Bilingualism: Que pasa?

A strange story made it onto Page One of the Washington Post last week. At least it must have seemed strange to readers who don’t keep up with the byzantine politics of bilingualism.

“Plan to Meld Cultures Divides D.C. School,” said the headline. It was about a $ 1 million federal grant for a new bilingual program at unsuspecting H.D. Cooke Elementary School, which is about half Latino, half black.

The experiment in culture melding amounts to this: Starting in prekindergarten and kindergarten, and advancing one grade a year, both Latinos and non-Latinos will be taught in Spanish as well as English. Up through third grade, 80 percent of all teaching will be in Spanish. In later grades, it will taper off to half Spanish, half English.

First obvious question: Why would non-Hispanic parents want four fifths of their children’s lessons to be taught in Spanish?

Other obvious questions: How did the United States reach the point where bilingualism, which was designed to help immigrant children learn English, turned into a plan to teach nonimmigrants in a foreign language? And if a dual-language precedent is established, how do we then go about withholding the same system in schools that are, say, half Hmong speaking or half Vietnamese speaking?

Bilingual school programs, launched in 1968 with a budget of $ 7.5 million, evolved into a bureaucratic monster that eats up almost $ 10 billion a year. Though everyone agrees that non-English-speaking newcomers need help, at no point along the way has anyone demonstrated any connection between money spent and goals sought.

New York City has just issued a gloomy report showing that it apparently gets very little for the $ 300 million it spends each year on bilingual education: Immigrant children enrolled in bilingual programs in city public schools do less well, on average, and at every grade level, than similar students who take most or all of their classes in English.

$ 10 billion establishment. This is an old story. In 1990, researcher Christine Rossell surveyed studies in the field and found that 71 percent showed that transitional bilingual education was no different from doing nothing at all for non-English-speaking children. Yet the $ 10 billion bilingual establishment keeps chugging along, sometimes getting what it wants by dangling a million dollars in front of a poor school like H.D. Cooke.

According to the Post, parents of Latino students “seemed less informed about the proposal, and they have not organized to support it.” Unsurprisingly, black parents and teachers seem angry, particularly the teachers, wondering why their school has to be radically altered.

One reason, it seems, is to avoid the segregation that bilingual classes regularly bring — Spanish-speaking children will not be off by themselves. But the main function of the plan is to establish Spanish as a school language on a par with English. Like Canada, Cooke would officially be bilingual.

This development is softened with familiar rhetoric about the supposed advantages of a fully bilingual system. The Post report says: “Through sharing language, Latino and non-Latino children are expected to develop more empathy for one another and their cultures.” But such bursts of empathy are rare among those forced to struggle with someone else’s language while not yet fluent in their own. (Parents could opt out of the program, but saying no to the bilingual juggernaut has often involved long waiting lists and buses to another school.)

Non-Latinos are supposed to benefit by mastering a second language, but in reality, that won’t happen. Diana Walsh of the San Francisco Examiner looked hard at a roughly similar plan in her city and concluded: “The English-speaking kids don’t learn how to speak Spanish…. The school district knows that, and if you push them they will concede that.” She says 80 percent of black kids in Spanish-language classes were reading below grade level.

No evidence suggests that the black students at Cooke will do any better under similar conditions. It’s a dubious experiment at their expense. Whatever the advantages of learning about Spanish language and culture, the sheer weight of this instruction will displace much of what the black children need to learn to get ahead. Putting English and Spanish on a par obscures the obvious truth that learning English is crucial for Latinos, but learning Spanish, or French, or Chinese, is very much marginal for non-Latinos.

Latino children seem to be pawns here too. The initial idea behind the bilingual movement was that classes were to be “transitional” — temporary and aimed at getting children into the English-speaking mainstream as quickly as possible. The New York City report shows that Korean-speaking and Russian-speaking immigrant children manage this with stunning swiftness. But activists have encouraged Latino children to think of themselves as permanently culturally distinct. So many activists aim to extend “transitional” programs as far as possible, creating jobs for Spanish-speaking teachers and using schools to enforce ethnic solidarity.

This is a corruption of sensible bilingualism, and there’s no reason for a school such as Cooke to buy it.



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