Language Lesson in '70s Ruling
Juan Gonzalez
WE ARE HEARING a huge outcry these days about the "failure" of bilingual education in our public schools. Latino children are being forced into bilingual programs that serve children who don't need them, that parents do not want and that fail to teach children English, the critics claim. The best way to help immigrant kids is by total immersion in English, they insist. These critics must think that no one remembers what life was like for Hispanic children in our city's schools before 1974. That was the year the Board of Education was forced into the historic federal consent decree with Aspira of New York that began the bilingual education experiment in earnest in this town. Aspira is the agency founded by one of the most venerated educators in the Puerto Rican community, Dr. Antonia Pantojas, who sought to train a new generation of Puerto Rican professionals. Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, for example, was one of the first Aspira members when he was in high school. By the early 1970s, Pantojas was frustrated at the public schools' failure to educate Puerto Rican children. So she got together with Cesar Perales, then an attorney with the fledgling Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, and Victor Marrero, now a federal judge, to file a civil rights law suit. It is hard to describe the terrible job the public schools did back then with Latino children. By 1958, Puerto Ricans already comprised 14% of the public school population, and virtually all instruction of those children - 137,000 of them - was in English. Yet Puerto Ricans were already the worst-achieving group in the system. By 1961, two-thirds of Puerto Rican eighth-graders had fallen more than three years behind in reading. By 1963, the Puerto Rican population in the schools had jumped to 179,000 (17% of students). That year, 21,000 New York public school pupils received high school academic diplomas. Only 331 of them (1.6%) were Puerto Rican, and only 28 of those went on to college. The school system was better at programming Puerto Ricans for blue-collar jobs; they made up 7.4% of vocational high school graduates that year. The situation was just as abysmal in the lower grades. A 1969 review of school reading test scores by the Puerto Rican Forum revealed that in 87 city elementary schools where Puerto Ricans were a majority, only 15 of every 100 pupils were reading at grade level; in 23 junior high and middle schools where Puerto Ricans were the majority, one of every four pupils was more than four years below grade level. And those 1969 scores didn't even count students with limited English skills, because they were exempted from the test! That year, the Board of Education's own figures listed 88,000 non-English-speaking children among 249,000 Hispanic pupils in the city's public schools. Yet only 10,000 of those non-English speakers received as much as one period a day of remedial English instruction. Another study, this one in 1971, showed that 30% of Puerto Ricans entering the public high schools were graduating, compared with 50% for blacks and 65% for whites. In other words, throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Board of Education was engaged in one of the biggest failures in U.S. public school history - with Puerto Rican children. There were so few Hispanic teachers back then - 803 out of 70,000 in 1970 - that thousands of children were lost in limbo when they got to school, with no adult able to communicate with them. Yet school administrators and politicians ignored the growing problem year after year, as they practiced their own form of English immersion. It was against that backdrop that Aspira filed its suit in 1972, and two years later, U.S. District Judge Marvin Frankel oversaw the consent decree. In that decree, the Board of Education acknowledged its "responsibility to provide all children attending the public schools, English-speaking and non-English-speaking children, with programs in which they can effectively participate and learn." The decree stipulated that all Spanish-surnamed children in the system be tested for their knowledge of English. If they scored in the lowest 20th percentile, they were to be tested in Spanish. If the Spanish test showed the child was dominant in Spanish, he or she had to be placed in a bilingual program or an English as a second language program. BUT ASPIRA'S FIGHT for quality education for Latino children, as we shall see, met continued resistance among educational bureaucrats and the politicians. To be continued . . . |