Immigrant Parents Challenge Bilingual Education

Immigrant parents from one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods are fighting state educational policies that they say keep their children in bilingual programs too long.

One of the parents, Maria Perez, whose two children were in bilingual education, says, “What bothered me was that they place children in bilingual programs and keep them there for years and years. They aren’t learning English.”

Perez and other members of the Bushwick Parents Organization (named for the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood in which the families live) argue that many immigrant students are needlessly kept in bilingual classes for up to six years, the maximum time allowed under state law. They say bilingual education stifles their children’s learning and point to studies showing that after three years 75 percent of bilingual students in Bushwick’s District 32 have not been moved into mainstream classes.

The local controversy underscores the national debate over whether bilingual classes work or, instead, backfire by immersing students in their native language. It also poses questions about the motivations of the massive bureaucracy that has evolved to run these programs. Detractors of bilingual education have long contended that immigrant children are kept in these programs by self-serving administrators and teachers out to save their own jobs. For example, in New York State, the law stipulates that students can remain in bilingual classes for up to three years but should be moved out if they reach a 40th percentile on a language-assessment test. But local school boards, claiming immigrant students have not attained proficiency in basic reading comprehension and writing in English, are routinely granted waivers by the state to keep students in for much longer periods of time.

Irate Bushwick parents argue that many of these students would be better off in mainstream classes. They have filed a lawsuit asking the state education commissioner to deny requests for such waivers and to require the state to review each child’s progress individually. State education officials claim that they lack the resources for individual tracking and say that parents have the power to remove their children from bilingual education.

But immigrant parents want to see the program revamped. They believe bilingual education as structured in New York City doesn’t work — and might even inhibit the learning of English. Indeed, they might be right: after three years of bilingual education, one-third of bilingual students in District 32 scored lower on English-language tests than when they started. And the city’s bilingual education program was blasted last year in a report issued by New York’s Board of Education. The report concluded that students — even recent immigrants — who took most of their classes in English generally fared better than those in bilingual education.

Like the several hundred parents in the Bushwick group, some education experts agree with the report’s conclusions. “Students are getting hurt. They’re not mastering English, and from what we’re hearing, they’re not mastering Spanish either,” concurs Ray Domanico, executive director of the Public Education Association, a nonprofit advocacy group based in New York City.

The attorney representing the parents, Robert Smith, with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which has taken the case on a pro-bono basis, says that these immigrant parents believe their children are “trapped in bilingual classes.” Smith says that for many students “bilingual education becomes a prison. They don’t learn the English they need and can’t get out.”

Although the lawsuit focuses on District 32 in Brooklyn, Smith says that most New York City elementary and junior high schools treat bilingual education in this way. “When a student is in his or her sixth year in New York City schools and can’t speak English, something is wrong,” he says. Victoria Delgado, who is coordinator of bilingual education for District 32, did not return repeated telephone calls to her office for a response.

The seeds of the lawsuit were planted about three years ago when parents began grumbling about the low educational achievement of children in the district, recalls Sister Kathy Maire, an associate organizer with the East Brooklyn Congregation, a New York-based advocacy group that has helped organize the Bushwick Parents. “We didn’t set out to begin a lawsuit,” she says. “They were frustrated by low-level performance, poor teacher qualifications, what happens when teachers were absent, and a general sense of lack of education.”

Dissatisfaction grew with bilingual classes. A majority of students in the district — 65 percent — are Spanish-speaking students, primarily from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Many of these youngsters were being rejected from the city’s more competitive junior high schools because they lacked adequate English-language skills, according to parents. “When parents looked back, one pattern was that bilingual students had not learned enough English,” Maire adds.

In Maire’s view, the bilingual program is failing in teaching both English and the students’ native languages. Students in the bilingual program are not competent in speaking and writing their native language or in speaking English. She is hoping that the suit will lead to more accountability of bilingual classes and closer monitoring of the program.

MAKING THE TRANSITION

Just how long should children stay in bilingual education? Experts can’t seem to agree. Jim Lyons, executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education, based in Washington, D.C., says that across the country most students are removed from bilingual classes within three years. But, Lyons says, parents and school districts should forget length of stay and look at other measures of success. “I would prefer seeing a measuring stick based on the quality of how students are doing academically in English and content areas rather than on the time element,” he says.

Lyons adds that parents should be aware that even when their children speak English, they might not have mastered the language sufficiently to handle English-language courses in math, science, or social studies. He says that in other parts of the country, parents are filing lawsuits demanding the addition of bilingual education programs.

Another expert, writer James Crawford, believes most immigrants can benefit from more than three years in bilingual education and says that if students are forced out of programs too quickly, their education can be stunted. The models that have proven most effective, he claims, are when students learn in their native language up to the fourth grade and then are taught in English and their native language. “The fact is that later transition is not harmful. For many students three years is probably too soon to be transitioned into English,” says Crawford, author of Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory and Practice (Bilingual Educational Services).

Not surprisingly, Carmen Perez-Hogan, coordinator for bilingual education at the New York State Education Department, also defends current bilingual education policies and says that parents can remove their child from the program without going to court. “Parents have the option of withdrawing their children from bilingual programs at any time. All they have to do is come to the school and sign a release form,” she says. In fact, she adds, many parents in the district have taken that option.

And, Perez-Hogan believes that the state is correct in granting waivers. She says that many students need to stay in bilingual education longer than three years in order to master English. She asks, rhetorically, “Have you ever tried to learn another language?” In bilingual education, she says, students are keeping up with their other subjects like math and science by learning in their native language. Empathizing with the parents’ concerns, she agrees that the current testing methods are inadequate.

But she would prefer to see standards raised and the test toughened. “If the student hasn’t made any progress and isn’t reading or advancing, sure, there’s a problem. We need to track down the situation and determine what kind of correction should be made,” says Perez-Hogan.

A correction is just what parents in Bushwick have been seeking. The parents’ organization had sought out Schools Chancellor Dr. Ramon Cortines, but he announced his resignation and left the post last October. Parents felt that they had no other recourse but to file a lawsuit.

One of their advocates, Sister Kathy Maire, says that extended stays in bilingual education serve only to hold students back. “Students are watching TV and interacting with peers on the street, and they would be better off in English as a Second Language (ESL) class, not bilingual education,” she says.

Whatever the outcome of this lawsuit, the tide might already be turning against protracted stays in New York City’s bilingual classes. The newly appointed African-American chancellor of the New York City Schools, Dr. Rudolph Crew, has said that he would prefer to see students spend only a short time in bilingual programs. “The issue for me,” Crew has said, “is the education of children, how they develop, how they reach a level of skill, a level of trust, and how they see themselves as productive, capable learners.”



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