Feds Target Calif. On Bilingual Plan

Oppose quicker move to classes in English

With Californians poised to end decades of bilingual-education programs, Clinton administration officials jumped into the fray recently, announcing they would actively campaign against the upcoming ballot measure that would dismantle such programs.

The fight is over what opponents of bilingual education call the “English for the Children” initiative – Proposition 227 on the state’s June 2 primary election ballot. The measure would allow children with limited English skills just one year’s instruction in their native language, then move them into mainstream classrooms where instruction must be mostly in English. The programs include bilingual education and English as a Second Language for about 1.4 million students, 81 percent of them Latin American immigrants.

Clinton administration officials say that replacing bilingual-education programs with a one-year course would leave schoolchildren without needed skills.

“The best research that we have suggests that the one-year immersion structure . . . is a major mistake,” Marshall Smith, the Education Department’s acting deputy secretary, said recently.

Bilingual education opponents say Proposition 227 would not abandon students with limited English after one year because schools would be allowed to provide teachers’ aides to help out, although instruction would remain “overwhelmingly” in English.

But the measure does not define “overwhelming,” nor does it specify what constitutes the “good knowledge” of English required of teachers and aides.

“All these terms will need legal definitions, so I would guess this will be in the courts a long time,” said Roger J. Diamond, a First Amendment lawyer.

Still, polls find that a majority of Californians support Proposition 227. A recent Los Angeles Times survey, for example, put support at 63 percent with 23 percent opposed and 14 percent undecided. Those polls found a majority of every large ethnic group – including Hispanics and Asians – in favor of the bilingual ban. Many Hispanic parents told pollsters they fear their children will be stuck in dead-end jobs unless they are forced to learn English while very young.

But even as the public appears ready to dismantle bilingual education in California, some of the largest school districts are defying a new requirement that public school students be tested annually in English.

In Los Angeles, where slightly more than 40 percent of the 630,000 students, from elementary to high school, are classified with limited English, principals acting on orders from Superintendent Ruben Zacarias sent hundreds of thousands of waiver forms home with pupils, enabling immigrant parents to let their children avoid the test. The original intent of the waiver forms was to allow parents to exempt their children from any test whose content they find objectionable on religious grounds.

In San Francisco, where 8,000 pupils are English-deficient, the school board voted in March to exempt all of them from the test that was administered last month to students in grades 2 to 11. State education officials sued the district, demanding that it test all students, but local Superintendent Bill Rojas has so far refused.

Rojas and others maintain that giving the test in English only is unfair to districts with large numbers of recent immigrant students who may possess many skills but be unable to express them when test questions are presented in English. But other districts giving the test – the Stanford Achievement Test – to all students, say defiance of state law is unfair to them.

“These districts are just afraid they’re going to look bad and lose state money or lose some of their students to private schools,” said Billie Rae Ester, testing coordinator for the Chico schools in Northern California.

Dan Wilson, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who decreed the English-only testing by executive order, added: “We’ve got to make the commitment to test all students and quit fudging around the edges.”

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, who helped write Proposition 227 and has poured almost $1 million of his money into pushing it, says he became involved because state statistics show less than 5 percent of California’s schoolchildren in bilingual classes last year progressed into English instruction by school year’s end. Such programs cost California taxpayers $320 million a year in state funding.

Critics of the state’s bilingual programs say the programs suffer from a shortage of 21,000 qualified teachers for immigrant children who together speak more than 50 foreign languages, not including Spanish.

“No matter how well-intentioned, it’s just not working,” Unz says of the programs, which were compulsory in California from the 1970s until this year, when the state school board passed a local-option policy.

But the state’s large teachers unions are fighting the measure, contending it is unfair to force children into English classrooms after only one year’s instruction.

“Nonsense,” says Sheri Annis, spokeswoman for English for the Children. “Yes, the overwhelming majority of the day would have to be taught in English, but our initiative allows flexibility if the child needs more help.”

Critics note, however, that under Proposition 227 parents would have the right to sue teachers and principals if they believe schools are not complying with the new rules. That would have “a chilling effect on teachers helping students in their native languages,” Kelly Hayes-Raitt, manager of the No-on-227 campaign.”No teacher wants to be sued, so most of them probably wouldn’t use a word of anything other than English.”



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