs build upon the knowledge that all children bring to school." In essence, bilingual programs were meant to offer academic instruction in the native language until English was mastered so that students would not fall behind. CLASH OF THE SCHOLARS Stephen Krashen, a professor of education at the University of Southern California and a leading advocate of bilingual education, explains his educational theory in the book Condemned Without a Trial: Bogus Arguments Against Bilingual Education. "The knowledge that children get through their first language helps make the English they hear and read more comprehensible," Krashen says. "Literacy developed in the primary language transfers to the second language." A principal aspect of bilingual theory is that students must spend five to seven years mastering their native language before they can learn English. But, according to Rosalie Pedalino Porter, a researcher and former director of bilingual education programs in Lowell, Massachusetts, "Bilingual education is a classic example of an experiment that was begun with the best of humanitarian intentions but has turned out to be terribly wrongheaded." Educators who are critical of bilingual education instead support alternative programs that focus more on English instruction. Christine Rossell, a professor at Boston University, found that a structured, intensive program of English acquisition is exactly what most children who speak less-common languages receive. English as a Second Language programs provide instruction to students in English acquisition for a portion of their school day from a teacher specially trained in improving language skills. "The research evidence suggests that all-English instruction holds the least risk and usually has the greatest benefit for limited-English-proficient children," Rossell declares. This contrasts sharply with the views of Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto, who is widely viewed as the developer of bilingual education theory. Cummins, speaking before a gathering of the American Association on Higher Education in Washington, D.C., last March, said that "the academic debate lines up virtually all North American applied linguists who have carried out research on language learning as advocates of bilingual programs against only a handful of academics who oppose bilingual education." Cummins often denounces the "coercive relations of power" that he discerns in the traditional American multiethnic classroom. He sees this coercion stemming from a "curriculum that reflects only the experience and values of white middle-class English-speaking students." Those who disagree with him are branded "intellectual xenophobes" and "cultural hegemonists." Such belligerence and arrogance, critics of bilingual education say, help keep this form of schooling among the dominant movements on the education front today. Although bilingual education has been thrown on the defensive nationwide and rolled back in a few localities, it is still a fixture in most school districts--and will likely remain so for years to come. Jorge Amselle is the executive director of the READ Institute (short for Research in English Acquisition and Development) in Washington, D.C. |