Californians considering whether to dump bilingual education

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The first part of the day, she learns English.

But when she sits down in her social studies class to learn about the Roman empire, 12-year-old Brenda Simental is immersed in a familiar sound: Spanish.

She and other students are so immersed that her teacher, Alejandro Juarez, scolds a boy who repeatedly answers in English.

“Necesitas contestar en Espanol,” says Juarez, a teacher at Hoover Middle School in San Francisco.

That Brenda and hundreds of thousands of other California students learn about history, math and science in their native tongues is a point of contention with Ron Unz, a Palo Alto software developer who is leading a push to end bilingual education in California’s public schools.

Known as the “English for the Children” initiative, his proposal would require public school students to learn in English, except when parents specifically ask for bilingual help. Meanwhile, children who come to school speaking little or no English would spend their first year in what Unz describes as “a sheltered English immersion class.”

Several early polls, including one by the San Francisco-based Field Institute, have found more than two-thirds of voters supporting the initiative, which will appear on the June ballot.

“California is ready,” Unz says.

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It’s been two years since Brenda and her family moved from Durango, Mexico, to San Francisco, where her father works as a roofer.

In that time, she has learned enough English to — on this particular day — read and mostly understand a detailed rendition of the “Nutcracker,” finish a short story about what she does on vacations and to respond to questions in a halting manner that seems more shyness than anything.

The seventh-grader — who plans to go to college and thinks she might like to be a lawyer — wants very much to learn English. But she can’t comprehend why anyone would stop her from learning in Spanish.

“I don’t want to forget,” Brenda says, preferring to speak in Spanish during a lunch break. “I need to know both languages to have a better future.”

Educators say the dual-language system allows Brenda to learn English while not falling behind in her core subjects. This sort of system is used for 30 percent of California public school students who are not proficient in English.

But Unz and his supporters say she would learn English faster in an immersion program.

“It’s a crazy system,” Unz says. “It’s really not bilingual education. It’s Spanish-only instruction.”

He points to the numbers from the California Department of Education and cries failure.

The department reports that nearly 1.4 million, or a quarter, of students in California’s public schools are not considered fluent in English — meaning that the state accounts for about half the nation’s so-called “limited English proficient” students.

At Hoover Middle School, about 19 percent, or 242 students, fall into that category. Most of those speak Spanish or Cantonese, a Chinese dialect. The others come to school speaking anything from Russian to Korean and Japanese.

Last year, about 6.7 percent of California’s students were reclassified to “proficient” status — a percentage which San Francisco tends to mirror.

Although recent research shows that San Francisco students who complete the language program score above average on standardized tests, educators and bilingual experts concede that the numbers should be better than 6.7 percent. But they also point to the chronic shortage of bilingual teachers and the constant flow of new immigrants, such as Brenda, who come into the district each year.

“We constantly get at least as many new students as we redesignate, so it almost looks as though we’re standing still when we’re not,” says Lydia Stack, a coordinator for the district’s Language Academy.

Other states have a smaller, but similar influx, including Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois — four states that also have a large percentage of students in bilingual education.

It is a big enough issue that House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called for local school districts to find ways to teach students English by the fourth grade.

“When we allow children to stay trapped in bilingual programs where they do not learn English, we are destroying their economic future,” the Georgia Republican said in early January.

If California’s initiative passes, at least one bilingual advocate doubts it will become a national trend.

“I think there is a national perception that some of the initiatives California passes are really pretty kooky … and are something that cooler heads throughout the rest of the country don’t really want to jump at,” says James Lyons, executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Despite some cries of racism, the “English for the Children” measure has supporters in Latino, Chinese and other ethnic communities.

Jaime Escalante, the tough-talking educator depicted in the movie “Stand and Deliver” is backing it. Fernando Vega — a former Redwood City School Board member who once fought for bilingual education in his city — is the honorary campaign co-chair.

If Vega had any doubts about his frustrations with modern-day bilingual education, they were put to rest when he put “Ingles Para Los Ninos” campaign signs in his front yard this fall.

Thinking that Vega is offering English lessons, Spanish-speaking parents have been knocking on his door.

“They’re asking me, ‘Senor, what do you have to do to get into your school? … The schools don’t teach my children English,”‘ Vega says.

Other Latinos — by far the largest ethnic population receiving language help in public schools — see it differently.

Juarez, Brenda’s social studies teacher, explains that he teaches his class entirely in Spanish in part to benefit English-speaking students who are there to learn a new language.

But, he says, there is something more.

“We hold the language as part of our identity,” Juarez says. “And we are so close to Mexico — to think that we have to speak just in English and forget about Spanish is to forget about yourself.”



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