Shocked, Shocked Ron Unz
Dear Sirs, So Stephen Krashen and James Crawford (letters, 9/10/2000) are shocked, shocked that Oceanside's so-called bilingual classes were mostly just Spanish prior to the passage of Prop. 227 in 1998. I could have told them that. In fact, I *did* tell them that during the dozen or more times we debated during the Prop. 227 campaign. Furthermore, the vast majority of surviving bilingual programs in California and elsewhere are also still mostly or almost entirely in Spanish. Now that Oceanside has switched to English, the test scores of its immigrant students have climbed from well below the California state average to far, far above average. For example, Oceanside's 2nd grade immigrant math scores are now at the 47th percentile---the children of extremely poor, Spanish-speaking, often illiterate farm-workers have in less than two years nearly reached the national average for white, middle-class, English-speaking children from the suburbs. If all of California's other districts followed Oceanside's strict model, their Hispanic students would probably do just as well. For the past ten or twenty years, the disastrous bilingual educational theories of Krashen, Crawford, and their supporters have destroyed the education and lives of millions of Hispanic immigrant students. They should be ashamed of themselves. Sincerely, Ron Unz, Chairman
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