Bilingual Ed Battle Heats Up
Jessica Kowal
The lines were drawn yesterday for an impending battle over bilingual education in city schools, as immigrants and their advocates testified about the poor performance of thousands of students and debated what to do about it. A recent Board of Education study showed that half of the students who lack English proficiency fail to leave dual-language programs after three years, as the state requires. Middle school and high school students in bilingual programs have a much tougher time becoming proficient in English, the study concluded, and those students have a much higher dropout rate. But the suggestion that bilingual programs, which mainly enroll Latino students, make it harder for children to succeed created an angry debate about whether the goal should be to maintain children's ethnic roots or to get them to learn English as quickly as possible. At a hearing of the Mayor's Task Force on Bilingual Education, several parents and their advocates suggested that any effort to reduce bilingual education programs was the result of anti-immigrant, and mainly anti-Latino, sentiment. "Spanish is our identity and no one can take away what is ours!” one woman testified at the hearing, to applause from the audience. But Alicia Julian, 36, of Ridgewood said she fought to remove her 6-year-old daughter, who was born in the United States, from a bilingual program. "It is important for my children to learn English,” said Julian, who is from Mexico, speaking through a translator. "I am in this country and I and my children have to learn English in order to succeed.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani yesterday called for a "two-year rule” to limit bilingual programs to helping students learn English. Bilingual education should return "to what it was originally intended to be... to teach you English, not 10 years of foreign language,” the mayor said at a news conference. At the hearing, former Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro recommended that parents of students who lack proficiency in English should be able to enroll them in "English immersion” classes. That would add a third choice for parents, beyond bilingual classes, where subjects are taught mainly in a student's native language, and English as a Second Language programs, where students may have no more than three hours of English instruction. The board will ultimately decide whether to change its policy, and Terri Thomson, who represents Queens, the nation's most diverse county, could be the swing vote on the seven-member board. Thomson said yesterday that she wants more information "about programs that work and programs that don't,” but has not yet made any final decision. One of every eight city public school students is placed in bilingual or English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. All immigrant students who do not reach the 40th percentile of English proficiency are eligible for bilingual or ESL classes. By state law, 20 or more students in a grade who share the same native language are placed in a bilingual class. Longtime advocates of bilingual education said City Hall was moving too quickly in seeking changes. "This is power and fear of the Latino community, simply because of the demographics. They fear our presence, the color of our skin, the language we speak,” said Juan Figueroa, president of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which litigated a 1974 court case that demanded widespread bilingual programs in the city. He described City Hall's effort to change bilingual education as a "political circus,” not least because Mastro invited Ron Unz, a California multimillionaire who funded a successful ballot initiative that ended automatic bilingual education in California. Other states, such as Arizona, have similar initiatives on the ballot next month. |