Prop 203 would be step back, foes say
Eric Weslander
Banning bilingual classrooms from Arizona's public schools would be a return to a shameful era in education that ended more than 30 years ago, a group of speakers said at a weekend conference on the University of Arizona campus. The conference examined a program from 1919 to 1967 that required minority children in Tucson and surrounding towns to enter an English immersion program before starting first grade. Opponents of Proposition 203 say an almost identical program would be put into place statewide if voters were to pass the November ballot initiative to make bilingual classrooms illegal. Throughout the existence of the program known as "1C," the Hispanic dropout rate in Tucson schools never dipped below 60 percent, said Mary Carol Combs, a UA professor researching the 1C program. In contrast, she told an audience of about 150 people in the School of Education's Kiva Auditorium, after almost 30 years of bilingual education, the statewide Hispanic dropout rate is 17 percent and the bilingual student dropout rate is less than 6 percent, according to statistics from Tucson Unified School District. Under "1C," minority children - even if they spoke English - were herded into the program automatically simply because of the neighborhoods where they lived, Combs said. Many graduates of the program remember an oppressive environment where they were punished for speaking their native languages, she said. Combs called the program "shameful" and said that passing Proposition 203 would bring the era back. "Let's not repeat the past," said Combs, an adjunct faculty member of the UA Department of Language, Reading and Culture who is studying the topic for the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. The "1C" program mainly affected Mexican-American, Tohono O'odham, Yaqui and Chinese children in Tucson and in a handful of towns near the Mexican border. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was a semester-long program, and later became a yearlong program. It was called "1C" because during that time, first grade was broken up into a fall semester, "1B," and a spring semester, "1A." According to Combs' research, it was known colloquially as the "baby class," even though older students who didn't speak English were sometimes placed in it. Speakers at the Saturday conference included researchers, UA professors and "1C" graduates - including Pima County Supervisor Raul Grijalva, who entered the program in 1958 at Ochoa Elementary. Another "1C" graduate, Ballet Folklorica Mexica executive director Mercedes Guerrero, said she remembered hearing the word "dumb" used to describe her classmates who struggled in elementary school in Bisbee. "I wondered why so many Mexican kids were so dumb," she said. Leonard Basurto, who attended a "1C" class at Ochoa and is now director of bilingual education for TUSD, said Proposition 203 would be "the 1C all over again and would enforce elitism in public schools. "Public education was meant for the masses," he said. Around the perimeter of the auditorium, people held signs in Spanish and English that read "No! Prop. 203" and called the initiative "un retroceso," a step backward. Proposition 203 is an effort funded by California businessman Ron Unz, who passed similar but weaker legislation in California in 1998. It states that "all children in Arizona public schools shall be taught English by being taught in English and all children shall be placed in English-language classrooms." It allows parents to ask for waivers of the English-only requirement under certain circumstances, such as in cases of children with special needs, but it states that school districts "may reject waiver requests without explanation or legal consequence." |