Students' failure led to opposing bilingual education, teacher says

TUCSON, Ariz.—Hector Ayala says he became a foe of bilingual education because he just got tired of seeing students fail.

“One of the things that pushed me over the brink was that I would notice year after year, kids would come in with a practical incapacity for any kind of academics,” says Ayala, an English teacher at Tucson’s Cholla High School for a dozen years.

And more often than not, the students had been on a bilingual education track, he said.

But he added, “In the end, it’s the intractability of the bilingual proponents which caused us to form English for the Children Arizona.

“I thought perhaps we were trying to create a market for ourselves. But when we started walking around the neighborhoods, we found out there was a demand for us.”

Ayala said his group found recently in going door-to-door in southwest Tucson, a largely Hispanic area, that “95 percent of the parents want nothing but English in the schools. They resent that most of the time their children are placed in bilingual classes.”

Immigrants are most staunchly against bilingual education, he added, because it is keeping their children learning Spanish “much too long instead of learning English.”

Most Hispanics don’t speak out on the issue, he said.

“They’re very quiet. It’s difficult for them to come out and speak out against people who are so adamant about keeping it.”

Ayala said many Hispanics whose children speak little or no English often are intimidated by teachers with advanced degrees. “They trust these educators. And by the time the kids drop out at 16, it’s too late,” he said. “They dropped out because they didn’t speak any English.”

But Alejandra Sotomayor, president of the Tucson Association of Bilingual Education, said she believes a fear of too much Spanish – and “illogical thinking” – are at the core of efforts to eliminate bilingual education.

“I don’t think if we were talking about a French immersion program we would have the same reaction. There is a fear of the Spanish world moving into Arizona,” she said.

Leonard Basurto, who heads the Tucson schools’ bilingual education program, attributes “racist and xenophobic attitudes” to the anti-bilingual push.

The same group that headed efforts in Arizona and California to make English the official language is behind the move, he said.

“These people make it a point to have Hispanics become their spokespersons, in order to mask their racist and xenophobic attitudes,” he said.

Ayala denies that he is racist, anti-immigrant or an anti-Hispanic extremist. “That is ridiculous,” he said. “There will be racists supporting any proposition, there will be Mexicans and Anglos. The best way we can answer these people is by informing them. If they got to know us they would know that we are Mexicans.”

Ayala said bilingual education keeps Mexican kids out of college “because they never learn to speak English. They’re dropping out at twice the rate of Anglos.” And support of such a program, which maintains high failure rates, is “patently racist,” he insists.



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