This year celebrates 25 years of bilingual education in Chicago. Next year, bilingual education will become a hot-button issue. Presidential candidates Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan and House Speaker Newt Gingrich have all warned that America is becoming “Balkanized” by special-interest groups who think our differences are more important than our similarities.

Part of the bilingual education controversy is Dole’s crusade to make English the national language. Coupled with the backlash on immigrants, it reflects a thinly veiled intent to gut bilingual education.

Underlying the debate on bilingual education is the “we-did-it-without-special-treatment-why-can’t-you-do-it-too?” reasoning that stirs up resentment of newcomers. The traditional American myth is that great waves of European immigrants all learned English without government help.

But immigrants didn’t need high school diplomas to work in the stockyards, mills or factories — jobs that were stepping stones to the middle class but are, for the most part, long gone.

Yesterday’s immigrants who made it through public education bought into the textbook accounts of America’s glory, even if they didn’t see themselves reflected in those narratives. And although few educators gave much thought to the immigrants’ self-esteem, the myths, however shallow, successfully bonded yesterday’s generation of diverse Europeans.

I have noticed that it is now popular to blame “intellectual elites” for the destruction of the myths that once bonded us. Yet aside from sweeping generalities, these “intellectual elites” are rarely identified.

They are certainly not the people I know who work on the front lines as bilingual teachers, social service professionals and others serving immigrant populations. The people with whom I work — many immigrants themselves — are focused on helping newcomers gain access to mainstream America. They recognize that English fluency is essential for success in an English-speaking country.

Successful transitional bilingual programs exist all over the United States. With sufficient resources and controls, they enable non-English-speaking children to join the mainstream. The back-door strategy to gut bilingual education by imposing what everybody already knows is the national language — English — is an extreme and hypocritical strategy detrimental to thousands of newcomers who, like their predecessors, have chosen to be Americans.

Jeryl Levin is executive director of the Illinois Ethnic Coalition.



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