Bilingual Funds: A Problem In Any Language

WASHINGTON—DWINDLING Federal financial support for bilingual education is putting limits on the service at a time when increasing numbers of youngsters need it, according to school officials.

For instance, in the sprawling New York City school system, where more than 70,000 pupils attend bilingual classes in 10 languages in 684 schools, officials say that Federal support has dropped 25 percent in the last two years.

”This will have a terrible effect on our ability to deal with a need that grows constantly,” said Awilda Orta, director of the New York City school system’s office of bilingual education.

She said the cutbacks would have severe constraints on the schools’ ability to deal with such difficult problems as meeting the needs of gifted and talented students hampered by language deficiencies, providing career and vocational aid and dealing with the complex problems of schools with needy pupils.

Leaders of the Hispanic community, where there is the most pressing need of help in English-language skills, have been urging Congress to resist the budget cuts because the problem of language needs among pupils appears likely to grow rather than diminish in coming decades.

The level of Federal support, which stood at $161 million last year, has diminished to $138 million this year and the Administration is pressing hard to reduce it to $95 million next year. Legislation to set the budget level for fiscal 1983 is among the sea of pending bills languishing in Congress and likely to be considered in the special session set for December. Meanwhile, Federal financing on an interim basis is being dispensed at the 1982 rate.

What concerns many advocates of bilingual education is not so much their presumption that no services will be offered without the guiding hand of the Federal Government, although that is part of it. The concern centers, rather, on what they regard as the overall need for resources to make bilingual education work, including an adequate pool of trained instructors.

A report commissioned by the Department of Education, entitled ”A Study of Teacher Training Programs in Bilingual Education,” estimated that up to 56,000 more teachers were needed for bilingual education from kindergarten through the 12th grade. The study found, however, that the educational system was now producing fewer than 2,000 teachers a year who were qualified to do the job. In the face of this need, proponents of bilingual education criticize the Department of Education for seeking a reduction of about 20 percent in teacher-training funds.

Peter D. Roos, director of education litigation for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, outlined the problem before a House panel earlier this year: ”At the current time, there are more than 3.5 million students in the United States who need language help. These students live in every state of the Union, and about two-thirds of them are Hispanic.” In all, he said, they come from ”homes and communities where over 90 languages other than English are dominant.”

In another study done for the Department of Education, it was found that while the school population was expected to increase 16 percent by the turn of the century, the student population needing bilingual aid and others needing help with English-language skills was expected to increase by 40 percent.

Anne Graham, assistant secretary for legislation in the Department of Education, said that the Administration did not oppose bilingual education, but that it merely wanted to move control of it to the local level.

”We believe bilingual education is mostly a state and local matter,” she said in an interview. ”The problems in Texas are not the same as those in New Hampshire, so how can we establish policy at the Federal level?”

She said that the department’s legislative proposal, which has not been approved by Congress, would have children take bilingual education, then be carefully reassessed after two years to see if they qualify for placement in regular classes. ”We do not envision students in bilingual classes forever,” she said.

Few people dispute the effectiveness of bilingual education for those whose first language is other than English. For instance, a study in New Jersey showed that among students in a program there ”almost one-third of the students – 31.5 percent – improved so much that they became ineligible for the progam at the end of one year.”

The argument of most advocates of bilingual education is that longstanding court rulings have raised what would appear to be a local issue to the level of Federal policy. They point to key cases, such as the 1774 Supreme Court ruling in Lau v. Nichols that said, under Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, school districts must provide some form of special instruction to ”language-minority” students who do not understand English.

This decision appeared to be buttressed substantially by subsequent rulings, including a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, in Castaneda v. Pickard. In this decision, the court said that should a school district choose to delay substantive instruction in a child’s native language it has an affirmative obligation to remediate any resultant substantive learning deficits or weaknesses.

A number of states, including Texas, have embarked on a planned approach to bilingual education. The Texas Legislature has established a program requiring local districts with 20 or more students in need of the service to have bilingual education or intensive language study followed by regular courses.

The state leaves details to the individual school districts, an aspect that raised concerns. This led a Federal District Court judge, William Wayne Justice, to hold that the court should assert jurisdiction in the matter. His decision, however, was reversed on appeal.

The debate over the program at the Federal level is expected to continue in the lame-duck session of Congress. But given the press of high-priority matters, there is considerable fear that Congress may find it convenient to postpone bilingual education and many other social programs until the next session.



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