Common sense debunks bilingual education rule Thomas J. Bray
Chalk up another big hit to the liberal orthodoxy. The New York Times, in its lead news story on Sunday, revealed that the test scores of the sons and daughters of immigrants in California have been rising dramatically since voters approved Proposition 227 two years ago, ending bilingual education. The educational establishment had predicted "catastrophe," noted the Times, if non-English speakers weren't given extra time to assimilate the dominant language. But even ardent foes of the anti-bilingual measure now say it seems to be working. One of the converts is Ken Noonan, who founded the California Association of Bilingual Educators 30 years ago and now is superintendent of a school district north of San Diego. One in four students in his district comes from a family whose primary language is Spanish. "I thought it would hurt kids," he says of the ballot measure. "The exact reverse occurred, totally unexpected by me. The kids began to learn — not pick up, but learn — formal English, oral and written, far more quickly than I ever thought they would." Well, hallelujah. How many times have we heard that kids are like sponges, capable of soaking up huge amounts of knowledge in short periods of time? But the bilingual educators were sure they knew better, despite the fact that, as the Times also notes, the main proponent of Prop. 227 found little serious research to confirm that teaching kids in two languages would work. For years, bilingual education required kids from non-English backgrounds to be taught social studies, science and math in their native languages. There may be other factors in the gain in test scores — but they, too, seem common-sense. Class sizes in the lower elementary grades have been reduced to an average of 20 kids from 30 kids. And for children who have little or no grasp of English, schools have reintroduced the old sound-it-out phonics approach to reading. Gone is another "progressive" approach to teaching, the so-called whole language approach to reading. Overturning bilingual education is on the ballot in Arizona this year, and similar measures are gaining headway in other states with significant immigrant populations. But there is broader significance to the California findings. One reason the public school system is in such political trouble these days is its faddish reliance on educational dogmas that supply students with endless excuses for failure to perform. Bilingual education, in fact, represented a coming together of a number of left-wing notions that have infected education generally. One is the idea that it's destructive to insist on standards. Those who couldn't meet the standards would suffer lifelong scars to their self-esteem, it was said. Never mind the lifelong scars to millions more that would come from illiteracy and innumeracy. Another of the reigning orthodoxies has been diversity. America's motto had long been e pluribus unum — Latin for "out of many, one." But now America's strength, we were told, lay in its diversity. Thus the time had come to do away with the old "brutal bargain," in which America would keep its doors open, in return for which immigrants would conform to existing American culture — a culture based on the English language. That there are profound strengths in diversity is not to be denied. But that there is value to social cohesion cannot be denied either. Until the scare campaign began against Prop. 227, polls showed that immigrants, too, favored doing away with bilingual education. That's hardly a surprise: Many of them came here precisely to get away from stultifying cultures in their native lands. To them, America was not just another culture. It was the promised land. And now, finally liberated from the dogmas that have so deeply infected our intellectual classes in the last 30 years, their children appear on their way to realizing that promise. Thomas J. Bray is a Detroit News columnist who is published on Sunday and Wednesday. Write The News at 615 W. Lafayette, Detroit, Mich. 48226, or fax to (313) 222-6417, or send an e-mail to letters@detnews.com. |