Critics or No, Bilingual Ed Works Juan Gonzalez
BACK IN 1952, when I started kindergarten at Public School 102 in East Harlem, I spoke only Spanish. The teachers quickly threw me into the sink-or-swim world of English immersion, and I somehow managed the transition to English pretty quickly. By the second grade, I was even drafted into a little-known unpaid labor force of the New York City Board of Education. Each time a new kid from Puerto Rico arrived in my class, the teacher would sit the child next to me and assign me to translate her lessons from English into Spanish. It was hard enough keeping up with my own schoolwork. But there I was, clumsily whispering all day to the lost and petrified child at my side. My efforts inevitably failed; the child was summarily left back by June, only to be replaced by a new one the following September - and the school system barely blinked. Those were, after all, the golden years we keep hearing about from those who decry the decline of our public schools. Today, the Giuliani administration jump-starts its campaign to take New York back to the good old days of English immersion. Giuliani has put his old buddy Randy Mastro in charge of this effort. Mastro is the former deputy mayor and federal prosecutor who has perhaps fewer credentials as an educational reform expert than the least qualified of the uncertified city teachers working in the worst-performing school in town. Two years ago, Giuliani appointed Mastro to head a Task Force on Bilingual Education. Even though the task force has met only a couple of times since then, and even though it includes no representatives from public groups or organizations that have been involved in the teaching of children with limited English skills, Mastro will boldly unveil its findings soon. Even Board of Education staff who have spent their entire professional lives in this field have been kept in the dark by the Mastro task force. Mastro, however, has hastily scheduled a last-minute public hearing for today where he will roll out Ron Unz as a featured speaker. Unz is the Silicon Valley millionaire who bankrolled the campaign for Proposition 227, which ended bilingual education in California two years ago. In preparation for the release of his plan, Mastro and other opponents of bilingual education have orchestrated a big media campaign to highlight its "failures." I tried to call the former deputy mayor yesterday to talk about his thinking and his plans, but he didn't respond to the message I left for him. But in a recent Op-Ed piece in the Daily News, Mastro wrote, "More than half the city's non-English-speaking students do not learn enough English in three years of bilingual education to move into mainstream classes." This is a clever use of statistics to distort reality. The same Board of Education study Mastro used makes clear that 65.9% of non-English-speaking children assigned to bilingual or to English as a second language classes do move out of the program within three years. What drives the percentage down is including - as Mastro does - thousands of children who have been placed in special education programs because of learning disabilities. Those special ed children have a much lower rate of making the transition to English. School district researchers found that thousands of other children have been bounced back and forth between the two programs - bilingual and English as a second language - and they have the biggest problem making the transition to regular English classes. Mastro also ignores the reality that 43% of our teachers in bilingual or English as a second language classes are not state-certified, a far higher percentage than in the rest of our teacher corps. Poorly prepared teachers will produce poor results in whatever language. Mastro points to how reading and math scores for Hispanic pupils in California have increased sharply since immersion programs were instituted two years ago. But test scores increased for all California students, mostly because of smaller class sizes that were put in place around the same time and because of a new state emphasis on preparing for standardized tests. We haven't heard much publicity, though, about the success of bilingual education in Texas, the home of Gov. George W. Bush. There, nearly 500,000 of the state's 4 million children are enrolled in bilingual or English as a second language programs. The percentage of Hispanic children who passed the statewide Texas Assessment of Academic Skills jumped from 39% in 1994 to 72% this year - a far greater increase than for white or black students in the state. MASTRO DIDN'T mention that in his article. But his task force never was about bettering education for immigrant children. It was always about putting prosecutors in charge of educational policy. |