California to take initiative on bilingual education

LOS ANGELES — So the legislature is logjammed. So state officials are stuck in the mud. When Californians find themselves fed up with a festering problem, they don’t wait for government to get moving; they take the matter into their own hands — for better or worse — at the polls.

A month from now, in the state’s June 2 primary, voters will decide not just their candidates for governor but a host of policy issues — from whether unions should have to ask their members’ permission before donating dues to political causes to whether school districts should be forced to limit spending on administration to just 5 percent of their budgets.

Already, several of the nine initiatives on the ballot are attracting national attention — none more so than Proposition 227, which would put an end, in one fell swoop, to the state’s longstanding (and long-troubled) bilingual-education system.

Last week, President Clinton weighed in on the proposal, through Education Secretary Richard Riley, who said it would lead to “fewer children learning English and many children falling further behind in their studies.”

Like other critics, administration officials have called the proposal too drastic. They publicly fret, too, that if the California initiative passes, it will be as trendsetting as past voter-driven California measures, prompting similarly drastic measures in states across the country.

Californians are fond of drastic measures. After all, this is the state that, in 1996 with Proposition 209, effectively eliminated all affirmative action in public education, contracting and employment. Two years earlier, in Proposition 187, voters had denied a wide range of benefits to illegal immigrants (a decision that would subsequently be largely thrown out by the courts).

Like Propositions 209 and 187, the bilingual-education ban is wildly popular with some voters, and even though some observers have characterized it as similarly racially divisive, polls have shown that a majority of California Latinos support it.

The latest statewide poll found 63 percent of registered voters ready to vote for the initiative, which would force all students with limited or no English into English-immersion programs, pushing them into mainstream classes (except in rare individual cases) after a single year.

That there is a chronic problem in the bilingual-education system is hardly debated. Most experts agree that the program, started with a federal mandate a quarter-century ago, has fallen far short of its ambitious goal: to give students quickly the skills needed to catch up with their English-speaking peers.

In California, home to just less than half of the 3.2 million students labeled as “limited English proficient” in the United States, a chronic shortage of properly trained bilingual teachers and a steadily growing immigrant population have left many students languishing for years in classrooms where little English was spoken.

The state itself estimates that it needs 21,000 more bilingual teachers than it has. Plus, teaching materials in many of the first languages of students either do not exist or are in woefully short supply.

Still, across the state, dozens of school systems have been trying to teach bilingual students by experimenting with innovative programs, some of which appear to work.

Perhaps under the threat of the initiative, the state recently relaxed its rules on bilingual education, letting school systems try new approaches without first seeking state permission. Just last month, the state legislature also belatedly began working on legislation that would offer a more gradual approach to changing the system, by trying to move students out of special classes within three years.

Chances are, those reforms have come too late to affect the vote. So, in the end, instead of educators with expertise trying to find ways to solve the problem, voters will do it for them — deciding the fate of 1.4 million California students with a simple up or down vote.

“The biggest, most controversial measures these days invariably are voted on by the public, and most Californians like it that way,” said Charles Price, a professor of political science at California State University, Chico.

“The downside is we tend to take the most radical approach. So, here, instead of trying to make modest reforms, we’ll probably wind up doing something extreme.”

It takes serious money to launch a ballot initiative in California, where it’s become the norm to pay media consultants, pollsters and lawyers to word the proposals carefully.

Even gathering the hundreds of thousands of signatures (at least 433,000) required to qualify an initiative — which must be done within 150 days of filing — is costly, since paid signature gatherers often get as much as $1 per name.

Direct-democracy policy making by ballot initiative has a long history in California, where Progressives instituted the option with a constitutional amendment in 1911. Back then, they were trying to lessen the grip of big business on the state legislature, which was heavily influenced by the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Ironically, now, because of the costs, many initiatives are largely funded by special interests — often, trade organizations with direct stakes in the outcome. Others are the work of wealthy individuals with deep pockets.

Ron Unz, the author of Proposition 227, is one of the latter, a multimillionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sought the Republican nomination for governor in 1994 and says he has long been troubled by the state’s crumbling educational system.

Unz has no training in educational theory. Nor does he have empirical proof that his plan would work for the wide variety of students, often well into their high school years, who enter the California system with poor English skills.

Still, Unz has said he believes only a complete clearing of the decks will work for the bilingual-education system, which has grown its own fully entrenched bureaucracy. Bureaucracies often have been targets of California initiatives. Often, too, they have been the unintended victims of sweeping initiative-passed legislation.

The modern flurry of initiatives began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, at a time when California was booming, development projects seemed to be filling up every open space, and real-estate values were soaring — pushing real-estate taxes sky high. People voted for Proposition 13 because it lowered property taxes to 1975 levels and all but barring future increases.

But Proposition 13 did much, much more. It radically shrank the coffers of state and local tax collectors and handed to the state legislature decisions on how tax money would be allocated.

Suddenly, much less was available for schools, for libraries, for all public services. Local governments found it all but impossible to raise crucial funds. In fact, Proposition 13 is now blamed by many for leading the state’s once-proud public institutions on a rapid decline that may be irreversible.

“Overnight, we changed from being a state where the governing principle was ‘Do we need it?’ to one in which everything came down to money, which was suddenly in very short supply,” said Peter Schrag, a former longtime editor of the Sacramento Bee’s editorial page and the author of a new book, Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future, about the many unintended consequences of populist policy making.

With each initiative further prescribing government at all levels, Schrag argues, the state has found itself less and less able to pursue the kind of broadly beneficial public programs that it was built on. More and more, initiatives — intended mainly as safety valves — have become California’s chief avenues of change.

Still, one thing that has not changed much is the state’s voter rolls. While experts believe that whites will soon be a minority in California, whites remain the vast majority of the voting population. And in many cases, that means that those deciding key policies are not the people who will be most affected by those policies.

Often, it amounts to the haves radically changing the lives of the have-nots — people they do not know and with whom they feel little connection.

In the case of bilingual education, about 80 percent of California’s limited-English students are Latino. Latino citizens make up only about 11 percent of the state’s voters.

Clearly, many Latino parents are frustrated by their children’s lack of progress in bilingual classes. Clearly, some will go to the polls to express that frustration by voting yes on Proposition 227.

But what happens if the Unz initiative passes and does not work? What monied interest will go to bat for the students, trying to undo what will have been done?

Those are the sorts of bothersome questions often lost in the rush to the ballot box. In California, the rule of thumb these days is: If it’s broken, get rid of it and worry about the consequences later.



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