Los Angeles California's language fight

Residents to vote on teaching in English only

LOS ANGELES – A Canadian-born Skid Road minister and a Silicon Valley multimillionaire are unlikely allies in a historic bid to end 30 years of bilingual education in California.

If voters support Proposition 227 in a state election today, software magnate and right-wing Republican Ron Unz will have spent $700,000 of his own money to force reform of an education system that everyone, from parents to President Bill Clinton, admits is failing.

If the proposition passes, former Calgary resident and self-described “left-of-left Democrat” Rev. Alice Callaghan can tell her poverty-crushed families – jobless on Skid Road overworked in this city’s notorious garment district – that the dispossessed have a voice.

It may well be the poor in this trend-setting state who initiate the drive to kill controversial “native language instruction” across the United States.

“Bilingual education was invented and fought for by Latin parents and it was started with the best intentions, but it’s broken. There’s nothing bilingual about it,” Callaghan says.

“It has become nothing more than a language maintenance program (for Spanish) while sacrificing English. Without English, our kids are going nowhere.

“This is really a revolution started by garment workers,” says Callaghan.

“This is an issue of empowerment, about mothers working for $1.80 an hour in sweatshops who want more for their kids, who want them to be doctors and lawyers and not their office cleaners.”

Among the most vocal critics of Proposition 227 is the 5,400-member National Association of Latino Elected Appointed Officials, a Los Angeles-based non-profit group representing Latinos from school board bureaucrats to members of Congress.

“It’s great to see this much interest and this much money being spent on an education issue – I just wish we had seen it sooner. The system could have used this 10 years ago,” says Rafael Gonzalez, civic education director for the group.

Callaghan admits her “English for the Children” campaign is “the most politically incorrect thing I’ve done in my life,” but the low academic scores and high dropout rate – about 40 per cent – of California’s Hispanic students persuaded her to “leave my ideological prison.”

Two surveys, by the Los Angeles Times and the independent Field Poll, show 62 per cent of voters agree California’s 30-year experiment has bombed and non-anglo students should learn English as quickly as possible.

Proposition 227 would replace the state’s current mishmash of bilingual education with “sheltered English.”

All students would attend English-only classes, but non-anglos would get intensive English immersion with textbooks and a curriculum designed for those new to the language.

One year of immersion would be deemed enough to speed most into mainstream English-only classrooms.

The current system allows children to be taught primarily in their native language and eased into English-only classes when they’re deemed proficient.



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