California battles over emphasizing English in schools

State board may drop bilingual policy

SAN DIEGO – Bilingual education has joined affirmative action and immigration as a skirmish line on California’s political and cultural battlefield.

On Thursday, the California Board of Education heard testimony on a proposal to stress development of English proficiency, which would end the state’s policy of “native-language instruction,” implemented in 1987.

“There is absolutely no need to promote native-language instruction,” said John Stoos of English First, a national organization with 30,000 members in California.

“Limited-English-proficient students in California need to learn English,” he said. “To propose anything less is a serious disservice to the child and the people of California, who pay the bills.”

But Silvina Rubinstein, legislative affairs director for the 4,500-member California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE), said: “We oppose it because we feel it is not legal.

“We want to maintain the primary language instruction. . . . We want to move from the perception that bilingualism is a deficit to one of an asset.”

In 1986, 73.1 percent of Californians voted to make English the state’s official language. But the measure has remained largely unenforced and has not affected bilingual education.

A bill introduced last month in the Assembly by Democrat Dede Alpert would authorize schools “to choose from a variety of academically accepted methods of teaching limited-English-proficient pupils.”

The bill notes that about 21 percent of the more than 5 million children in California’s public schools did not speak or understand English well enough to participate in the regular school curriculum in 1992.

“Bilingualism is such an incredible travesty,” said Linda Chavez of the Washington-based Center for Equal Opportunity. “It has taken Hispanic kids and treated them different than all other kids. It puts native-born Hispanics into bilingual programs where they don’t belong and makes it difficult for them to test out of the program.”

A civil rights commissioner in the Reagan administration, Mrs. Chavez said bilingual programs hurt children and blamed a “selfish and self-interested lobby promoting the interest of their members over the interest of students who desperately need to learn English.”

But Ms. Rubinstein said bilingual education “has a positive effect on the economy.”

“It is good to speak two languages,” she said.

Rick Lopez of the Washington-based National Association for Bilingual Education said Mrs. Chavez and her organization “are pretty politically motivated themselves.”

“They say the best way is English only, but the research does not support their claim,” he said. “Bilingualism has never hurt anybody.”

In 1993, the California’s Little Hoover Commission, a nonpartisan watchdog, reported: “For the better part of two decades, bilingual education programs . . . have been as much a problem as a solution for the education of children who come to school speaking little or no English.”

Ms. Rubinstein accused the commission of bias against bilingual education and called its findings inaccurate.



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