English for the Children of Colorado

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: RITA MONTERO

June 19, 2001 (310) 458-1711

PR #1

Denver, CO---The drive for a ballot initiative to dismantle Colorado’s decades-old system of "bilingual education" was launched today on the steps of the Denver State Capitol. The leaders have modeled their proposed initiative on the successful measures that largely ended bilingual programs in California in June 1998 and in Arizona in November 2000, both of which passed in landslides.

Rita Montero, statewide campaign chair of English for the Children of Colorado, argued that a ballot initiative was the only solution. "As a member of the Denver Board of Education, I devoted more than three years of my life to trying to reform these Spanish-only bilingual programs, with absolutely no results. We’ve already lost too many generations of Latino students maintaining that disastrous system; our ‘English for the Children’ initiative is the only hope for providing a decent education."

Ms. Montero was an early supporter and candidate of the La Raza Unida Party in the 1970s, and helped lead the campaign to defeat Colorado’s 1988 English-only initiative. As a long-time progressive activist, she recently supported Ralph Nader’s presidential candidacy.

The proposed measure would require that children not fluent in English be placed in a special intensive "sheltered English immersion" program to teach them English as rapidly as possible. Last year, the New York Times and other national media highlighted the apparent large gains in immigrant test scores produced by a similar statewide program in California.

Ron Unz, national chairman of English for the Children, believes that the dramatic rise in California’s immigrant academic performance will persuade Colorado voters to back a similar approach. "In less than two years following the passage of Prop. 227, the mean percentiles test scores of over a million immigrant students in California rose by an average of 40%. The founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators has now become a born-again convert to English immersion. I think most Coloradans will think that anything which raises Latino test scores so rapidly sounds like a pretty good idea."